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

[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.