I sat there with my feet in the sand. Acoustic guitar was playing quietly, and people were crying. The bride walked down the makeshift aisle towards my best friend. He stood there with a ridiculous grin on his face, and I couldn’t help to wonder… Why?

I’m 27 years old and David, the groom, is the first of my close friends to be married.

The audience that congregated on a small patch of sand in front of Santa Barbara’s Yacht Club last Saturday consisted of a small amount of family members and a massive amount of my own childhood friends.

Not a single one of those friends are even remotely close to getting married. So it begs the question… What is David doing right? Or maybe even, is what he’s doing just wrong?

According to the census bureau, the divorce rate actually started dropping a bit in 2005, but the amount of people getting married has dropped considerably as well.

I come from a broken home; my parents were divorced when I was 13 years old. I have a brother and two sisters. My brother is on his third marriage with a child from each one. My older sister is a divorcee with two children from the marriage and one illegitimate child. My other sister who is closest to me in age just finalized her divorce.

I don’t put a lot of stock into marriage.

In 1981, the year before I was born, the divorce rate began to skyrocket.

Just about everyone in the audience at the wedding had divorced parents.

It makes sense that my generation is skeptical about marriage, hence the statistical drop. David’s parents sat in the front row, holding hands and wiping each other’s tears. They have been happily married for 30 years.

When asked what the glue was that has kept them together for so long, Shelly, David’s mother, found it hard to come up with an answer. Steve, David’s father attributed their longstanding marriage to Bud Light.

David is a very simple man. His goals are small and attainable. He has a job in sales that makes him happy. He wants a family with all the fixings: dog, backyard, picket fence, and Grandparents right down the block.

David’s life seems admirable, humble. But his friends’ general consensus is that he is fooling himself.

He had dated his now wife for two years. He has had his job for about a year. They just rented a house in the Grandparents’ neighborhood two weeks ago. To most of his friends it all just seems a bit contrived. A close friend at the wedding said, “It’s like he’s following the steps of some 1940s life handbook. Like he thinks this is what he supposed to do.”

And that’s exactly right, it is what he feels he is supposed to do. But that ridiculous grin on his face was 100 percent genuine. This is what he wants to do.

He’s a “relationship guy,” hasn’t been single since early in high school. And has never been in a relationship for longer than two years.

Something happens two years into a relationship; a sudden pressure emerges where it’s sink or swim. It’s either “we love each other and let’s get serious,” or it’s “we are just wasting our time.”

All of David’s friends can be skeptical about marriage with good reason, just as he has faith in it for his own reasons. It will be interesting who will be the first hypocrite amongst us and take the plunge next, or tie the knot, or any other of the hundreds of cliches associated with marriage, but I have a feeling it will be a while.

David and his wife can be our trial run. But something tells me they’ll be just fine.

I got them a case of Bud Light as a wedding gift.

– Kian Mitchum is a Journalism 271 student.