You know who really loves a bachelor party? Guys who have already been married for a few years.

The edges have been good and worn off of the marriage by then. You’ve seen each other vomit a few times, you pee in front of each other (and in some particularly intimate relationships the dreaded #2 as well), you’ve possibly changed some diapers together, dealt with taxes, found that certain aspects of each other’s personality, once charming, are now near-insufferable. One or both of you probably has a few extra pounds in places that don’t quite work, and your sex life has probably taken a hit. You’ve begun to relish the moments apart as much as the good moments together.

It’s inevitable that the honeymoon is over after a few years, there’s nothing you can do about it but embrace this fact as gracefully as possible. In fortunate cases all of this has somehow led you to a point of a deeper love for each other. In others, it has a dampening effect, obeying that lousy law of diminishing returns. Lifestyle patterns give way to routines, which harden further into ruts. Ennui sets in tender teeth which slowly gnaw away. Something primal begins to itch within your soul, a hungering for new thrills, for excitement. We begin to fantasize about every other woman we see, even ones we wouldn’t have given a second glance to a few years prior. But what we really want is for all of our old drinking buddies to be in the same goddamned boat as us.

Married couples are always putting pressure on their friends to make the leap and join them in the matrimonial stew. We envy the sense of freedom and irresponsibility that our unwed buddies still enjoy, we resent that we must bear witness to and live vicariously through our single chums’ seemingly more exciting lifestyles. The proverbial grass is never greener than on the lawn of our unmarried pals; it’s far easier to coax them into the same trap as us than to escape our own and join them in the pack once more. Besides which, it provides us with a thoroughly sanctioned excuse to kick up some serious shit at the bachelor party.

Misanthropic scumbags that we are, we joyfully regale our grooms-in-training with plastic balls and chain, amidst pealing laughter and cries of “it’s all over now,” “hand over your checkbook,” “welcome to the club, buddy!” Now that we’ve helped guide them into the approach vector, we paint the landing strip with somber tones of doom, handing the hapless boob yet another shot of tequila and another fiver for the stripper.

Perhaps at no other time in their friendship are men so brutal to each other than at the bachelor party. After baiting them for months, years, extolling the virtues of marriage to our single compadres, we suddenly pull the switch on them in their weakest moments while they’re nervous, drunk, and the center of attention. We ask them all night in word and deed, “are you sure you wanna do this? Give all this up? There’s no turning back!”

What we’re actually doing is testing their mettle. We stuff the night chock full of bacchanalian delights in wine, women, and song, we insist that all this goodness will be done when they say “I do,” and we laugh at their folly. But the real point is the excessiveness of it all, the oversaturation of our friend with decadence, leaving him sick and over-glutted by morning. If we’ve done our job correctly, he’ll be gazing deep into the bottom of a toilet, heaving away in technicolor regret, thoughts barely assembled, save for one solid notion: As awful as marriage could possibly be, it’s got to be better than this.

As he curses our names for poisoning him so mercilessly in body and spirit, he conversely sings the praise of his bride, his redeemer of all man’s ills. She is his savior, his salvation, and in looking down upon his frail and stinking mess and somehow loving him in spite of himself, his woman bestows nobility upon him and raises him up into a higher place.

Though marriage may be a gilded cage, perhaps it is also a protective barrier against the debauched foolishness of a single life; a proper bachelor party drives this point home like nothing else.

(image: Target For Matrimony, Steve McNeil, 1952)