Today, Cary answers a letter about hooking up at a wedding.  So that got me wondering, just how common is the wedding-guest-hookup?

A quick search yielded tons of ideas for those looking find love (if only for one night) at a wedding.  Most of the lists are common sense-based, and not likely to include things you don't already know.  A very sensible sounding 7 tips list made the rounds earlier this month, and there are no shortage of other lists to help you out with ideas. Check here, here, here, here and here.  You can also find cautionary tales of when the hookup went poorly, such as the story here.  For a reasonable description of why hookups are likely, this is a pretty good summary of some contributing factors.

In some cases, the bride and groom aim to facilitate encounters between their friends.  In one case, I found a Facebook group established by a groom that posed the question, "Who is going to hook up at Andy and Erin's wedding?" (apparently no one who admitted anything).  Brides and grooms now have the option to try out a new tool that is more or less intended to help their friends scope out the other guests ahead of the event.

I did a survey of the wedding planning and etiquette guides at the San Francisco Main Public Library, and while it wasn't a comprehensive search, none of the books I explored addressed this topic at all.  I wasn't terribly surprised that the Emily Post wedding etiquette guide stuck to the more traditional set of topics.  But neither thebooks geared towards bridesmaids nor those that took a decidedly casual approach to the events of a wedding seemed to address this common activity.

The wedding hookup is fodder for lots of movies. It's the entire basis of the movie "Wedding Crashers." And the second wedding in the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral" is the result of an unlikely encounter during the reception of the first.

Anna Davies addressed this topic for a Salon a few months ago with her piece, "Hooking up while the happy couple gets hitched."

But none of this really helps me address my original question: how common is the post wedding hookup?  There is plenty of anecdotal evidence.  I know of at least one hookup from my own wedding.  And as I think about it, the size of the wedding, the makeup of the guest list and the venue all must be contributing factors.  Much of the mythology of the wedding hookup has something do with the amount of alcohol consumed, so would a wedding where the guests aren't offered any booze correspond to fewer romantic encounters by the guests?

I have to admit a bias of mine.  The idea of having scholarly articles on this type of subject would probably make me roll my eyes and wonder why money was spent studying something so silly.  Of course people hook up at weddings.  Gathered together are people important to the couple from different times and places in both of their lives, and isn't it true that friends of friends often make good potential partners?  I didn't find any research dedicated to this topic specifically as I was looking today, but... I'll keep looking.  I might roll my eyes, but now I'm curious. 

Update:

In the comments section, wmbt pointed to Assortative Meeting and Mating: Unintended Consequences of Organized Settings for Partner Choices; Matthijs Kalmijn and Henk Flap; Social Forces, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Jun., 2001), pp. 1289-1312.  I checked out that article, but it covers a different question.  This article addresses how five organized settings (school, work, neighborhoods, common family networks and voluntary organizations) have the side effect of introducing people to future mates.

Because this article specifically addresses those 5 places, and the ending point they are looking for is marriage, my original question is not addressed.  Unfortunately the references for this article also don't get me any closer.  They look at plenty of resources on how people meet their future mates, or at information about social networks, as well as a variety of sources that mention marriage, but none that address weddings in particular.