I love weddings.

I don’t really like crowds, or people, or wearing fancy clothes, so I think I’m supposed to hate them, but actually the opposite is true. I love weddings. And I don’t just love them. I love them. Maybe it’s because I know a lot of interesting people, and they happen to have interesting weddings, but almost every wedding I’ve ever been to has been a complete blast. And I have been to a lot of weddings.

I keep waiting for the invitations to stop coming, and though I’m down from my 2005 peak of six weddings, I still get a few invitations each year. It’s wedding season right now, and last weekend I found myself pulling the black dress with the white dots out of the closet and taking it to the dry cleaner and checking to make sure I still had appropriate footwear.

Wedding season is a lot like baseball season, in that it generally runs from March to October but really picks up steam during the summer, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that this was my first wedding of 2008, and that the only other wedding I’m supposed to go to this year is my cousin’s in the fall. I stopped and pondered this. Only two weddings? Was this an aberration, or had I moved a step closer to entering that phase of life where everybody who’s going to get married is married? Because even my wild bachelor friend is getting married in 2009, and if that’s not some kind of sign, I don’t know what is.

People have told me that the phase of life where you get invited to a lot of weddings will eventually end, but until last week I never believed them. The fact is, I’ve been taking weddings for granted. There have been so many, I assumed that every year I would receive a summons, printed artfully, on beautiful paper, inviting me to join a group of fun and interesting people for a weekend of drinking and dancing. But that isn’t necessarily the case, is it? I won’t always get summoned, will I? And this alarms me, because I like seeing my friends from college, and weddings are about the only time we all get together. (As one of the unmarried members of this crowed, I worry that people will begin to think it’s my responsibility to get married, just so we can have a reunion, and I don’t like that kind of pressure.)

One of the things I like about weddings is that each one is a new experience, which is somewhat amazing, when you consider how old and time-tested the formula is. There was the wedding that involved traveling to LaCrosse, Wisc., taking a cruise on the Mississippi River, eating a meal recreated from a menu off a New Orleans steamship, and staying in a little red schoolhouse that had been converted into a bed and breakfast. (The bride helpfully sent all guests a copy of Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” to prep us for the event.) There was the wedding at the art museum in Philadelphia, where after the reception we made our way to a bar called Dirty Frank’s. There was the Leap Day wedding at the lodge in New Hampshire that involved sledding, a campfire and lots of kilts. And there was the wedding I officiated in Vermont, which may be the most memorable of them all, for obvious reasons.

Last weekend’s wedding was typically insane, in the best sense of the word.

My friend Adam and I arrived at the retreat center in Massachusetts mid-day, as the torrential downpour was beginning. The wedding was for two women we worked with years ago at summer camp, and they mentioned that they had wanted the wedding to be as much like summer camp for grown-ups as possible. The part that reminded me most of summer camp was running around in the rain, unable to stay dry or find an umbrella, and getting mud all over my legs, but never mind. There was drinking and dancing and reconnecting with old friends — we were up until about 2:30 in the morning, jumping in and out of the swimming pool and hot tub — and I was struck by how a wedding is the one event that can actually make me behave like an extroverted person. I was gregarious and social and filled with this bizarre love of humanity, and I drove back to New York with a silly grin on my face, even as I knew it would take me about a week to recover from whole ordeal.

So I’ll be sad when the weddings end, because that love of humanity has already subsided, and who knows when I’ll get to dance to “YMCA” ever again?