Marriage Quote by Janet Street-Porter

Weddings are sold as curated bliss; Janet Street-Porter yanks the camera slightly downward, to the tremor in the hands and the grim little jokes that leak out when everyone is trying too hard. The line works because it refuses the romance-industrial script without lapsing into bitterness. Instead, it frames the ritual as a recognizable genre: not fairy tale, but social farce punctuated by panic.

“Went like these things generally do” is doing heavy lifting. It’s a shrug that doubles as indictment, implying the chaos isn’t bad luck, it’s baked into the institution: families converging, money on fire, time schedules collapsing, clothing designed to restrict breathing. Street-Porter’s journalist’s eye is in the casual aggregation of detail into pattern; she treats the wedding less as a personal destiny than as a repeatable public spectacle with predictable failure points.

The phrase “anxious moments interspersed with black comedy” nails the emotional rhythm most people recognize but rarely admit in the official album. Anxiety isn’t the exception; it’s the baseline. The “black comedy” is the pressure valve, the gallows humor of people trapped inside performance. Subtext: the event demands sincerity while producing absurdity, and the only honest response is to notice the mismatch.

Context matters too: Street-Porter’s public persona is tart, unsentimental, allergic to sentimentality-as-mandate. She’s not mocking love; she’s puncturing the expectation that love must look serene on schedule. That’s why the line lands: it grants permission to experience the day as it actually unfolds, not as it’s supposed to photograph.