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.

[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.