Black Meringue

Virtually Yours

From first contact to marriage, the internet has changed the way we do relationships. Richard O'Grady looks at the weird and wonderful things the web can do for your wedding day.

I’d like to share some exciting news with you all: I’ve just married the editor of Black Meringue! Online, that is. It cost me absolutely nothing, we didn’t swap a single vow and she was in the bath at the time.
The best bit was the minimal planning. I simply went to www.irom.org (presumably short for i-romance), submitted our names and email addresses and clicked the ‘I do’ button. Not much time for pre-wedding-day jitters, and certainly no space for ‘does anyone have any objections?’. And we’re now officially married. It must be true, because I have an email that says so.

There are two major problems with our newfound matrimony, though. One, it’s not in any way legally binding – and I suppose that’s fair because, two, until she checks her inbox my ‘wife’ has absolutely no idea that she’s tied the knot. She just asked me to do some research into online weddings – I wonder if this is what she had in mind?

LOVE AT FIRST TYPE

Let’s start at the very beginning. Love at first sight, those early bashful glances and the first awkward dates could all be a thing of the past as more and more people are meeting their true loves in cyberspace. High street dating services and classified ads in the newspaper are now competing with a host of more versatile websites. Social networking sites like Facebook, Friends Reunited and MySpace are the new generation of meeting places, introducing and reuniting millions of people. The internet gives people the opportunity to meet others from the comfort of their own home without the added pressures of worrying about what they look like and where to go. It can offer a filter for romantic hopefuls to check that they actually like someone before they go to the hassle of meeting up. And it means that you don’t have to prepare some intelligent-sounding lines of conversation on Nietzsche or Freud to impress a potential lover: social networking sites will have you talking about underwear in no time!

Ann Harding, 65, met her fiancé Dave Errington on the dating website www.udate.com. She says: “Dave was the fifth guy I met up with. I’d said in my profile that I wanted to meet someone within a 50 mile radius of Exeter, where I lived at the time. Even though he lived in Warwickshire Dave got in touch, and although I was 61 I told him I was 56, as he was 50!”

The couple got to know each other for six months via email before they finally met, when Ann went to the Midlands for her granddaughter’s birthday.
“We chatted all night,” laughs Ann. “We were a match made in heaven.”

“I did tell him my real age that night,” continues Ann. “He was worried about it, because he thought in a few years I’d be 70. But after he’d had some time to think he phoned me back and said he’d like to see me again.”

The couple are now planning a September wedding, after Dave proposed to Ann on a birthday cruise. Despite her perfect love story, Ann says that most people are sceptical when she tells them how she and Dave met: “Whenever I tell people about my experience they say it sounds incredibly dangerous. But it’s not. You don’t give anyone your email address or telephone number, and I always met up with people in the daytime, in restaurants, as per the website’s rules.

“Even my son wasn’t happy at all. He said: ‘If you want to meet someone, Mum, go down the pub.’ But I wouldn’t have met anyone there.

“I can’t recommend internet dating enough. I’d been with my husband for 27 years when we split up, and I was sad and lonely. The very first day I posted my profile on www.udate.com I had 65 replies – imagine how that makes you feel when you’ve been dumped! There must be so many people out there who are desperate to meet someone, but who are too scared to try the internet. Through it I’ve met my soulmate.”

JUST ONE CLICK

Once you’ve met the man or woman of your dreams and it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty – planning the ceremony – the web can make things millions of times easier than back in the internet-less dark ages. Before the web you might have spent hours travelling around or making long phone calls to pull together the countless ingredients. Now you can submit your needs to a wedding planning website and it’ll do the rest for you. Or, if you’d rather keep hold of the reins, there are loads of useful planning websites which can answer your questions and point you in the right direction. Most of these provide forums or chatrooms where you can share advice with other stressed out brides and grooms to be.

From invitations to fireworks, you can buy or hire all you’ll need online. It’s far easier, and in most cases you’ll be able to save some pennies for the honeymoon. It’s often a lot more environmentally friendly too – if you email your wedding invitations as opposed to posting them you’ll not only avoid paying for stamps, you’ll save a tree or two as well.

In fact, sharing the details of your wedding has never been easier. If you can’t bear the idea of your guests badgering you for wedding day updates, then why not set up your own ‘wedsite’? Web designer and artist Amanda Daniel set up her online company The Social Gathering to make wedding planning easier. She offers couples their own personalised piece of the web to share their story, wedding day plans and pretty much anything else you can think of. Amanda says the idea was born from necessity: “I’m planning an August wedding myself. My dad lives in Bermuda, where I was born, and so does a lot of my family. I’m a web designer by trade so I created a website to save me having to ring around everyone to tell them the details. They can just log on and check the venue, dates and accommodation for themselves.”

Having seen the more basic offerings on the market, Amanda wanted to raise the bar and give her product a more personal feel: “The websites available before all looked exactly the same. I’ve been a designer all my life so I wanted one specially designed for me, and that’s the difference with The Social Gathering. It’s not a templated website, it’s created to perfectly match your wedding. I’m having a black and white wedding so I can use those colours and the wedding motif on the website.”

To create your own wedsite go to www.thesocialgathering.co.uk. It can be as easy or as complex as you like, and if you don’t want the whole world gawking in you can protect it with a passport to give to your guests. From video clips, galleries, event diaries and story pages right down to information on the bridesmaids’ and ushers’ outfits, The Social Gathering is perfect for a generation that loves to share its lives online (outside of working hours of course), but also very useful for those who can’t drop in for tea with all their guests.

Aside from the visual and the interactive, the internet offers a lot to listen to. Podcasting (that’s episodic on-demand radio, in case the terminology still baffles you) has hit the world-wedding-web. The stylish weddingpodcastnetwork.com offers podcast shows about everything you can think of. There’s advice on honeymoon hotspots, keeping a healthy relationship – even a wedding workout! The site has the slogan ‘advice worth listening to’, which is probably about right.

Podcasting is a great example of what the internet can do. Because the cost of production and broadcasting is so low, those who wish to can make programmes about anything that interests them and the chances are, someone somewhere else will be interested in listening to them. In the case of weddings, you have an enormous and guaranteed audience helping the network to grow and develop.

CYBER CEREMONIES

But now to the real deal: internet weddings. The first online wedding in the UK took place in Cardiff in April 2000. Jane and Bleddyn Edwards’ ‘cyber ceremony’ was streamed through a single webcam, had no sound and consisted of vague images which only refreshed every 30 seconds. Nevertheless, it sparked a revolution. Eight years on, the idea has blossomed and live, high definition video has taken over.
The quality of weddings broadcast online is almost completely clear nowadays. If your guests can’t attend the wedding in person you can hire a film crew to broadcast the event online from four different angles at high definition. This way your guests won’t miss out on the action and they can feel the same comfortable satisfaction I sometimes feel when I watch Glastonbury on television. As the world gets smaller more and more couples are likely to have friends dotted all over the globe, causing a geographical problem for the big event. Whether the barriers are through finance, travel sickness or your ever-growing carbon footprint, an online wedding is a solution for absent friends who still want to be part of the big day.

E-FUTURE?

So what might the technology of the future bring to weddings? I can’t see weddings ever being a sit-at-home event – people like to dress up and have a party too much. I also think that most of the traditional values will stay because that’s what weddings are all about, but perhaps it’s not hard to imagine an online marriage more legal than mine between two people who have never met.

And Amanda Daniel thinks that websites will be the new way to capture the memories of your special day. “It’s about life-caching: creating a ‘scrapbook’ of your life. In the past you sat around with your Nan and Mum looking through photo albums, but in the future you’re going to be sitting online, viewing people’s websites.”

One of my friends recently got engaged and the first I heard about it was on the news feed page on Facebook. Their engagement was front page news before they’d even hit the pillow. Actually I’ve been on Facebook at least 10 times since I started writing this. Uh-oh, the wife won’t be happy. I’ve got a feeling there’s an e-divorce on its way. If only I had a cyber-prenup!

BM