We Deserve Better Weddings
Recently, it struck me that people spend countless hours daydreaming happily about their future weddings, only to be anxious, stressed, and miserable for the majority of the actual event. What a strange irony. And we’re led to believe it is inevitable.
There are infinite causes for these problems, and the most pressure tends to fall on the prospective spouses themselves. Their special day becomes their harried madhouse. Last minute cancellations, seating charts, delayed setups, conflicts between relatives, a parade of greetings and photographs such that the couple gets no time to eat, drink, or breathe. Many of them will still say it was one of the best nights of their lives, so I don’t want to undervalue them too much, but it seems clear that there must be a way to avoid those stressors.
A few years ago, at a friend’s wedding, I spoke to some older relatives of the bride, and one of them said something that immediately sounded wrong to me. “Weddings are for the family members and the community, not the couple.” That’s a paraphrase, but he carried on a small diatribe about it.
It felt so wrong to me that I assumed he was joking. But, of course, he was dead serious. My whole understanding of wedding traditions shifted that day, as I considered the implications of what this man had said. The more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right, at least functionally. How had I lived under such a rosy illusion that the opposite was true?
I have no real sense of how many other people consciously feel this way about weddings or not. Everyone I’ve spoken to about it, though, immediately recognized the idea.
Today, much of the world has been settled, for decades or more, into the idea that a person should marry someone they already know and love. That isn’t the traditional understanding of a marriage, which was arranged by heads of families, or agreed upon by communities, or some other form of matchmaking. Crucially: out of the hands of the couple themselves.
Sure, we can reconcile that by just transposing all the other customs onto the new love-based model. That’s what we have done. But many customs, ceremonies, rituals, and other such cultural dressings arise as the structure around a social need. But when you recognize that a marriage was a functional role in a community or society, including at the highest scales, such as royal dynasties, the whole picture starts to come into focus.
Do communities or marriage-based politics really function that way in the modern world? Not in the west, they don’t. If communities don’t really exist the way they used to, then the traditional purpose of a marriage is defunct. So all those traditional behaviors and customs which we still use are literally without purpose. Both the core of marriage (functional and arranged vs self-selected and love-based) and the structure of traditional marriage (social role in a community) have fundamentally changed. They are now nothing but husks of the way we used to think.
Most modern wedding traditions—those which evolved out of the major world religions—are all surface, no substance, because the substance there once was is now a specter of the past. Especially those in the west. The origin of marriage is, of course, the exact opposite: a symbolic, substantive, sacred commitment between two (or more) people. People who believed this truth did not have to worry about whether they already loved their spouse or not: they both served a greater purpose, often based on their local community.
For our weddings, how many distant relatives that we’ve met maybe once or twice in our lives are we obliged to invite? How many family friends who don’t know who we really are will we have to spend half an hour talking to? How much of a porcelain facade are we expected to wear? How many close friends do we leave in the lurch because great grandma Beelzebub takes twenty minutes to tell you about the issues she had at the airport which really just boil down to the fact that she’s old?
A few weeks ago, I told my best friend and her husband, “At my wedding, I won’t stand for any of that nonsense! My wedding invitations will state: This day is about the grooms, not about you!”
That same friend brought this up recently at our other best friend’s wedding reception, and the delightfully subversive group at our table embraced this idea. They made fantastic additional suggestions. For example, that the save-the-dates should include a survey with a customized personality test to determine whether the person is fit to be invited.
I added: and it would be a double blind selection process; I wouldn’t know the identities of those who passed the test until afterward, and anyone who didn’t pass would have their invitation revoked. Brilliant!
This was (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek, but I really think there’s a way to create a new culture around marriage. What are the ways in which we can make a love-based, healthy, self-actualizing marriage into a sacred event? By forming new rituals, and creating new symbolic understandings.