Let ‘em Eat Cake

            Two girls walk into Take Five Coffee Lounge, they order drinks, and one of them a piece of pie.  They sit down at a table near me, and start discussing cake.  I like cake, most of us do.  One of them is getting her wedding cake made at this coffee shop.  She describes the cake to her friend.  She brings up her married friends cakes that she has seen on Facebook, and notes that most of them had grooms cakes while she will not.  They joke that a groom’s cake sounds like it should be at the bachelor party.  They talk about her plans for the bachelor party.  I finish my coffee, then get up and leave.

            There are a couple of parts of this conversation that I find interesting.  The first one is when she mentions her married Facebook friends.  In the world of Facebook we get to share just how wonderful our lives are with as much photographic evidence as we can procure, and in the case of weddings, that’s usually a lot of evidence.  In this situation, this abundance of documentation was creating a sense of competition.  She was speaking to her unmarried friend who, due to her relationship status, is obviously not a contender.  Yet she was in it to win it.  She was organizing her attack.  She was feeling out her competition.  She was carefully managing her resources to be able to post the best Facebook wedding pictures she could.  Since she couldn’t afford a grooms cake, she wrote it off as silly and a non-traditional extravagance.

            The second part of the conversation that struck me as interesting is when they began discussing her plans for the bachelor party.  When asked what he was doing for the bachelor party she responded, “I was thinking maybe he and his friends could hang out at our house and play beer pong, then us girls could catch up with them later and we could all party together.”  This desire for control and limited mobility of his bachelor party shows a lack of trust and a level of insecurity.  A bachelor party is intended to be a last hoorah, time with the boys, and a ceremonial end to the bachelor lifestyle.  If she is unwilling to allow him this freedom, she obviously doesn’t trust him.

            These, of course are only assumptions that I have made based on a few lines of exchanged dialogue, overheard one day and written about the next.  Perhaps she only brought up Facebook because she needed a point of reference from which to even speak of this new concept of a groom’s cake.  Perhaps her partner really likes to stay in and play beer pong with his friends, and she is only suggesting the things she believes will truly make him happy.