Debriefing: a wedding

[vezzie]

I went to a wedding at the weekend and ended up thoroughly depressed, as I often do after weddings. Please indulge me, because I want to talk about it.
The bride is one of the most dynamic, active, imaginative and intelligent people I know. She was patronised and belittled throughout ? ?who gives this woman ???? and during the speeches she looked very uncomfortable. I have never seen her so quiet and when it was clear that she didn?t like what was being said it seemed very strange that there was no opportunity for her to own the floor in her own style. I have never heard so little of her voice, ever, and yet she was notionally the centre of attention.
I suppose what is troubling me ? and there is no natural justice in what I am about to say - is that she is so close to the top of so many pecking orders (beautiful, clever, talented, well loved, well educated, professionally respected) that it seems obvious that her husband should be so near to the top of all the male pecking orders (tall, handsome, very rich, in a very well paying job) and yet unfair that this sort of man seems almost inevitably to bring the expectations that his wife will take a very traditional and subservient role. Without wanting to imply that anyone deserves to be pushed about, because they don?t, I suppose I am upset that this woman, who is brilliant, is now going to play second fiddle to a tosser for the rest of her life.

I hate weddings. I always start off all excited and filled with love and joy and enjoy the sentimental moment where you can look at the couple and do a mental 6-Feet-Under-like montage where you imagine them surrounded by children, growing older, surrounded by grand children, retiring together etc. Then at some point I am forced to realise that the whole thing is filling me with profound unease and it is as well if I am not too drunk or I have to find a cupboard to hide in and cry.

DP said, when I was telling him how sad I was feeling on Sunday, ?Why do you take it so personally?? I just shrugged and changed the subject. Later I thought, ?Because it is like this. Suppose you were invited to a housewarming party and you bought a present and wrote a card expressing all the good wishes that you have for the people in their new house, and you dressed up and turned up ready to celebrate and saw everyone else looking beautiful and happy and joyful, and the hosts offered to show you round and then you realised during the tour that the whole thing runs on a basement floor inhabited by slaves, it would slightly put a dampener on the occasion, especially if you were the same kind of person as the slaves.? This is of course a gross exaggeration.

We are not married. I often think we should be, and then I go to a wedding and I?m back to square 1.
What do feminists do about getting married?

Yes, yes, yes!!!

I've seen this with so many female friends. I went to a wedding a few months where a very driven, dynamic and ambitious friend did the whole 'who gives this woman?' thing. She was walked down the aisle by her dad, and then a few minutes later, he came back to take her hand and give it to her husband!

Even friends of mine who had very traditional weddings felt uncomfortable about this.

Then, the speeches were all done by the men.

I know that, if I got married (not looking very likely at the moment!) I'd either give myself away or ask both my parents to walk me down the aisle. I am a product of both my parents and not my dad's property. I would also do a speech.

I have been to so many weddings where the women keep quiet and the men speak. The one wedding I went to where the bridesmaid did speak, the bride was extremely embarrassed - and not in a good way, she told me afterwards. I was really saddened to hear this because I think it took a lot for the bridesmaid to speak.

And then all my female friends have taken their husband's name and called themselves "Mrs".

Honestly, I've despaired!!

Yes, it's true that the actual vows were completely symmetrical and this is one of the things that interested me (in a horrible way) - that an ancient traditional institution like the church can make a better fist of honouring a relationship than people's own made up traditions, and the behaviour of their friends and families. In the church, there were times when it all seemed rather lovely, solemn and true.

Lots of projecting of stuff I didn't say, by the way: I haven't judged anyone; nor have I suggested that the bride got stuck with a ceremony she couldn't change (it is precisely the fact that she must have chosen all this that interests me); nor for a second have I suggested that feminists cannot or should not marry - what I am asking feminists is how they arranged it themselves.

I know you don't have to do it that way and you can in fact have women making speeches at the reception without legally invalidating the marriage. Pointing this out is a bit silly though, it is like saying to someone who complains that the work canteen food is all stodge and chips "well you could bring a salad" - yes, you could, I might, some people probably do, but that's not the point - most people are going to go into the canteen and take what there is and if it's slowly killing them, that's not good, is it?

And, goddammit, I am NOT overthinking this. I do not go around looking for things to offend me; as I said in the OP I go to weddings with the wholehearted intention (and amnesiac expectation) of celebrating and supporting the couple's union and it is always with deep regret and after hours of (cowardly?) attempts to bloody well UNDERthink it that it dawns on me that there are aspects of the thing that are making me very honestly miserable.

An American friend of mine went to a fundamentalist Christian wedding. She was a friend of the bride. The whole sermen in the middle of the ceremony was about the bride now being the property of the groom and needing to submit to him and his will entirely (the whole surrendering thing). It put my friend in a terrible dilemma - every fibre of her being was telling her to walk out, but it would have embarrassed the bride in front of her new family, and the friend didn't want to make things awkward for her on her own wedding day.

Scary stuff.

Strangely enough, no obeying or giving this woman in the Roman Catholic marriage service either. DH was mightily surprised to find that out.

dittany - that would be fun!

It would make the news...

What would the placards say?

The bride could be given a present - "Wifework" .

:o dittany

I remember marriage being discussed on another feminist board a few years ago, and the consensus was that yes, marriage is definitely patriarchal and bad for women. Nevertheless, a man who's willing to do it is better than one who isn't.

What I think of getting married is this:
It has NOTHING to do with love and commitment and devotion. Nothing. I know of too many very happy cohabitees and too many miserable married people to think this.

What getting married does do is this:
it is a formal declaration to the authorities i.e. the law, financial providers that two individuals wish now to be viewed as a couple.

It is very, very important from a legal viewpoint to be married. The law- RIGHTLY- cannot assume a couple wish to be viewed as each other's next-of-kin etc purely because they live in same house.
I hate notion of cohabitee rights- it is the state inflicting a quasi-marriage-like arrangement on those who may to live free of such ties.

It's a legal procedure and if you wish to get married, do not let weddings put you off tying the knot!

Very important from a legal viewpoint to be married if you wish your partner to have certain rights as regards your relationship, that is.

Exactly marantha its easy nowadays to have any type of wedding you want with no formalities. As long as you know the person you are marrying then its not going to end up you being treated like property or disrepscted.

You only get disrespected and treated rubbish if you allow it.

So, vezzie, as a major disliker of weddings myself- can't stand all the hype about a big wedding, I can't say you're being unreasonable about not liking this wedding.
I do think you are being unreasonable about assuming that she will play second fiddle to this guy. Don't you realise that weddings like this are about show and have little bearing on reality? Maybe he will play second fiddle to her?
I think you are being unreasonable if you don't realise that getting married can cost about £100 in a register office with just two witnesses.

I had a fairly traditional wedding ( albeit non-religious) and wore a big ivory frock. However, I gave a speech as did DH and the best men. There was no way I wasn't going to speak at my own wedding and I always think its a bit strange when the bride just sits there not saying anything! I also wore a big dress cos I wanted to and I loved wearing it, not sure if that makes me a less of a feminist or not.

DH and I both wanted the absolute simplest marriage ceremony possible, ie the sparest of vows, 2 witnesses, and that was that. I like marriage as an institution, for me personally, and I haven't ever been able to articulate why, but it is in NO way to do with submitting to a man, being seen to be a man's property, declaring myself off the market publicly, etc.

I've been to weddings where there was nothing of the groom, as well. The bride's family had taken everything over and he was just told to turn up on the day, basically. In one case, the groom walked out mid-sentence whilst making his speech.

And there are plenty of weddings where there's a best woman, where the bride makes a speech, etc.

I think you have to take weddings very much on a case-by-case basis. (Though mostly they're awful!)

Can I ask (though maybe it's a separate thread) about Wifework? It's just that I read an article by the writer, who seemed all over the place, and very chippy about her own (what I see as) poor decision-making.

Then a friend recommended it to me. This friend is a very enabling wife of someone we very, very strongly suspect has a narcissistic personality disorder. Needless to say I was , given both of those things.

In a nutshell, what does it say about being a wife?

Yes, I know you can get married for a hundred quid and I also know that marriage has a different legal status from cohabitation; and it has also not escaped my notice that those taking part are free to choose the style in which they marry. THAT IS THE INTERESTING PART. See below.

Marantha, I don?t think it?s true that the style in which a couple marry has no bearing on how they will conduct their life together. People spend a lot of time and energy and money arranging their weddings (usually). It would be very surprising if it said nothing about them. Even what mobile phone people have usually says something about them, and that is far more a matter of chance / convenience / arbitrary decision.

Customs like only men making speeches: as with name changing, a lot of women say ?I agree in principle that it could have gone either way, but it so happened that we went the traditional way ? not for traditional reasons, oh no absolutely not, but for irrelevant arbitrary reasons like the women in my family all hate speaking, my mother had laryngitis, his best man graduated from RADA, etc?? (Equivalent to ?his surname is prettier, my surname goes terribly with his first name, I have 7 brothers to carry the name on and he had no siblings? ? etc). If that was really all there was to it, you would statistically hear about roughly the same number of cases that fall either way ? as many families where the men all had laryngitis and the women were all Ac-Tors. You don?t though. Still, great to hear on this thread about so many women giving speeches at weddings.

Anyway here is the bit that I wanted to unpick that I find kind of depressing: it?s about status. Women who have these big grand traditional weddings are often the women who are confident and are able to award themselves marks of high status in general, in other areas of their lives: people who look good, have nice houses, good jobs, slick social skills, eat good food, hold their birthday parties in expensive bars. Good luck to them. Then, when it comes to their weddings, they opt as usual (or, even more than usual, on such an important and special day) for all the signifiers of a High Status Wedding (=, in this twisted world, expensive and traditional). However, these signifiers are from a time when only a man actually had any status, so it was his status only that defined the status of the couple and therefore by extension that of the woman in it. However, perversely, all specifically masculine status is predicated at least partly on the extent to which they successfully dominate women (in general, and their own in particular) so the ceremonies which were carefully devised to show maximal male status (transferrable to the couple as the wife?s only access to any status at all) simultaneously emphasised her adorable door-matly qualities (or lack of status, relative to his). Now that these status signifiers are still being actively selected in the 21st century by women who earn good money and have lots of degrees, it?s blowing my mind.

I completely agree about status. I find the whole big-wedding thing awful, because they're mostly (with some exceptions) totally pointless and vulgar. Interesting about women hijacking traditions that didn't historically serve them well. I tend to think it's more to do with consumerism.

Interesting. I promised to obey (DH did as well) but that is primarily because DH's health is rocky and we were looking at some pretty big decisions - could we/ should we have DCs/ if there gets to a point where the treatment for his illnesses is worse than the illness what happens etc and it was important for me to acknowledge that he will have the main say in what treatment he will do and whether he can carry on.

I did make a speech at the reception though.

I would certainly self-describe as a feminist and don't think it would exclude me but admittedly, DH isn't a tosser.

Well, if anyone doesn't want a traditional wedding, they don't have to have one. DH and I made ours up, put everything we liked about wedding into it and left out the bits we didn't like. I'd agree that the traditional Christian wedding is very un-feminist, but unless we start to have more non-traditional wedings to show people that they do have a choice, things aren't likely to change. I don't think that boycotting weddings, either as bride or guest, will help at all.

For DH and I it was about getting up in front of family and friends to declare that we were definitely an item and planned to stay that way. And have a magnificent party with everyone in the world who we loved. Best day of my life!

And not liking weddings is no excuse not to get married! Have a small civil wedding. Legally I think it puts women in a stronger position. Marriage is what you make of it, for us it's an equal partnership (for the most part).

I did take DH's surname, but only because my name was impossible to spell/pronounce and frankly I was glad to be rid of it!

DH is Israeli, and oddly, for a very progressive country with very strong women, the Hebrew word for 'husband' is the same as the word for 'owner'! I'm astounded no-one has changed this yet. The word for 'wife' is the same as 'woman'. So in Hebrew I call DH either my partner or my 'man'. I refuse to call him my owner!!

Interesting points Vezzie especially about consumerism. Weddings have always been about public declarations of wealth and status. For example, the tradition of wearing white came about not as a symbol of virginity but because pre-washing machines, it showed you were wealthy enough to buy a dress to wear on one occasion only. Nowadays those sorts of weddings are more accessible.

I am married and a feminist but to be honest I don't really believe in marriage and what it means. I think we would be better off without it and that it should be removed as a legal entity. This would make the law more complex around property but it would put the onus on the individual to ensure their financial affairs are clear and well managed. I also think it would free our imagination to create our own celebrations and days where we declare our love for our partner / partners / dog / best friend.

The reason I married was because of the person my DH is, not because I believe in it as an institution. We walked up the aisle together, we wrote our own vows and readings, I kept my maiden name, gave a speech myself (no fathers to give speeches) and my best woman gave a speech too.

Smallwhitecat: I agree, that these things are usually chosen unreflectively, I think.

However: I suspect that this unreflective attitude to the wedding day might bleed into an unreflective attitude about the marriage where a lot of similar attitudes are imported into day to day life ? there is a surprising sort of smirky implicit pride taken by some women in having uncompromising husbands, as if this is a positive alpha male trait that confers status on themselves, even when they are the one not being compromised with.

AnnieLobeseder ? really, you don?t have to have a traditional wedding if you don?t want to? (That, by the way, was sarcasm as I have been forced to explain that that has nothing to do with my point about 3 times now). But you are not the only person on this thread who seems to be just pressing their ?play? buttons on ?My Spiel About Weddings?.
Also, interesting that your particular reasons for taking your husband?s name are so very particular and individualistic, and uniquely have no bearing on feminism but purely coincidentally result in a traditional outcome. As I said above so often seems to be the case.