IKEA Now Offers Virtual Weddings (Some Assembly Required)

The dream of the 90s is alive: You can still get legit married in a virtual ceremony! You haven’t missed your chance! All this technology, it is all for you! From IKEA! Because the company that you associate with cheap furniture, Allen wrenches and hours of frustration is now in the wedding game.

You could have a virtual IKEA wedding for a variety of reasons: First, weddings are expensive; second, people from all over the globe to see you for one day and it might be easier just to do it all online and then take a nap after everything is done; third, you are an IKEA aficionado like no other. If you go to IKEA just to eat on a regular basis (the same my partner goes down to Costco just to hang out and see “what people are doing”), then this might be the perfect wedding for you.

And the technology has gotten better. IKEA weddings are all mics and Skype and two-way communication. The last time I tried to get virtual-married — at 14 in 1998 — a virtual wedding meant taping the reception and putting it up on a website for no one to ever look at. The IKEA virtual wedding happens in real time, with people forced to be there or miss out on the entire thing. It’s perhaps not something I want anymore — I am no longer 14 — but if I were still into kooky offbeat stuff that I would do just so I could tell people about it, I’d be all for it.

Unlike my late nineties virtual wedding, however, the IKEA version is for an actual marriage. Nothing virtual about it. The Daily Dot reports there are some stringent requirements:

The only caveat to online weddings—and this is pretty important—is that for your marriage to be legally binding, the couple needs to be in the same room as the officiant and at least two witnesses.

If you met your partner online, The Daily Dot points out, this may be the absolute perfect wedding for you. Also if you love to collect wedding presents without having an actual wedding. Also if you want all those presents to be from IKEA, which means that your house will just be filled with unopened cardboard boxes you won’t have the emotional strength to open and put together for months. There’s nothing about this plan that sounds bad, actually. Sign me right the fuck up.