A wedding is not primarily for the couple. This is a claim most contemporary couples would dispute, since they have absorbed a script in which the day is about them, their love, their preferences, their personalities. The script is recent. For most of recorded history, in most cultures, the wedding has been a community event that happens to feature two people at its center, the way a coronation features a monarch or a christening features a baby. The community is the audience, but it is also the author, the producer, the underwriter, and the enforcer of what the ceremony accomplishes. The two people at the center are the occasion, not the point.
The revision that the present moment is forcing on this older model is partial and unstable. Couples now plan their own weddings, write their own vows, and curate their own guest lists in ways that would have been unintelligible in 1900. They also still invite their parents, accept gifts, register at department stores, hire vendors who specialize in the wedding industrial form, and feel obligated to people they barely know. The result is a hybrid: a ceremony that pretends to be private but functions as public, that claims to be personal but performs the same kinship work weddings have always performed. The performance is for the community even when the couple insists otherwise.
What does the community get out of the performance? Several things at once. Information, first. A wedding announces, formally and irreversibly, that two adults are now to be treated as a unit by everyone who knows them. Invitations replace gossip. The community no longer has to track the relationship's status through indirect signals. Reassurance, second. A wedding demonstrates that the institutions through which the community organizes itself, family, religion, property, are still functioning. Weddings are how a community proves to itself that it still exists as a coherent social body. Obligation, third. Every wedding creates a web of reciprocal duties: the guests will be invited to other weddings, will host the couple's children at their own future weddings, will be remembered at funerals. The performance binds the audience as much as it binds the couple.
The revision under way is not that the community has stopped attending. It is that the community no longer knows what role it is playing. In a traditional wedding, the community was the audience but also the ratifier. The marriage was real because the witnesses had seen it. In a contemporary wedding, the community is the audience but the ratification has migrated elsewhere, to the state, to the photographer, to the social-media feed. The witnesses still come, but they are no longer doing essential work. They are doing decorative work. Many of them sense this and resent it without being able to articulate why. The widespread complaint about contemporary weddings, that they are too expensive, too long, too self-indulgent, is in part a complaint about being asked to attend a performance whose function has been removed.
Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Pleck, in their work on lavish weddings, argue that the modern American wedding has become a form of consumer spectacle whose primary function is the display of taste and resources. The community is the audience for the display. This is true but incomplete. The community is also the audience for the relationship itself. A couple who has lived together for five years and produced a child still holds a wedding, often spending more than they did on the down payment for their home. The wedding cannot be doing the work of announcing a new household, since the household exists. It is doing the work of asking the community to formally recognize what it has been informally tolerating. The performance is a request for ratification of an already-extant fact.
The cross-cultural data complicate any simple story. In many South Asian, African, and Latin American traditions, the community's role in the wedding remains explicit and uncontested. The wedding is multi-day, involves dozens of relatives in defined roles, and accomplishes work that the families recognize as work: alliance, dowry transfer, kinship reorganization. Western weddings have shed most of this explicit functionality but retained the form, which now floats free of the work it used to do. The form is doing other work, signaling, bonding, displaying, but the participants often cannot name what work that is. This naming gap is where the revision is happening. Couples are increasingly aware that the form is doing something. They are not sure what. They keep performing it anyway, because the alternative, no ceremony, feels insufficient. The community keeps attending, because the alternative, refusing to attend, feels hostile. The performance persists in a state of partial unintelligibility, which is one of the more interesting positions a major ritual can occupy.