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Mawwidge + Squid
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...
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...
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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.