As someone who got married about a month ago, I am highly qualified to comment on other people’s weddings. And here’s the thing about weddings: they are like 90% pageantry, 10% actual getting married. Even though the entire point is to get married, people will criticize you and call you a social failure if you don’t invite 100 of your closest friends and relatives to watch you put your private feelings on display.

I guess my point is, weddings are 90% unnecessary, but we continue to participate in it because it validates our need to be paparazzi’d for a day. And weddings, it turns out, are exploitative enough without actually being 100% fake.

Apparently, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt of “The Hills” didn’t get that memo. I’m not too surprised; this is the same Heidi who continued to claim she was a virgin even after a pregnancy scare on her “reality” show. Now, let me be clear: many couples choose to or need to marry before they are ready to have a big, public ceremony. And that’s just fine. But it’s something else entirely to do the pageantry before you are actually intending to be married. (Those couples who are not allowed to legally marry are excluded from this, of course.)

I wouldn’t be so bothered by the whole Heidi/Spencer thing if it weren’t painfully obvious that they have zero intention of actually being married, ever. You see, they got “married” in Mexico lately, except they didn’t actually get married.

But the couple acknowledged Wednesday that their wedding ceremony near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico _ featured in a photo spread in the magazine _ was symbolic, and not legally binding. At least not yet.

“We had a beautiful ceremony here … officiated by a minister and photographed by the hotel photographer. We’ve never been happier,” said the couple in a statement provided by Us Weekly. “And, like other elopements that happen outside the country, we’ll take care of the legal details when we get home.”

HuffPo commenter LMPE asks the question that has, no doubt, occurred to all of us.

Just who are these people. Why not report on famous people who have stayed married for a long time? Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss have been together since 1961 I believe.

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