For better or worse, in sickness and health, post-Pilates or post-pizza pigout: Phyllis Nefler will love you however you are. Unless you have more advanced degrees than bottles of wine in your fridge. Celebrate good times, come on!

You've got to love the passive aggression of Weddings and Celebration. I can see mothers of the groom the world over slyly sidling up to their glowing daughters-in-law at the post-wedding brunch with a copy of Sunday Styles in their veiny hands. "Oh, your announcement is lovely," they begin. "And oh, did you happen to see this? I think it's very interesting...are you planning on finishing that french toast, dear?"

"Call them happy pounds, love chub or the marriage 15," writes the Times' Abby Ellin. "No matter what, gaining weight during marriage is about as common as holding your breath under water."

Shit. Add that to the freshman 15 and the blogger 15 and I might as well just run out and buy a lifetime supply of muumuus right now. But anyway, important facts to be learned in the article, "For Better, for Worse, for B.M.I." include:

-Married people eat more.
-Married people drink more.
-Single people watch their weight because they know otherwise they will never find true love!
-When they do find true love, they will cover it in melted cheese and butter and shovel it down their throats as they lay on the couch and watch TV.


Oh, speaking of butter: Butters got maaarried! Not to take anything away from the accomplishments of a great man, Andrew Butters, who graduated from Brown, received two masters degrees (one from Cambridge in history and one from Columbia in journalism), and met his accomplished wife Nahid Siamdoust in Tehran while "they both were covering the 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution for Time" ... but ... I hope the vows went something like this:

Click to viewIn addition to the Time magazine pair, it's been a great month for writers. The Atlantic's Megan McArdle married Reason's Peter Suderman in a union that must have Markos Moulitsas foaming at the mouth. Slate's Jessica Grose married Michael Winton, with former Gawkerer Doree Shafrir getting the rare third-party namecheck in the announcement, for co-authoring "Love, Mom" with Grose. And last week Deadspin's former fearless leader Will Leitch married Alexa Stevenson, the union being particularly notable for gifting the world with the rare unicorn known as the Marty Markowitz Marriage Certificate (TM), previously discussed with great glee in this space.

Finally, I'd like to point out what may possibly be the greatest and most unexpected sentence I've ever read in Vows:

Her father, along with his brother, Robert Bell, known as Kool, is a founding member of the recording group Kool and the Gang.

THE RECORDING GROUP KOOL AND THE GANG. While the band did not perform at the reception, their song Celebration was played. "My father wrote the song back in the 1980s for people everywhere to celebrate good times in their lives," said the bride. "This is exactly why he wrote this song, for moments like this."

And now I can add "have gotten misty-eyed over a Kool and the Gang-related story" to my list of life accomplishments.

In a strange tale, Amanda Pritzker and Brad Kahn had been dating for awhile when they finally had the parents meet the parents. The never-a-good-thing words were uttered, by his mom to her dad: "I feel like I know you from somewhere."

The somewhere, it turned out, was in a DC movie theater, on a date to watch The Exorcist while the two were in college 25 years earlier.

Mrs. Kahn had been so frightened by the film that she lost an armful of bangle bracelets, and she and the bride's father had to stay after the movie to search for them.

Oh, come on. If I tried to use that as an excuse for why I came home past curfew, I'd be grounded for months, if you catch my drift. But anyway, "the bride and bridegroom view the "Exorcist date" as an omen of sorts," according to the announcement. Well, yeah: an omen that you are star-crossed lovers and your marriage is doomed, right? Maybe not: somehow the story is proof that they're soulmates who were brought together by fate. Hey, whatever helps keeps your mind off the fact that you're each going to gain 15 pounds by Thanksgiving!

It could be worse, I suppose: Kavita Mariwalla and Kabir Bhasin met, says the Times, "when she disagreed with his diagnosis of a rash." How...romantic? But it was enough to entice me to click on the video about the two, and having watched it there's only one thing I can say: can I be an Indian bride somehow? Girl looks good.

Elsewhere this weekend, someone must have accidentally replaced the second half of this wedding announcement with the advertising copy for Project Runway, the late great David Halberstam's daughter Julia got married to James Harvey; the son of the owner of "Boogie Wonderland, a Harlem record shop, as well as Wonderland Stud & Stables" married a choreographer in one of the day's cutest stories (unfortunately, this kickass photo didn't make it in print); two Saturday Night Live associate producers are funnier than you'll ever be, and know Alec Baldwin better too; the wedding of two specialists in "outsider art" reminded me of the excellent book The Privileges — have any of you read it? Altarcations book club! It begins with a wedding scene, for crying out loud! — by Jonathan Dee;

and I LOVE the uber-pretentious clarification that ends this announcement:

The bridegroom was named for the conductor, but is not related to him.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I was more so wondering how they got their bangs to match.

This week's faceoff: which yacht club wedding-having couple is more worthy of the rope bracelets they rock and the Southsides they sip?

Julie Ann Gottlieb and Ethan Lewis Schulman

• The couple married at the Pine Orchard Yacht and Country Club in Branford, CT: +1
• Incredibly, the amber waves of grain-set photo in the print version is even more ridic: +1
• The bride is "the legislative affairs manager for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children." What have YOU done with your life?: +2
• The bride graduated magna cum laude from Brown and received a law degree from Stanford: +8
• The groom graduated with the highest distinction from the University of Iowa: +3
• The groom received a Harvard MBA: +3
• "Before entering Harvard he served in the Air Force and was discharged with the rank of captain: +2

TOTAL: 20

Sara Marielle Manning and Carter Haynes Griffin

• The couple married at the Figure Eight Island Yacht Club in Wilmington, NC: +1
• The bride graduated cum laude from Yale and received an MBA from Wharton: +7
• The groom graduated magna cum laude from Princeton and received an MBA from Harvard: +9
• The bride is "of Darien, Conn": +1
• The bride's mother is a nursery school director: +1
• The groom is "a founder of a business that is developing a device to help hospitals detect staph infections": +1
• The groom's mother is a trustee of Salem College: +1

TOTAL: 21