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?

Er, marantha?

'Marriage' is a concept that has existed for hundreds and thousands of years. Your definition is specific to the last 200 minimum.

This may be why you sound a bit odd.

Marriage is NOT a concept that has existed for hundreds and thousands of years.
It came about with Marriage Act of the 18th Century because of dispute over money and property.
In any case, so what if it is specific to the last 200 years, it is what it is about now that matters.
As for the 'odd' comment, I do not know your circumstances and hope you never have misfortune to divorce (it is awful), but I really can assure you it is when a person divorces that they really, really do find out that marriage IS primarily a legal construct.
Don't have to tell Vicar or dressmaker you're divorcing, do you?
Or your guests, bridesmaids. You Do have to involve divorce lawyers, though.

'Your definition is specific to the last 200 minimum'
Er, surely the last 200 years- and what marriage is about NOW- is what matters to us today?

Consider myself a feminist- DH and I share housework, childcare etc. However, at our wedding I did not give a speech, and my brother walked me down the aisle. Our wedding didn't reflect how we are as a couple, we were happy to fall back on tradition, a ritual that is well known. I didn't "obey" as part of our vows either. I have kept my surname and mingled it with his , my (female) colleagues can't get their heads round this at all, and frequently feign confusion over our dcs' names.

Isn't the 'obey' thing a bit of a red herring on this thread? Surely only about 1% of couples (wild unfounded guess) choose to have it in their ceremony. I've certainly never heard it. Similarly with saying 'who gives this woman...' though possibly that's more common.

Of course it's a red herring. A marriage in a register office will not use it at all.
I do not understand moaning over something that need not be said!

But marriage was plainly legally binding before the last 200 years, and there are plainly marriages in other, non-Western societies which have existed for centuries at least.
What am I missing here?

I had a small wedding with my sister, her children and our children. No speeches, no dancing, no nothing. It was 'equal' but equally shite!! I would not have been given away, but I would have liked someone to say I was nice and beautiful!!

You seem to be stressing over some admittedly rather peculiar choices made when the wedding was planned, and extrapolating this into a lifetime of servitude and submission for your friend.
Either your friend made those choices, with her then DF, or she is in an unequal relationship which doesn't allow her to be herself - the two are very different issues, I feel. So are you saying that feel it is the latter?

Sorry, that 'you feel' it is the latter.....

re the speeches, if you follow the trad and have bride's father, best man and groom, then the bride gets 2 people telling everyone how great she is. The groom gets one person telling everyone what a loser he is and about his most embarassing moments.

On that basis, happy to be the bride....it's not like I could have made a speech telling everyone about my personal achievements - much nicer to have someone else do it while I kick back with some champagne and have a good old bask.

I guess my point is that OP, I think you're overhtinking the speech bit.

i got married with just a few people in attendence,my MIL and a few co workers,that was a civil ceremony,i didn't like at all,then we had a church wedding,one of the things i had looked forward to was my daddy walking me down the isle,he was a continent away,i would have wanted to be 'given away' because my dad would have been placing me into the care of one of the most amazing men alive,i thought i didn't want all that to obey and who gives crap,but i missed all of it that day,

However i wrote my own vows and i put to obey,because i am a christian,and the bible says wives should obey their husbands,a verse that has been so misused its impossible to try and explain it,,i think sometimes things are not as they appear to be,i wouldn't let that put me off getting married,when you decided to just make sure you do things your own way,,

Unprune I do not know what happened before the last 200 years in the UK or, indeed, how it is in other countries now, but it does not matter to me as this is the age we are living in now and I think it is fair to say -from an objective view at least- marriage is a legal thing.
They did not ask me if I loved my spouse when I married in the register office. It did not matter to them. All they cared about was:
a, Was it legal for us to marry.
b, Were we doing it of our own free will.

That is why this thread irritates me:
NOBODY who is marrying of their own free will in this country has to say anything other than the simple legal reading at their marriage in a register office.
So why whinge?

IME, a lot of the points people object to (the "obey" bit, father escorting daughter down the aisle, male speeches) are only present in Anglo Saxon Christian services.

At French weddings, barely anyone makes speeches. In Jewish weddings, both parents walk both the bride and the groom down the aisle.

If you don't like it - leave it out of your own wedding if you want to have one, and don't start imposing your own impressions on other people's relationships.

Anyways, back in the day (Medieval period) people could become legally married by just having sex with each other.

But who is whinging?

I agree btw about it being a legal construct but it does go deeper than that culturally, obviously. (Pointless anecdote coming up: we chose the most basic, legally-binding script (the one where you answer yes and yes) for our register office marriage, and the bloody registrar embellished it, requiring us to promise to cherish each other or some shit like that. I could see dh wavering as he was weighing up whether a challenge would be proper, but we burst out laughing instead. Even the people whose job it is to oversee the legal contract couldn't quite manage to stick to the basics: it was bizarre.)

But marantha, your argument makes no sense! You say, 'I don't know and don't care about the historical and traditional meanings of marriage. Therefore, they don't exist. For anyone. I will now define marriage in my own way, and insist that everyone else adopt my definition. Then, I will complain about those who don't.'

I don't understand why you think you have the right to do this. My wedding was rooted in traditions that go back thousands of years. My husband belongs to a religion that sees itself as an unchanged version of the Christianity the disciples learned from Christ. You (and I, actually), don't have to agree with this, but you should understand that for some people, like my husband, that is what marriage is really about. He's just one example: loads of people will feel that for them marriage is not really about the (historically, pretty recent) legal obligations, but about other things.

I don't think that's what Marantha meant at all.

Sorry, I've misunderstood then.

What rubbish, to say that marriage has only existed for 200 years, just because one local, legal adjustment was made law then.

Also, while I fully accept the legal implications of marriage being its main purpose, there is a level of institutional hypocrisy about this, as evinced by the distinction between "visa weddings" and "real weddings". I personally think the distinction is completely spurious - traditionally you could marry for money, you could marry to get a woman into your farm to do the poultry and the kitchen garden (if you're a man), you could marry to get an establishment of your own away from your parents (if you're a woman), or any other thousands of reasons that amounted to finding a willing partner in making a mutually beneficial deal. So why you suddenly can't marry to go and live in another, richer, country, I don't understand.

On another note, weddings are social contracts. People who invite others to their weddings are doing so because the fact of having everyone there when they make their vows means something to them (as lots of people have said on this thread) and therefore when you attend a wedding you are a participant. (In the wedding I went to the other day we were explicit participants in that we were asked to say "we will" support the couple in their marriage. I was very glad to do this.) To have an emotional response to something as important as this, in which I was asked to participate, is quite legitimate. (Not to judge; not to suggest that they should have done it differently; just a personal, involuntary emotional response). To attempt to unpick it and understand it a bit better is in my nature. To express this, is, apparently, unacceptable to many of you. This in itself is very interesting. I am not threatening anything; even if I wanted to, I couldn't change what other people do, or compromise its value, or take it away from anyone. What is so terrible about me, a stranger, writing about unrecognisable strangers, and being upset?

Ok I will admit I am being a bit abrasive but really, you are allowed to have an opinion (which of course you will never ever express to the bride) when you have spent a whole, long day following regimented procedures 4 hours away from home, in the services of this thing called Wedding.
I work full time, I am pregnant, I have an 18 month dd who was not invited and I missed her terribly because it was a Saturday and I hadn't seen her all week, I stood up for hours at a time, ached a lot, and at one point wasn't even allowed to use a lavatory (at 4.30, after the service that started at 1.30) because it was just on the other side of a door we weren't allowed to go through until after the receiving line. None of this would have mattered if I wasn't generally getting slowly sadder and sadder as well. I chose to go, I wanted to celebrate with and for my friend, but when you dedicate a fair bit of your own (limited, for me, at the moment) personal energy into jumping through all these hoops, you are allowed to have feelings about the day.

I agree with that post, vezzie.

I also think that while the legal implications of marriage are important, and for many people the primary reason for marrying, they're just not the focus for some. DH and I, as it happens, had to be married in the registry office because his church won't perform the religious ceremony if the legal contract isn't already in place (this is for immigration reasons - you don't want any confusion over legal status if your church deals largely with foreign nationals). But if we hadn't had to do the legal bit, I doubt we'd have bothered shelling out for it. We'd just have had the religious ceremony.

I had a bit of a salutary moment when I realised that the anti-scarf me, the anti-burqa me, the anti-hijab me, had happily swanned into church to get married wearing a cathedral length veil. Yes, I had covered myself symbolically and not even noticed.

Luckily I am not allowed to be subservient at home.

at boffin.

Well, I am quite happy to cover my head and have no problem with it - but I knew damn well I wasn't wearing a veil! But then I had MN to teach me to think about these things.

Btw, was a cathedral-length veil not incredibly awkward? I would be so nervous about tripping over the thing!

I had bridesmaids to worry about the logistics. I was more worried about looking dreamlike!