“Are you going for the bride or the groom?” I was standing at the car rental counter making small talk with the young lady completing the paperwork for us to rent our car, and I answered without giving any thought to the oddness of my response.

“Neither. I’ve never met either of them.”

She smiled. “How did you get the invite if…”

I started pointing over my shoulder. “She knows the bride,” I explained, indicting behind me with my thumb my absent wife. I turned around to discover K wasn’t standing behind me.

“Wherever she is…” I continued.

I have, in fact, only been to one other wedding where I didn’t know the bride or the groom, and it was the evening I proposed to K in 2003.

There was little difference between that evening and Saturday’s wedding. During the 2003 wedding, K and I sat with a group of her college friends (it was a college friend’s wedding), but I really knew none of them.

Saturday, we sat with a group of folks who were from the same village as K (the father of the bride was from Jablonka) but otherwise strangers to us.

No matter: we were soon talking with them as if we’d known them for ages.

That’s part of the magic of a Polish wedding: you can go knowing no one and be fairly certain you’ll still have a great time. The copious amounts of alcohol certainly helps lessens everyone’s inhabitions, but there’s something more to it than that.