Getting Married Phase 3: Deconstructing the Wedding

Filed Under gender, heteropatriarchy, life changes, love, plans, questions

And now the Donut Husband (DH) becomes the Legal Husband (LH) Last Friday afternoon, the DH and I went to the courthouse to sign marriage papers in front of a judge. The next morning I left on a road trip to the California Redwoods with two female friends, returning home very late last night. He spent the weekend fixing computers, writing documentation, watching Heroes, and hanging out with our friends.

Our original wedding date was August 31, 2008. So what happened? In my earlier post on this topic, Getting Married Phase 2: Why Am I Doing This? I tried to look at why we were even getting married at all. I was asking questions along the lines of how would our relationship change once we went from “just” living together to being married? Now I’m chronicling a key decision we made: to separate the wedding event from the legal marriage.

About a month ago, we decided to do the legal thing sooner rather than later. The DH still wanted to “seal the deal” with me, and I was still trying to figure out ways to avoid becoming a Bride-zilla.* At the same time, P. Lutus’s essay had made a deep impression on me, particularly his comment that “people often forget that they will have to build the thing (a human relationship) after achieving the symbol for the thing (marriage).”

We had to do some hard thinking about what we wanted the wedding to be. Was it to be a moment of triumph: a culmination of multiple years of dating and living together, and trying each other out? I was surprised to learn from the DH that when he’d asked me to marry him, it wasn’t so that we could “see” if we wanted to be married! He already considered us married, in a sense. I was so accustomed to seeing engagement treated and portrayed as a sort of incubation period, during which the couple becomes accustomed to the idea of being married, and decides if they really want to do it! This was not the case for us.

The DH and I came to the conclusion that we wanted our wedding to be a highly festive gathering of family and friends, at which time we publicly declared our love for and lifelong commitment to each other; on this occasion we would combine new rituals and familiar traditions that symbolized our particular journey (already in progress) as a couple.

With the wedding event now stripped to its fundamental purpose, it became apparent that there were some things that just didn’t need to happen there - like becoming legally married. I’d been very worried that I would become emotionally overwhelmed (and subsequently depressed) with planning the wedding. Past experience + my recent readings of statistics and human behavioral studies suggested that the likelihood of this happening was high. It was important that I not conflate the stressful experience of planning a big event like this with being a wife.

We agreed to make it extremely clear in our own minds that the success of the wedding had nothing to do with the success of the marriage. The experience of signing our legal papers a year before the “big day” has already given us breathing room. While we spend the next year continuing to lay the foundation of our marriage, we can plan a wedding event that celebrates how far we’ve come and the distance we have yet to go.

I’m not sure yet what our one year anniversary wedding ceremony extravaganza will look like (or even what it will be called), but so far it look as though a few things will be missing: no bride will be given away by her parents (if anything, his parents should be transferring him to me), no registry for household items (we should do a reverse registry for all the stuff we don’t need!), no wedding party divided by sex (does he not have female allies? do I not have male allies?). We’ve also been having a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for things that, in our current time and place, would really demonstrate our commitment, e.g. exchanging of computer passwords, public joining of cell phone plans, and a promise to share rollover minutes. Just kidding! (I think.)

Stay tuned!

Bridezilla (a portmanteau of bride* and Godzilla) is a generic term used to describe a difficult, unpleasant, perfectionist bride who leaves aggravated family, friends and bridal vendors in her wake. A bridezilla is obsessed with her wedding as her perfect day and will disregard the feelings of the family, bridesmaids and even her groom in her quest for the perfect wedding. [from Wikipedia]

Comments

6 Responses to “Getting Married Phase 3: Deconstructing the Wedding”

Scott Wells (Boy in the Bands) on September 5th, 2007 1:32 pm

Well, whatever happens next year, congratulations now too.
Jess on September 5th, 2007 7:42 pm

Congratulations!

And a word on gender-divided wedding party — next Spring, I will be my bro-in-law’s Best Lady. And I’ve seen weddings with both sexes on both sides. So, while still technically unconventional, this is not unheard of.
hafidha sofia on September 5th, 2007 7:47 pm

The first time I saw this was at the wedding of Joseph Santos Lyons; his best “man” was his long time friend, Laurel (who is about to pop out a baby, and definitely not a man).
hafidha on September 6th, 2007 11:06 pm

Thanks, Scott and Jess!
Elandria Williams on September 7th, 2007 1:34 pm

Congratulations. I have been thinking about wedding parties and realized that I have only been to one wedding where the sides were not split up. What seems to happen more or less is that the sides are split up according to gender but they are friends or family of both parties no matter what the side. I think that the whole idea is archaeic (sp) and a little ridiculous.

Amen for the none bridezilla wedding. the happy part about having friends and family who either get married really late, don’t really believe in marriage or at least the whole ceremony thing in an old fashioned sense is that they are not completely tied to the whole fairy tale make believe event.

Yea for ya’ll
claire on September 7th, 2007 2:35 pm

one thing you’re doing to make your wedding easier than mine was is *not* moving several thousand miles within 3 weeks of the wedding! one thing i did do to make things easier was not have a wedding party at all. no bridesmaids, groomsmen, or stress about what they should wear and whose responsibility is whose. we knew who our friends were and those who wanted to/could help out with little and big things did so, whether we asked or not.

anyway, enough about my wedding! this is about you two!

legalizing early is a great idea and eliminates another step from the bridezilla potential.

you two rock and i can’t wait to meet michael one of these days!