Looking for the unusual in a short story

I always look for the unusual in a short story, a form in which fiction writers can push boundaries and try things that they won't or can't do in a novel - the commitment of time and emotional resources is too great to risk going down a wrong path - and Maile Meloy's story The Proxy Wedding in current New Yorker is unusual - in some respects - and very traditional in others. The unusual: it's rare that we see a story that encompasses a great span of time successfully; most contemporary stories are about a single event, emotion, insight - sometimes a single character. Meloy's follows a high-school student who has an unrequited crush on a fellow student across the span of his years in high school, college, and early career as a composer - he and the girl cross paths a number of times over the years, particularly through the oddity that her father, a lawyer, hires the two of them to perform the role of a proxy couple at weddings, generally of servicemen overseas. So again and again they take wedding vows, and he has a tremendous love for her, but to her he's just a friend - she later marries, breaking his heart, but he's never been able to declare his love: like the old country song You Don't Know Me. Ultimately, her marriage breaks up, they perform one last proxy wedding, they kiss, at urging of the proxy couple linked in on Skype, and voila, magic - they're in love. OK, isn't it pretty to think so? Story is very well narrated and moves along briskly and, though Meloy doesn't go into a lot of depth about any one moment or scene, I could almost imagine this making a good movie - the story itself is like the outline for a screenplay (and in a sense reminded my of another rare story that covered a long swath of time, Brokeback Mountain) - and the story is very much in debt to a particular film: Four Weddings and a Funeral, right down to the Auden quotations. I'm sure it was everything Meloy could do not to end her story with the words "I do" (she uses them a few paragraphs from the end, but fortunately carries story on for another few beats), as did the movie.