Away marriage
Last night I read a sweet short story, The Proxy Marriage by Maile Meloy, about a pair of high school friends (one in love with the other) who over the course of many years perform a series of "double proxy marriages," standing in together for soldiers overseas and their fiances at home. Such marriages are legally binding and allow for death benefits to the soldier's children if the soldier is killed.
In the final scene, the marrying couple ask to be skyped in to the proxy ceremony, and both couples interact on-screen. This seems to me to raise an obvious nonliterary point: why not eliminate the middle-couple? That is, in an age ubiquitous webcams, why can't physically separated couples marry by videoconference, with officiator and witness? Proxy marriage seems a needless anachronism, great story premise though it is.