Marriage, the New Counterculture

Several friends of mine who are not friends with one another and do not seem to be conspiring to drive me crazy have been insisting for years now that “weddings are so back.” I mention the idea of conspiracy because sometimes their insistence in the face of the data—which tells a completely different story—puts me on edge: the marriage rate is not rising anywhere in the world, least of all in Argentina. In some countries, there was a slight rebound in 2023 as a result of the weddings that had been “postponed” during the pandemic, but the surge came to a very quick halt, and the downward trend, which has been underway for nearly four decades, resumed with little change. In Argentina, for example, the marriage rate fell from around 7 marriages per 1,000 inhabitants in 1980 to fewer than 3 per 1,000 today. That means, in relative terms, that marriages have been cut by more than half (1). I tried to convince the people around me that this was indeed the case: if it feels as though “everyone is getting married” or “everyone is having kids” now, it is because, even though very few people are getting married and having children today in historical terms, the people who are doing so are people our age and from our social milieu. If you are a middle- or upper-class person between thirty and forty-five, the people getting married are your friends, your colleagues, your former schoolmates or college classmates (another thing middle-class people refuse to accept: it is simply not true that marriage “is for the rich and the poor”; it is for the rich, period: the correlation between marriage and income is linear, not an inverted bell curve) (2). So the feeling that everyone is doing it is only logical: perhaps everyone in your world is.

In the midst of this intermittent conversation, which resurfaced every time some acquaintance flooded our feeds with photos from the civil ceremony—the red marriage booklet between the fingers, the minimalist white dresses that have now become typical of the atypical bride—, Bad Bunny staged a wedding (not a mock wedding: a real one) during his legendary halftime performance at the 2026 Super Bowl. Much was made of one image: a small child sleeping between two chairs, a veiled tribute to all the migrant children separated from their parents at the border by ICE, but above all a tribute to the long-standing Latin American custom of taking your children everywhere; not just wherever adults have to go, but wherever they simply want to go. For better and for worse, it is all somewhat postmodern, but beyond the value judgments, it is interesting that Bad Bunny’s assertion of a subaltern group becomes, in the churn of social media, a kind of aspirational assertion. In the world of matter, Latinos in the United States are being discriminated against and actively persecuted; on Instagram, a parallel universe that is more real than reality itself, Latino culture is cool, and not just among progressives. I started investigating and discovered that Mexico City has become a very popular destination for what are now called “destination weddings”: a wedding held in another city, far from the couple’s place of residence, for which all the guests travel to spend a kind of Big Brother weekend with a somewhat random group of friends and the extended families of the newlyweds. “Latinos know how to have fun,” I read on Twitter in a discussion about these weddings.

Following the online rabbit hole, I came across a series of debates about a topic that has been very hot on social media for quite some time: child-free weddings, where children are not allowed. All over the world (especially in the Global North), many venues are establishing themselves as “child-free” spaces as a matter of policy: hotels, bars, restaurants. As someone who had no children until less than a year ago, I understand it perfectly, and in fact I think it is fine: common sense should tell you that a two-year-old has no business in a spa or cocktail bar, but in a time with so few shared ideas, it has become necessary to explicitly spell out consensuses that are no longer common ground. Weddings, however, seem to be a sensitive point—especially in the United States, one of the few countries in the world where the marriage rate, although it has fallen, remains comparatively high (3). Apparently, it is increasingly common to receive wedding invitations explicitly stating that children are not welcome. A wedding is not a luxury hotel or a wine bar: it is, essentially, a family event. But a wedding, precisely, involves a mixture of lives and registers that bother obsessives and puritans (that is, Americans): there are children and drunk people, great-aunts and young singles looking for something to do, crawling babies and people dancing perreo.

It is true that rampant individualism is partly responsible for treating children not as people, but as nuisances: “I didn’t choose to have children, so I shouldn’t have to put up with yours” is a stupid notion that takes a child for an expensive hobby rather than a rights-bearing individual. That said, there is a missing piece in this portrait of contemporary neoliberal individualism, which is the parents, often just as selfish and self-absorbed as the childless people who complain. We all have to adapt to the presence of others; parents, then, cannot demand that people at a wedding behave as though they were in elementary school or a children’s playground. I dwell on this because today the conversation about whether people are getting married is closely connected to the conversation about whether people are having children. In both cases, the answer is the same: no, regardless of what you see on Instagram, people are objectively not getting married and not having children. The latter, with good reason or not, is a source of considerable concern for many people, and for many governments. The little boy sleeping between two chairs at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance hit the nail on the head: in a society that overprotects children while simultaneously treating them with disdain, that spends fortunes on weddings while explicitly deciding to bar the youngest half of the family from entering, Bad Bunny comes to remind us that things are simpler. Marriages and families work better when things are done less perfectly: when we dare to let go of the kid’s sleep schedule for a change, when we stop worrying about whether they might hear their cousins talking about “grown-up things.” Of course, the answer late capitalism offers to this concern is not that perhaps we should relax a little, but rather: why don’t we get married in Mexico?

***

When I tell people that I am researching destination weddings in Mexico trying to get myself invited to one so I can get some color for my article, I get a variety of responses. There is one kind of reaction that I find fascinating: Mexican people who distrust my premise that weddings are still important, but who are married or have been married at some point, and who are convinced that they did it for some highly specific, personal reason, but that they are some kind of exception and people just do not get married that much anymore. This happens to me with several people, including my friend Daniel, who has been married not once, not twice, but three times, yet believes his case is unusual. It happens again with the bass player in a jazz band my boyfriend and I go see in Condesa a few months later, when I actually manage to get myself into a wedding: he finds what I am saying strange, even though he “just so happens” to have gotten married himself. I find this paradox enormously entertaining, but it does not surprise me. I have known this since I wrote The End of Love (4): all statistics are made up of people who see themselves as a special case.

People’s assumptions about weddings are interesting in general. Argentinians I talk to about this article and this trip do accept the premise that people in Mexico still get married, especially compared to Argentina. What seems to surprise them, even to the point of denial, is that getting married is for the rich. It is a very common belief in Argentina that getting married “is something that rich people and poor people do”; the middle class is supposedly the exception. I imagine this prejudice is connected to that peculiar Argentine tendency whereby almost everyone considers themselves middle class, regardless of where they actually fall on the socioeconomic pyramid (5). It’s the same belief in one’s own exceptionalism that I heard from my Mexican friends: people still get married, but we don’t anymore. Those who see themselves as part of an educated middle class assume that their segment of society has advanced considerably, is constantly transforming and changing, while imagining much more static trajectories for the poor and the wealthy: the evidence, however, does not bear this out. The marriage rate, unlike the birth rate, which has fallen fairly evenly across all income levels, has declined much more unevenly, with a very clear correlation to income level. Getting married today is something rich people do, both in Argentina and around the world (including, in fact, Mexico and Colombia). The explanation is fairly simple: throwing a wedding costs money, and among the popular classes, the greater social acceptance of unmarried partnerships means that the expense becomes a luxury rather than an obligation (6). I arrive, then, at one of the central hypotheses of this article: a wedding today is literally a luxury. Is that why weddings are becoming increasingly luxurious? As marriage shifts from being a universal marker of adulthood to becoming a status symbol, it makes sense that weddings should become more extravagant in various ways, the same way that with clothes, cars, or home furnishings, it is no longer enough to just have something nice. You need to create an impact, to leave people in awe. Otherwise, why do it?

***

The only people who do not question the data are the true experts. I am not talking about demographers or sociologists, but using the word expert as anthropologists do, in the sense of a native informant: experts in their own culture. I mean, of course, wedding planners.

I contact a few Mexican planners, partly to gather information and partly because, as I mentioned before, I need to get myself invited to one of these magnificent weddings. The one I end up talking to the most is Valeria Carballo (7), a planner specializing in destination weddings who tells me there will be no problem with my infiltrating one of her events. It makes sense: Valeria organizes very large weddings, with a huge number of people working on them. If you dress in black like the other workers, no one pays much attention to you. Valeria also comes from a family with a history in the business: her parents (and, as I understand it, some of her aunts and uncles as well) worked putting together various musical ensembles for weddings. “It’s true that there are fewer weddings than there were a few decades ago,” she tells me confidently, “but the ones that do take place are more impressive than ever.” I enjoy talking with her and exchanging theories: she has thought about the subject, and she has thought about it dispassionately, even though it is her métier, or perhaps precisely because it is. She then recounts her own hypothesis: “People used to get married younger, and it was like the beginning of something. Now, by contrast, a wedding is the culmination. It is the point you reach once you have achieved things, personally and professionally. And, well, the party somehow has to reflect that: the point you have reached. In fact, parents used to always pay for the wedding, and now that is often not the case, unless it is a very traditional or very wealthy family,” Valeria explains.

As I do my research, I notice that Valeria’s characterization is very close to what the literature calls the capstone model of marriage. For Andrew Cherlin, the sociologist who developed this approach in the early 2000s, contemporary marriage (which, as Valeria pointed out, is no longer a transition into adulthood but something that happens later in life) has ceased to be a marker of conformity and become a marker of prestige (8). Since marriage is no longer strictly necessary for economic survival, sexual activity, or family formation, its ubiquity has declined while its symbolic status has increased. That is exactly what Valeria thinks, in other words, and she finds that in her field this is connected to a search for ostentation and surprise. Arriving on a white horse, on a boat, in an antique carriage; three dresses, four dresses, five dresses; a chocolate fountain, a pyramid of champagne glasses, a vodka waterfall; from what I hear, there is a kind of tension between wanting to follow the latest trend and needing to surpass it with something no one has ever seen before. “You always have to keep raising the bar,” Valeria says, smiling but serious.

I talk to Valeria during whatever pockets of time she can find to chat with me; she is very kind and eager to talk, but she also has very little time. When she sends me the spreadsheet for one of the weddings, I understand why: it is like producing two Lollapaloozas a week. It is also clear that she has experience talking to the press. We keep talking and I gradually understand: she has done weddings for famous people a couple of times, but above all, it is non-famous people who want their weddings to appear in the media. I had no idea this still existed, but apparently it does: women’s magazines (Vogue, Elle, etc.) still have “wedding pages,” where ceremonies are featured. These are not usually weddings of famous people (those go in the entertainment or celebrity sections), but precisely those of unknown people who throw eye-catching weddings for one reason or another: the venue, the dress designer, the aesthetic, some particularly extravagant attraction. “One of my weddings appeared in Vogue,” Valeria explains; “after that, all the brides asked for the same photographer because they assumed he had the connections to get them into Vogue.” Just as in fashion and trap music, the concept of quiet luxury is completely passé. There is nothing distinctive about having a small, simple wedding: everyone, celebrities and non-celebrities alike, wants a spectacular wedding, and above all, to appear in magazines. The rich and famous once valued privacy; in the age of social media, that now seems as incomprehensible as championing ugliness or failure.

Cherlin’s theory predates social media, so it does not incorporate quite as explicitly this dimension of visibility, which now seems crucial to me. In fact, everything most people I know think and say about weddings, including everything they think and say when planning their own weddings, comes from Instagram. No one says their inboxes are overflowing with invitations; they simply see weddings. The result is a very strange effect: huge numbers of people, especially women, feel as though they are the only ones who are not getting married or pregnant. They feel this as intensely as women in previous eras, or even more intensely so: the fact that it is vastly more common to do neither of these things seems to have had far less influence than it should have on our feelings about the subject. It is hardly surprising: we have never been more preoccupied with the grass on the other side than we are now. There are fewer weddings than ever, objectively speaking, but they have never been so visible, so obvious, so unavoidable.

***

Until the very last moment, I’m convinced I am not going to make it to the wedding. Valeria has confirmed my invitation, but she has not given me the addresses of the various venues or the schedules, nor has she told me how I am going to get past the entrance. Five days before the trip, Valeria stops answering my messages. I panic: I start imagining a scenario in which they have paid for an entire trip for my husband, my baby daughter, and me, and I come home empty-handed. I have never been good at reporting; there are several reasons for this (one is that, as is already obvious, I end up engaging more with ideas than events), but the most important is that I am not very good at producing: getting people to talk to me, getting into places. Every piece of reportage I manage to write is a minor miracle. Luckily, once again, the miracle happens: a few hours before my flight to Mexico City, Valeria gives me the contact information for Elí, her husband, who works with her and evidently has a slightly less overloaded phone. Elí first sends me the details of another event they’re doing outside the city: it is a Jewish-French wedding, so given my last name and the fact that I am writing a piece for Le Monde Diplomatique, it makes sense that he thought that was the one I was attending. I tell him I am going to the one in Mexico City, and so he explains: the reception is at the Sofitel, the sangeet at the former San Hipólito Convent, and the ceremony at General Prim 30. The sangeet is the party: as Valeria had told me, it is an Indian wedding.

I arrive in Mexico on a Wednesday, and on Friday at 7 p.m. I am standing in the Sofitel lobby in black pants, a black blouse, and a black blazer. I have been rehearsing arguments and excuses in my head in case they do not let me into the wedding; but as always (this is the only reporting talent I actually possess), the best strategy is to walk in confidently, with a self-assured smile. It is obvious, from the way I carry myself and because I have neither a camera nor an iPad nor a headset, that I do not work at the wedding; but apparently no one cares much. The waiters walking around with trays offer me glasses of champagne and hors d’oeuvres, confused by my outfit, which looks almost like staff attire but not quite. I do not accept anything, but once I notice that no one is looking, I pour myself some tea from the chai dispenser just before the entrance to the ballroom.

The party starts to take shape very slowly. The guests arrive from different floors: I gather that almost everyone is staying at the Sofitel. Some are wearing saris, kurtas, and other Indian garments whose names I do not know. Others are dressed in ordinary Western clothes, those ruffled, brightly colored dresses that girls wear to weddings in English-speaking countries, and fairly well-tailored suits in the case of the men. I hear them speaking English with heavy American accents; in fact, once almost everyone has arrived, I notice that more than half are Americans. They are just as awestruck as I am, attending their first Indian wedding.

As people arrive, the bride and groom and their immediate families take photographs. Only then do I identify the bride, because she is not wearing white; since she is not wearing white, anyone can wear white, but actually, not just anyone. The American women who went to college with them wouldn’t  dare: whenever someone is wearing white, you can tell she is an aunt or uncle from India, one of the few there. The bride is beautiful; he is handsome too, and he smiles very warmly at me when I run into him on my way to the bathroom. Something about the way he walks and carries himself in the traditional clothes he is wearing tells me that he is not particularly religious. Later I see him drinking champagne quite naturally, which I understand is not something that happens at traditional Indian weddings. When I hear him and his bride talking, I notice that neither of them has an Indian accent; they do not sound like immigrants, they are actually as American as their blond friends.

Before I get closer to the guests to keep listening in on conversations, I ask Valeria’s husband, Elí, if there are any restrictions. «The most important thing is not to disturb the photographers,» he tells me, «or the content creators the bride and groom brought in from Canada.» I notice, then, that there are two types of photographers, the let’s say «classic», with large cameras, flashes and assistants who give them a hand with lights and lenses, and a group of girls with cell phones. The ones with the cameras take the classic official wedding photos, several of the families, a couple from each group of friends, and after that they try to capture candid moments, something spontaneous for posterity. Content creators, on the other hand, give specific instructions and ask for do-overs. I go up to them to ask their name and they give me an Instagram profile: @onekahani, specialists in creating luxury wedding content for Indian weddings. When Elí told me they were from Canada I thought I might have misheard, but no: Valeria brought in her official photographers, specialized in catching the precise moment when a hundred balloons fly away or the bride’s girlfriend catches the bouquet, and the bride and groom hired these girls, who offer a different service. It’s not a classic wedding service, like the photos our grandparents and parents had; what they do is cover the wedding of ordinary people as if it were a celebrity wedding. They don’t just take pictures and make videos: they choose the most attractive moments and match them with trending texts, making the wedding of two strangers appealing to people who don’t actually know them. Looking for a moment that can go viral, the same brands have been doing for decades, and people have been doing since a little less than a few years ago.

As I sip on a drink named after the bride, an item on the menu tailored for the occasion, I see a sign I hadn’t noticed before. A chihuahua with a Mexican hat saying «Let the fiesta begin.» Minutes later, a short and friendly American appears holding a microphone. He introduces himself as the MC of the night, what in Argentine standards would akin to an entertainer but much more involved, at least in my experience. He asks the guests from Texas to raise their hands, then the guests who come from New York, and those from Los Angeles. He does not mention any Indian city, neither Mumbai nor Delhi. I don’t understand if it’s a matter of political correctness or that in fact no one is actually from those cities. On the rooftop, I see a group of guys in suits doing a choreographed dance. They are friends of the groom, all pasty white gringos, practicing a Bollywood dance that they obviously have to perform either today or tomorrow. Meanwhile, the MC lets everyone know there is a churro cart, because «you can’t come to Mexico and not have churros«. Since it’s 10 p.m. and drinks and dinner are being served, I think you can definitely skip the churros no matter where you are, but that’s just one opinion. The MC makes another announcement: the «henna station» has been set up, a place where all guests can get a henna tattoo, following Hindu tradition. The Indian aunts, the ones that I noticed wearing white when I arrived, explain the ritual to the Americans asking questions in an error-free English. I hear that some of them have an Indian accent, but really softened: I think that in fact no one has come from India, they must have been living in Texas for decades, which is where the bride is from, as far as I understood. The girls who do the tattoos are Mexican and recommend restaurants to the aunts.

The Bollywood choreographed dances come next. Apparently, there are so many lined up that today we’ll already see some of them performed, even though they usually happen during the sangeet. As I look at the dance put together by the group of guy friends, a kind of Backstreet Boys of dubious physical condition and a controversial relationship with musicality and rhythm, I think that what I am witnessing is the syncretism of three great cultures of marriage. India and the United States are two countries that, despite participating in the global downward trend, still maintain relatively high marriage rates. In both countries, weddings tend to last several days and have high levels of protocolization and social recognition. In India, it is traditional for weddings to last between three and five days and to include, when it comes to wealthy families, some more intimate celebrations and others that are open to the whole village. It is also a culture in which arranged marriages are still popular, even among people who are not very religious. The United States is, of course, a much more secular and liberal society than India, but even so, expensive weddings tend to include engagement parties months in advance, rehearsal dinners in which the logistics of the wedding are rehearsed with all the guests (an encore party before the party, a primary election before the final ballot cast) and sometimes even a breakfast or lunch the following morning. Despite being a secular and liberal society, there are many rules about who does what and who wears what: there are bridesmaids, highly regulated toasts and, in recent years, even bachelor and bachelorette parties have become almost mandatory, and, like the wedding, they can also involve travelling. In fact, although getting married in another country was a custom among many European nobles, destination weddings as we know them today were invented in the United States in the 70s, and it is mainly the North American market that sustains them today. I follow these topics extensively, and at least every two or three months I come across an article about the «inflation» in wedding costs, not for the people getting married, but for everyone else. For middle and upper middle class sectors, who have money but are not made of it, the issue of having to pay for the trip to the bachelor party and to someone’s wedding, whether it is a relative, a friend or even an acquaintance (plus money for the wedding gift and all the different outfits that have to be worn for the different events) becomes an anvil between the late twenties to early forties. And now a couple who participates in both these cultures decides, however—or perhaps precisely because of this—to have their wedding in Mexico. Just as Bad Bunny showed at the SuperBowl halftime show, and as the chihuahua on the poster says, Mexicans know how to get married with great joy and less fuss. Although they do not incorporate any of the local wedding traditions, and limit themselves to a completely Americanized and globalized version of Mexican traditions, the Americans who choose these weddings do not do so only because Mexico City is comparatively cheaper than a similar city in their country  (although this is not a minor detail), but because, paradoxically, among the thousands of things they want to achieve and portray, they want to show that they know how to relax and have a good time. Deep down, not even the most bridezilla of brides would want a wedding that feels stiff. Freshness is a value and the Mexico brand today can sell it without sacrificing any of the things that this type of bride expects from a well-structured wedding full of instructions and activities. The mix between these three wedding cultures, then, is in some sense perfect: an explosive cocktail to turn a wedding into the most Instagrammable content on the planet, and thus save marriage from its virtual disappearance.

Now I realize I almost forgot to mention something. Before the dancing there were a few speeches: the sisters of the bride and groom, who apparently introduced them, some friends and finally the bride and groom themselves. When it was her turn, the bride said that she had met Valeria, the wedding planner, online long before the groom had proposed. She had no idea when she was going to get married, or even if she was going to get married, to the groom or someone else who came later on, but she already knew that she wanted her wedding to be planned by Valeria, in Mexico City. I can’t imagine a phrase like that in the lips of someone who isn’t Indian American, and after having experienced the wedding, I can’t think of a better destination for her wedding than the one she effectively chose.

***

What I just mentioned about the destination didn’t really hit me on the first day but on the second,  when I went to the sangeet in the former San Hipólito Convent. The truth is, I was a bit puzzled on the first day. It didn’t seem worth making your whole family travel just to get married in the generic room of a five-star hotel, but then I understood. The reception was impeccable, but in the end it was not much more than a meeting point where all the newcomers to Mexico met to be explained the itinerary and logistics for the next two days.

The former San Hipólito Convent, the location for the second day, is majestic. There is a bus that leaves from Sofitel, but I go directly and I arrive ahead of many from the rest of the group. I understand then the attraction of a city like this for such an event: Buenos Aires is beautiful, but it doesn’t have a sixteenth-century convent full of arcades, balconies and beautiful corridors, preserved in excellent condition, and available to book for a wedding party. The reception takes place on one of the upper levels; below, the food tables and the dance floor have been set. Beyond the fact that once again the food is a very strange (albeit delicious) multicultural mixture, the decoration is discreet and refined, respecting the fantasies one may have of a convent or a monastery in its original time. Above all, I love the warm lighting, which gives the illusion of impossible intimacy.

I’m surprised by how small the number of tables is, or rather, how huge the venue is in relation to the size of the event. While the choreographed dances take place (the ones set for today are more “official”, since the dancers are the sisters of the bride and groom and some other close and distant relatives), Valeria explains to me that the bride is a dancer specialized in Indian dances, and that is why she asked for an unusually large dance floor. I begin to understand some comments and jokes from the night before, about the groom having to study a lot because he had never danced Bollywood in his life. I look him up on the internet: he owns a startup and is doing very well. She clearly has a closer relationship with Indian culture, but they’re both very Western, as far as the eye can see. It’s an Indian wedding, but it’s more like when my bacon-eating friends decide to have a Jewish wedding out of nowhere. He is at least thirty-five, she is at least thirty. By looking closely at the body language of everyone who’s been invited, it’s obvious that the parents of the bride and groom are guests in the wedding and not the intellectual authors (and, I dare say, they are not the material authors either). This stunning wedding, following Cherlin’s leitmotif, is not a family obligation for the bride and groom but a pleasure they willingly chose for themselves.

On this second day, no one is wearing their usual attires: all of the gringos are sporting Hindu-style outfits, and no differences can be spotted from the ones worn by the family, at least to my untrained eye. I think of all the effort made to put this event together, not just by the bride and groom but their friends as well: the plane tickets, the dances, the clothes. I also think of something that seems like a paradox, but I believe it isn’t: these cultures, in which getting married implies so much involvement from everyone, so much demand for love, are not the cultures in which people are not getting married anymore, but quite the opposite. In terms of class, while it is true that people in the poorest strata are not getting married because it’s expensive, in cultural terms, marriages disappear in societies that do not value them, not in those where weddings are more expensive. Not valuing weddings does not mean, in general, not valuing the marriage. It means not valuing the ceremonies, the protocol, the paraphernalia.

I read about the correlation between fertility and weddings and it can’t be said that the fall in marriages has had a direct effect on the birth rate. In general, the fact that there are fewer weddings has to do with greater social acceptance of unmarried couples, and these couples are just as capable of having children as legally married ones. But what some researchers argue is that, although one thing is not the cause of the other, the drop in the marriage rate and the drop in the birth rate are part of the same phenomenon, which is that of a decrease in couples in general. Thus, there are more unmarried couples, and more children “born out of wedlock” than ever, but these increases don’t come close to compensating for the fall in the birth rate. I believe that the diagnosis is accurate: what is in crisis is our ability to be together (9). In part, I think, because it all takes a lot of work: leaving the house, meeting with someone, meeting them again, putting up with the annoying bits, overcoming one’s own. In a sense, spending one year organizing a wedding, even if it is the most Instagrammable of weddings, can be countercultural in the most literal sense, going against the dominant culture. If being cooped up inside scrolling by yourself is actually the norm, then paraphernalia ceases to be pure banality to be something else–not subversion, but something closer to it than its own participants would think.

I return from the sangeet to the hotel and I meet Florianne: they are the babysitter I hired for a few hours so my boyfriend wouldn’t be so alone with the baby in Mexico City during the days that I attended the wedding. I agreed that, once I was back, I would explain what it was that I came here to do, so I tell them. They laugh quite a bit and agree with me that the bride and groom are very good looking, when I show them the photos. Before leaving, Florianne shows me the pictures of their own wedding. It was a simple ceremony at the city council, since they are Canadian, it was just for the papers. «Well,» they smile at me, «not just that».

***

On Sunday I arrive on time, 10 o’clock sharp at General Prim 30. Yesterday was stunning, but today is romantic. Most Americans have reverted to their original clothes. Half of them are wearing dark shades. I don’t know if it’s traditional custom to perform the ceremony the morning after the sangeet, but it is not compatible with the American tradition of drinking oneself blind.

General Prim 30, like the former San Hipólito Convent, is a public building, preserved by the State. Built in 1905 by engineer Alberto Robles Gil, this house is one of the great architectural jewels of the Porfiriato. The central courtyard, where the aisle is set up for the wedding, is bathed in sunshine and filled with intricate fresh flower arrangements, the prettiest ones hanging from the ceiling. The wedding party walks down a staircase coming from a balcony. I’m surprised that the music chosen for the bride to walk down the aisle is a recording and there’s no live music. But then I remember, when I asked Valeria if there was something that had been lost in these gigantic weddings compared to the simpler ones which her family organized when she was little, she didn’t mention intimacy or warmth, she mentioned the music. Apparently few couples are interested in having live music ensembles anymore. My feeling is that unless they can hire someone famous, they don’t really care, and that’s where they cut costs, but Valeria is right, something is definitely lost. Valeria was also right when she said feelings and emotion don’t disappear behind the show. Even I shed a tear (and I don’t know anybody here) when the groom entered on his mother’s arm followed by the bride wearing a veil that makes her look like a fairy out of a Shakespeare comedy. When she walks in, some of the Americans clap their hands, but they quickly stop. Deep down, no one really knows what’s about to happen and that makes it even more magical and majestic. In any case, the man officiating the ceremony explains everything as he goes, in English. His accent sounds Indian to me at first, but then I realize he’s clearly Mexican. The bride and groom and their families repeat the words at their turn.

A month after this trip, already at home, I review my notes with several tabs open: wedding pages for women’s magazines that Valeria told me about, academic papers on marriage and fertility, online gossip sites mentioning Dua Lipa’s refined wedding and Taylor Swift’s tacky ceremony. I return to Cherlin’s hypothesis of marriage as a status symbol. I understand that he is talking about socioeconomic status, but it’s not just about that. A wedding is not just about showing that you have money to spend, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa already do that on any given weekend trip when the paparazzi find them. A wedding is fundamentally about exhibiting the status that comes with being in a relationship: showing that you not only have money, but whatever it is that is supposed to be needed to build a couple with long-term ambitions. Mental health, emotional stability, the ability to love and be loved, the courage to bet on a partner, whatever makes you worthy of someone else betting on you as well. In this era, all of these values seem to be as precious, scarce and enviable as money itself. I return to Cherlin’s theory: in a world in which getting married is not mandatory, the fact that someone chooses to do it with you speaks very highly of you.

I always thought that seeing relationships as a form of achievement or success was a bit reactionary. Pairing relationships and family with success means being single is bad or inferior. In fact, I think it’s quite clear, if getting married means being successful, being single, especially if you’re a woman, means being a failure. I can see clearly around me how this mindset continues to operate. That’s why I find it difficult to think about the positive aspect of claiming relationships as having merit or value, and not as a mere circumstantial accident. Because, in the end, that’s what it is: sometimes you find yourself in a relationship, and sometimes you don’t, and it is rarely because you’ve done things «right» or «wrong».

It may be true that there is no merit, then, in having a relationship or getting married, and it’s also true that a society is made up of its values, that those values produce incentive schemes, and that a society in which marriage, relationships, or family are not valued will inevitably be a society with fewer marriages, fewer couples, and fewer families. I don’t know if I’m worried about this, but I am concerned that these non-couples have not been replaced, in general, by large community networks of care and friendship, but by solipsism and indifference, by anxiety and fear of meeting in person, speculation and trivialization of human connection.

In this context, perhaps these Instagram weddings are a much needed, albeit somewhat consumerist, capitalist or post-capitalist vindication of love. Perhaps it is not wrong to raise the status of the value of having a human connection. Not because any connection is worth the while, nor because all marriages have to be saved. Neither does it mean that the only possible choice in life to be happy is to be in a relationship. But it becomes a little paranoid, a political correctness that is both parodic and boring, to think that celebrating relationships, showcasing them and showing ourselves proud of them necessarily implies contempt for other ways of living. Perhaps, in a world that still despises single people but, at the same time, makes us more self-centered and fussy, it might be good to celebrate the small achievement of putting up with each other.

1. See OECD, Society at a Glance 2024: OECD Social Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2024), chapter «Marriage and divorce», https://doi.org/10.1787/918d8db3-en. For the specific case of Argentina, see National Ministry of Health, Directorate of Health Statistics and Information (DEIS), Vital Statistics. Basic information, annual series, 1980-2024, Buenos Aires, Ministry of Health, available in «DEIS Publications», https://www.argentina.gob.ar/salud/deis/publicaciones.

2. See Benjamin R. Karney, “Socioeconomic Status and Intimate Relationships”, Annual Review of Psychology 72 (2021): 391–414 and «Child Trends, Socioeconomic Factors and Differences in Forming and Maintaining Marriages and Cohabitations» (Bethesda, MD: Child Trends, 2022). Both studies show that the probability of getting married and staying married increases systematically with educational level, job stability and income.

3. See OECD, Society at a Glance 2024: OECD Social Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2024), chapter “Marriage and divorce”. In 2022, the OECD average gross marriage rate was 4.3 marriages per thousand inhabitants. The United States was among the countries with the highest rates (6 or more per thousand), although it has also experienced a sustained decline since 1990.

4. Planeta, 2019

5. See Fundación Pensar, Pensar Lab, Esperando la Carroza: la “clase media Mafalda” se diluye, serie Pensar Social, November 2025, available at https://www.fundacionpensar.org.ar/esperando-la-carroza-noviembre-2025/. According to this research, 65% of those surveyed consider themselves middle class, compared to 43% classified as such by income.

6. See Albert Esteve, Ron Lesthaeghe and Antonio López-Gay, «The Latin American Cohabitation Boom, 1970–2007», Population and Development Review 38, no. 1 (2012): 55–81. The authors document a sustained expansion of unmarried couples in Latin America since the 1970s and argue that they ceased to be a practice associated exclusively with certain social groups and became a form of union that is increasingly legitimized in society as a whole.

7. Name modified.

8. See Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) and Andrew J. Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage”, Journal of Marriage and Family 66, no. 4 (2004): 848–861.

9. Ron Lesthaeghe, “The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition,” Population and Development Review, 36, No. 2 (2010): 211–251; Andrew J. Cherlin, “Degrees of Change: An Assessment of the Deinstitutionalization of Marriage Thesis,” Journal of Marriage and Family, 82, No. 1 (2020): 62–80; and Lyman Stone, Baby Bust: Fertility Is Declining the Most Among Minority Women (Institute for Family Studies, 2023). Taken together, these studies argue that the decline in marriage does not necessarily imply an equivalent decline in fertility, given the rise in cohabitation and births outside of marriage; however, they also show that the decline in the formation of stable couples is one of the factors associated with the sustained decline in births.

Traducción: Camila Dagnino y Cecilia Harari