Mawwidge + Squid

[dmaze]

The wedding yesterday was...amusing. It did not, somewhat to my surprise, involve squid or a Cthulhu summoning. (The bride and groom made sure there weren't candles or a pentagram involved, probably good.) The ceremony as a whole was a lot more believable to me than the preceding (very Catholic) wedding: several of the readings were oriented towards "marriage is hard, but rewarding", there was a cute "attendants put things with Meaning into a box and explain" mechanic, and in general the people who were supposed to Do Things, did things (the role of the outer pair of bridesmaids and groomsmen at the last wedding, from what I could tell, was "appear in pictures and sit at the head table").

But the ceremony started by asking, "why have a public wedding at all? You can express love without doing a wedding, and you can make the commitment without having the elaborate ceremony and party." It's a good question, and one I can't really verbalize an answer for. The ceremony's answer involved asking for community support and celebrating with friends, IIRC, which is an okay answer but not one that really seems to justify the hassle of organizing the whole thing. Still, getting married without a public ceremony feels pretty wrong to me; I just can't explain what's wrong with it...

Comments

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

my reason for wanting a public wedding (someday) is because it's probably the only time in my life I'll have a good enough excuse to throw a big party where I can get some reasonable approximation of all of the people I care about together in one place at the same time. People don't fly cross-country for housewarmings or even graduation parties... but they do for weddings.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Obviously, I'm of limited use here.

I could go on about personal and philosophical reasons why we didn't want to have a wedding or, God help us, a reception. But, really, the most important one is -- it felt right. It's our marriage and our life and we should get to dispose of the symbols in a way that's appropriate to the sort of marriage we have and the sort of people we are. If you've got another way that's more appropriate for you, that's all that really matters; you don't have to be able to articulate it (unless it happens to bug you that you can't ;).

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

For me (and everyone's personal mileage will vary), one reason is that marriage is a big milestone, and it's good to have formal celebrations to fix these milestones both for ourselves and the other people in our lives.

Other people's milestones and how they celebrate them are clearly different than mine - I like weddings, but graduations bore me to tears (including mine). But I know people for whom walking was a direct affirmation of the amount of time and work they spent on their degrees.

[dmaze]

That's an interesting parallel. I definitely felt obligated to walk, and I think the family that came was glad I did. But beyond the thirty seconds of actual fame, that was pretty much it. When I got my M.Eng., I certainly didn't feel compelled to sit in Killian Court for five blistering hours to get another piece of paper, and my parents were definitely just fine with that too. Hmm. Maybe I need a maxsalamander-style first wedding, or something. :-)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Well, there's also the fact that you are more attached to traditions and conventional structures than most geeks I know.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

It did not, somewhat to my surprise, involve squid or a Cthulhu summoning.

The Cthulhu summoning took place later that evening, at the home of the newlyweds, you see...

As for the reason for having a wedding, well, my own wedding was all about my parents showing off how much they could spend on their daughter's wedding, but I suppose that doesn't really address the question...

For me, I guess it boils down to the fact that marriage is a joyous occasion, and people generally like to celebrate joyous occasions with other people. And the more special the event, the bigger the hoopla. So birthdays might get short shrift because they come around once a year, but I have also been to milestone birthday parties that were pretty big. Marriage is (theoretically) a once-in-a-lifetime event, hence the big hoopla.

The other thing is that the celebration is as much for the guests as for the celebrants. I'm always a little disappointed when I find out some friend of mine got married on the sly (yeah, that includes you, ukelele!) because I didn't get the chance to formally wish them well and all.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

:P

...though actually, as I think about it, that's as it should be, too, from my perspective. You are free to informally wish us well :). But neither of us thought there should be any formal emotional spiritual or emotional content to the "wedding" idea -- the "marriage" idea, of course, is soaked with it, but the marriage idea happens continually and was already happening; people who needed to be formally notified to recognize that...were not people who knew us very well. I found in the six months or so after the wedding that I was extremely distressed when people treated us differently on its basis, and that I found my respect for them decreased as I realized how little they understood what was important to me.

Of course, this could be because I am a big weirdo.

But, really, it means it's for your own good that you didn't get that sort of chance ;).

(And it's also what you say -- "the celebration is as much for the guests as for the celebrants" -- well heck, I'm not going to go through tremendous stress and expense to have an event that is nominally about me but actually about other people. If they feel the need for me to have a wedding, they can throw it themselves! They just shouldn't be shocked if I don't show up. ;)

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I will be the first to say that nothing fundamentally changed in my relationship with DH when we got married. On the contrary, our relationship is something that evolves on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis, getting richer and more complex and more satisfying, like a good cheese.

I guess you and I view marriage differently -- to me, getting married was all about changing how others viewed us (most notably my parents). By getting married, we assumed all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges thereof, to go along with the graduation analogy. We could be recognized as a married couple, which society at large treats differently from a non-married couple. I think that's part of why same-sex couples are fighting so hard for the right to get married -- "husband" has very different connotations from "boyfriend" or "SO."

Sorry, I didn't really mean to hijack this post...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I think I view marriage differently from nearly everyone ;). (Except, conveniently, the husband.)

But yes, I was personally offended when people viewed us differently after we had a wedding.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

People change, day by day, evolving from who they were into who they are.

On the other hand, people's views of other people are much more static and lagging, being, as they are, composed of a series of encounters separated by time. I will forever be a little surprised that my younger brother is taller than me, because the last time I *lived* with him, he was eight. Since he's twenty-six now, he's substantially different.

Anyhow, you know what you're like, because you're around you all the time. You know the subtle shifts in your life, when you cross the line from "in love" to "this is the one for forever" - but that could be a lot harder for people who are in less constant communion with you to detect. And even when something's been that way for a while, not everyone goes around updating their internal concept of other people all the time.

A wedding is a good way of announcing "this is who I am, who we are, *now*" - but it doesn't require an implication that yesterday was different.

[dmaze]

I think I'm fairly clear that, if I ever have a wedding, it's not all about my parents taking over the world. I've thought a little about how to keep the guest list under control, while still bringing everyone I want, and when that includes 29 of my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, first cousins, spouses, attachments, and offspring thereof, whom I kind of feel obligated to drag in, it's a hard problem.

(And now I'm having thoughts of having the Big Wedding, in Las Vegas, with strippers and an Elvis impersonator. Bad thoughts, but thoughts nevertheless.)

I know a couple of people who have eloped. warlord_mit's wedding seemed to observe the proper forms, with a nice dress, pretty pictures, and a formal announcement (though that only being sent after the actual wedding had happened). There was ukelele's, which I missed. Umm...were there others?