"My first experience of solo wedding attendance was such a success I have probably been chasing it ever since." Photo / 123RF
"My first experience of solo wedding attendance was such a success I have probably been chasing it ever since." Photo / 123RF
OPINION:
Perhaps my greatest ever wedding appearance – if that word doesn't make me sound like an aurora borealis – was one I attended entirely on my own. As a newly-single woman, with a £12 haircut from an Iraqi barber and an orange men's racing bike, I was invited to the evening section of a friend's wedding at a small stately home just outside of London.
It was about 2013, those Peter Pan collar dresses that made you look like a twin from The Shining were still relatively popular, salted caramel was beginning its slow creep across the nation and I was emerging from a state of heartbreak.
As I remember, there was no mention of a plus one on the invitation. On the beautiful piece of card there was just one name: mine. Which absolutely delighted me. After six years of living a thoroughly intertwined life with a man I'd known for nearly a decade, the novelty of being able to turn up to a social event – a wedding, no less – on my own was intoxicating. I could leave whenever I liked. I could get there however I wanted. I could chat to whomever I pleased and wouldn't have to worry about whether my companion was having a nice time.
As a result, I turned up half an hour early, wearing a slim cut trouser suit and a pair of orange heels, on my bike, in the middle of a great lawn and sat outside the tent smoking a roll up and listening to the speeches through the canvas.
As the night wore on, I danced between two women who were both over six feet tall, took a photo of my bum with a disposable camera and didn't kiss anybody. At about 11pm, sober and buzzing with dancefloor adrenaline, I got back on my bike and cycled through the dark and winding lanes back to a nearby train station and so on home.
Is it still necessary to attend a wedding with a "plus one"? Photo / 123RF
I cannot imagine who the other guests thought I was: somebody's queer aunt attempting a Duke of Edinburgh? A stray tailor with ambitions towards the Tour de France? One of the gardeners with a taste for drag? Whatever impression I made, my first experience of solo wedding attendance was such a success I have probably been chasing it ever since.
For many people, however, wedding season still drops one particularly oily question in your lap like a slab of fruit cake: who should you take as your plus one? When you're single, particularly if you're single in your late 20s and 30s, the plus-one dilemma can reinforce that strange, sour feeling that you're falling out of sync with your contemporaries.
All those people with partners and cars and matching crockery who unquestioningly know exactly who they'll be with in three months, six months, even a year's time; they have their plus one carved in stone (or so it seems). While you struggle to know what city you're going to be sleeping in next month, let alone who with.
It is somehow even knottier when you're dating. At what stage of casual sex and text flirtation can you ask someone if they'd like to put on a suit and come meet a hundred of your friends and family?
When I was writing my novel, Square One – in which the protagonist Hanna is forced to move back to her hometown and back in with her 60-something, black leather sofa, square plate, single father – I knew that there would be a wedding invitation.
In order to bring into focus her dislocation from her old London life, where she had a boyfriend, a shared flat and some sense of forward momentum, I wanted her to be invited to a friend's wedding. And in order to bring her new relationship – with the boy she'd loved at school and hasn't seen for a decade – to a crunch point, I knew she'd have to be given a plus one.
Her agony over whether to invite a man she's previously been sinking bottles of wine with in low-lit pub gardens and banging in sheds has been my agony. I too have dithered over whether it's too early to ask someone to come to a wedding full of married couples, new parents and aunties in Per Una linen skirt suits and fascinators.
At what stage of casual sex and text flirtation can you ask someone if they'd like to put on a suit and come meet a hundred of your friends and family? Photo / 123RF
Like house hunting, comparing washing machines and finding the way to the train station, the search for a plus one is something that many of my generation are now outsourcing to technology and their phones.
Apparently, Tinder introduced a feature last year – called, imaginatively, "Plus One" – through which you could invite a stranger to be your plus one at a wedding. Because what could be better than sharing a tiny mushroom quiche with a man you've never met before, who turns up in a blue smock instead of a suit jacket and tries to knee-slide the first dance? Who doesn't want to take a complete stranger in a River Island jumpsuit to a drinks reception at a golf course, where you discover that she is allergic to all raw food and laughs like a rusty saw? Who wouldn't want to introduce a man in a pair of chino shorts who's either called Mark or Nick – you can't remember which – to your ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend while a bunch of university friends unironically do the macarena three feet away?
As well as the matter of whether it's too soon, inviting someone to be your plus one at a wedding can also bring to the fore other, trickier conversations. One friend was politely told by the man she's dating that he didn't feel comfortable going to a wedding where he was likely to be the only non-white guest. Other friends have struggled with inviting new partners to very religious weddings.
Bringing a stranger, new date or unspecified lust buddy to a wedding also raises issues for the bride, groom and attendant organisers – who to put in the photos. As one anonymous correspondent told me, in strictest confidence: "I still feel a bizarre mix of guilt and relief that we consciously asked for a 'uni friends' official photo without plus ones, as we had felt such an obligation to invite one friend's partner but knew the relationship wouldn't last."
Ah yes. The plus ones who you suspect won't stay the distance. I shudder to think of the wedding photos in which I appeared with my ex-boyfriend. Often in some semi-deranged outfit of my own making, often with the thousand-yard stare that only the child of divorced parents at a wedding will ever truly understand.
I hope the more Photoshop-literate couples have simply replaced me in their wedding album with a large fern or post box or artfully-placed pillar. Some people, I hear, actually manage to cop off at weddings; finding a future plus one at the Ground Zero of solo party attendance.
Fewer couples expect you to attend with a plus one in tow nowadays. Photo / 123RF
Personally, I have never in my life hooked up at a wedding. Although I did have quite an exciting encounter at a memorial for a brilliant nonagenarian, involving damson gin, an Aston Villa flag and an early morning flit. Well, it's what she would have wanted.
A mere decade since that orange shoes and matching racing bike solo wedding, I now find myself in the position of being the one sending out invitations. Just a cool six years, one child and a house purchase later, my partner and I are almost ready to tie the knot.
As bride and groom, we could choose how we wanted to approach the guest list and how formal we intended things to be. With the price of weddings now often creeping towards that of a deposit for a one-bedroom flat, I know that fewer couples are inviting girlfriends/boyfriends/flatmates/single cousins as standard. It is no longer necessarily expected that you will arrive in twos.
Ours, luckily, is a far more laid-back affair – think a buffet of falafel in a scout hut and a barefoot dad playing a small guitar rather than sugared almonds and Waterford crystal. And so I've left our invitations intentionally vague. I have invited single people and people in couples, families and colleagues and simply waited to see how they replied.
I don't want anyone to feel under that pressure to turn up to a wedding with their own stunt partner. Nor do I want single people to feel like they cannot bring a pal. As in so much of my life, I have avoided the issue by introducing an element of chaos.
