Merry War (Christmas is Over (If you want it))… or something!
Apparently there’s some kind of public holiday going on. But sod that, how about some proper “me time”? Why don’t you start the new year by having a solo wedding with yourself in Kyoto?
You are single and you don’t know if you would be able to get married and have a wedding ceremony in the near future, but you would like to have some pictures of yourself in a wedding gown or in a gorgeous bridal kimono now, when you are young and beautiful..
..or you even believe that you don’t really have to get engaged to be able to wear a bridal outfit..
..or you are already married, but didn’t have a proper ceremony with a beautiful dress and you find this fact to be quite regretful..
..or you did wear a dress, but it was so long time ago that you would like to experience it again, or you were too busy with the wedding preparations to enjoy yourself fully during your special day and you are looking for a second chance..
Offer yourself an opportunity to experience the feeling of being a princess in a beautiful and charming city of Kyoto!
I was lukewarm towards the whole thing until the part about being a princess in a beautiful and charming city of Kyoto. I’ve probably already missed the boat on being young and beautiful, but I’m definitely a fucking princess. For prices starting at ¥300,000 (about €2.000, £1,650 or $2,500) you can get a wedding dress or kimono, professional photos, flowers and whatnot. The previous sentence ending in “whatnot” perhaps gives you a clue that I’m not particularly au fait with weddings, but even I know it’s exciting that you can additionally hire a “Japanese man for image partner during the photo shoot… from ¥54,000 (clothing included).” I like them specifying that it’s a Japanese man. No way of knowing if he just happens to be the fellow who’s willing and available, or if they know their market and even the Russians or the English speakers want to pretend-marry a Japanese man.
In any case, just paying the Japanese man and sending him home is a great idea. His clothes are included. What more could you want? Much better than all the tedious stuff that comes after a real wedding, like having to live with him for years and years, and all that domestic shit. Ooh, your husband looks so handsome in the wedding photos. WHAT, WHO? NO, I DON’T EVEN KNOW THAT GUY. It might be worth the money and the effort just to mess with the heads of those smug couple-type people who never stop boring the shit out of you by talking about whatever banal thing their horrible kids have done recently. Pro tip: nobody cares, especially not other parents because they all just want to blather about their own children.
Incidentally, I’ve been to Kyoto and it really is beautiful and charming, at least in places. Not so much around the train station, but that’s true of most cities. Would it be out of order for me to set up a Kickstarter page so I can go back to Kyoto in 2015 and fulfil my dream of being a princess in a gorgeous bridal kimono?
I know I’m making fun of this thing, and it is (delightfully) daft. It’s probably not as daft as the aforementioned smugly coupled people might think, though. By 2015 33% of Japanese households will consist of a single person. The same more or less holds true throughout the developed world and has done for some time, although one wouldn’t think so based upon the relentless nuclear family or couple-orientation of everything around us: hotels and holidays, consumer products, insurance and financial products, film and television, advertising, government policy, societal attitudes and the thoughtless comments and ill-founded assumptions people make, the unaffordability and unavailability of homes for one person, the deprioritisation of homeless or vulnerably housed single people, ad infinitum. In 2012, 29% of the UK’s households consisted of a single person. According to the charity Age UK, about one million elderly people in Britain regularly go for at least a month without talking to another human being in any significant way, if at all. A recent BBC study showed that 7% of its respondents similarly expected to spend the winter holiday period completely alone, rising to 10% for over 65s. 28% of all the adults said they were lonely.
Of course not everyone who lives alone is lonely or doesn’t have a partner, because obviously you can be with somebody and not marry them or live with them. To suggest so is just another part of the whole outdated framework of assumptions that makes some people feel so desperately lonely at those times when there’s overwhelming pressure to be (or pretend to be) part of society’s groupthink. We could call it the Eleanor Rigby Fallacy, that an introverted or single person is ergo a lonely person. Thanks for another blot on the collective psyche, McCartney.
Likewise, you can also not be with anybody, not get married, not get partnered or raise a family in any way and still be perfectly happy; if that’s what a person wants then it’s nobody else’s business and nobody needs to make comments, conjectures or insinuations about it. Especially during the darkest part of the winter and the new year/Christmas holidays, it would still be nice if people who aren’t alone had a bit more consideration – or indeed any consideration whatsoever– for those who are. If a person either by choice or circumstance is single but wants to do things that couples or families do, then why shouldn’t they? In short: fuck it, marry yourself if you want and good luck to you. Offer yourself an opportunity.
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