There’s a new shop opening in Wellington this summer, Mrs. Peachum’s and The Neon Chapel. The name itself triggers a cascade of ideas. Mrs. Peachum is a character in John Gay’s 1728 satire The Beggar’s Opera, a pastoral of thieves and harlots. Its energy comes of its union of oppositions: the highest of genres, opera, meets the ballads and folk songs of life lived low. Pastoral, likewise, generally concerned with upper class idylls, is here set in the dog-eat-dog world of cutpurses and footpads, who turn out, of course, to share a code of honour as strict as that of a priest. 

The Beggar’s Opera sets a story of true love — Polly Peachum’s for the dashing highwayman Macheath — among villains in order to insist anew that the eternal verities — youth, love, innocence, and hope — are eternal because they can thrive anywhere. 

And so, the vivid world of Mrs. Peachum is popping up again, and with it the high, youthful energy of a Los Vegas-style wedding-chapel-in-a-bar. Disco balls will abound. It is the creation of industry veterans who are leaning into the oxymoron of the instant wedding: a lifetime bond forged in a few minutes. 

Fast weddings have been around since about 2017, gathering momentum during the pandemic. Now they are everywhere, including the County. Toronto’s Pop Up Chapel Co., for example, offers “mini” and “classic” micro-wedding packages at The Waupoos Winery on set dates in spring and fall. 

One fine day this June, for example, four different couples uttered the familiar words on the winery’s lakeside terrace. In the Mini package, the ceremony is 15 minutes. Then there’s 45 minutes to “toast, hug + take photos.” You can invite up to 20 friends and family members. Generally, everyone heads out to a celebratory lunch or dinner afterwards.

The appeal is obvious to anyone who has planned a major event: packages start at about $3000, and everything is taken care of: a beautiful venue, day-of coordination, flowers, officiant, photographer, music, cake, even a glass of sparkly for the toast. 

Done. 

The Drake Devonshire — old hands at the wedding business, the Drake hosts 2 to 3 weddings a month from June to October — will host a Just Married! Pop Up November 1. It follows another successful spring offering that saw 4 couples hit the same flowered arbor for their 15 minutes in the sun. The Drake package includes a two-night stay with breakfast in bed, and everything else — officiant, photographer, florals, boutonnière, cake, and a one-hour reception for up to 20 people in the glamorous Glass Box. 

In the spring version, all the newlyweds stayed at the Drake and had dinner there: it became a festive multi-wedding celebration, like the kind that ends a good comedy. (Four newly married couples in a hotel. What could go wrong?!) 

One justification for these stress-free arrangements, of course, is expense. The average wedding in Canada in 2025 cost between $30,000 and $42,000. In Toronto and Vancouver, it was closer to $100,000. Not just unaffordable, such display is becoming undesirable in these days of darkness. 

But something else is going on as well. 

Pop-up and micro weddings might feel new, but they’ve always been with us. It used to be called eloping, for example. 

To elope, from the French eloper, means to escape. For a very long time, the word was associated with the idea of thieves absconding. About the eighteenth century, it started to mean couples escaping.

In England, that led to the worry, not that true love could conquer all, but that a villainous and broke young man could squire a young heiress to Gretna Green and secretly marry her, and her fortune, away from her family. Girls had no rights in the olden days, and married women even fewer. Eloping was just another way of stealing property. 

Rakish young men could also turn the promise of marriage into a ruse: in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Wickham elopes with Lydia Bennet, but he has no intention of taking things that far: his plan is to ruin her and then dispose of her. She hasn’t the money to make marriage worthwhile.

The problem with eloping was the secrecy. Marriage is about coming out in the open. Secrecy exploits innocence and vulnerability. 

Romantically speaking, of course, the rebellion of an elopement champions the power of love: there are no imperatives, neither financial, nor social, nor familial, nor cultural, nor religious, that love cannot defy. All we need is us: it’s the rallying cry of the young.

But if that were true, in this day and age, why bother getting married at all? What is interesting about pop up weddings is that they don’t challenge tradition, they affirm it. They embrace convention. What could be more old-fashioned than the simplest possible exchange of vows amidst a small band of true friends? 

A wedding, every single one, is a grand instantiation, a moment in a long, many-storied, multi-layered, and evolving tradition. From Tom Jones to Jane Eyre, marriage means, not just that one loves, but that one has come of age. It marks entry into the world as your own person, the sign of which is the ability to keep your promises, to others as to oneself. 

If a couple’s life together is private, marriage takes it out into the world, makes it official: public, shared, conventional. An engagement marks the moment you start to engage others in your life. Invite them in. Tell them how important they are to your deep and lasting happiness. 

And so, I find something truly hopeful in this latest wedding trend. That people — young people, broke people, divorced people — are getting married at all, never mind again, affirms the importance, not just of a very old institution, but of the declaration, before witnesses, that love is a matter of duty, and duty of love, and that there are words worth living by. What more could we ask for?