San Diego

THREE years ago, at a wedding in Prague, I met an Englishman with whom I had an immediate and powerful connection. We e-mailed for two months, and then I joined him in the Bahamas for a weeklong second date. At first, the match seemed fated, the product of a romantic version of paying it forward. You see, my cousin Luke, who grew up in Michigan, started things off by marrying a woman from Prague named Kaja. At their wedding, my cousin Beau met Tereza, Kaja’s younger sister. They had an immediate and powerful connection, e-mailed and Skyped for a while, and then Beau moved to Prague. I met my Englishman at their wedding.

This is where the international matrimonial chain reaction ends, however, because we broke up in less than a year, driven asunder not by the 5,000 miles that separate London from Palo Alto but, mundanely, by our own incompatible personalities.

Had we met under different circumstances, I doubt we would have dated at all, but weddings impair judgment. It was 4 in the morning; it was Prague. We weren’t alone in behaving imprudently. After I walk-of-shamed the length of Wenceslas Square back to the apartment I was sharing with the groom’s sisters, I found a dress soaking in the bidet. One of these sisters, ordinarily an elegant and self-possessed woman, had gotten the giggles so severely while stumbling back from the bar that she had executed a kindergarten-style collapse-and-pee on the sidewalk.

I’m 29, squarely in the middle of that heady span of years when the tempo driving the game of conjugal musical chairs has suddenly accelerated and summer weekends are spent zipping around the country watching friend after friend tie the knot. There is something numbing about all this marrying. The thrill of the first friends’ weddings, when everybody was young and lifelong commitment seemed wild and transgressive, has worn off, and a jaded peanut gallery has sprung up: guests with finicky expertise on food and venues and fine points of policy, like whether bridesmaids should wear matching dresses or whether there should be bridesmaids at all.