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    5

    Getting Married Phase 3: Deconstructing the Wedding

    Filed Under gender, heteropatriarchy, life changes, love, plans, questions | 6 Comments

    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]

    Popularity: 26% [?]

    Jul

    21

    Blasted Out Of Innocence, Part 2 (Sex Ed in the Early Ages)

    Filed Under current affairs, education, gender, health, heteropatriarchy | 1 Comment

    At one point during the O’Reilly interview, Rev. Haffner brought up the recent Catholic sex abuse settlement case as an example of why children need to learn about their bodies from a young age. O’Reilly seemed to dismiss this on the basis that the victims involved were in their early teens.

    This alarmed me. As Rev. Haffner had pointed out at the beginning, early childhood sex ed is about laying a foundation for future, more comprehensive education. If children aren’t being taught from the get-go that it’s okay to even say certain words, when will they ever develop the comfort level to discuss sexuality? During adolescence - perhaps the most awkward stage of life?

    As a child reared in a very religious home, I never, ever used words like sex or penis. I was in my early 20s before I even pronounced the word rape. I When I would see a news story about a woman being raped, and wanted to talk about that with someone else, I’d say the woman was assaulted, attacked, or - if I was really shaken up - violated. I remember being so embarrassed about sexuality that between the ages of 12 and 15, I didn’t get any new underwear. The ones I had were practically reduced to shreds by washing and drying, but I couldn’t bring myself to let my mother know that I needed *gulp* panties.

    And I didn’t come from a particularly repressive family; I just never had the opportunity to use words expressing sexual concepts at all - in positive or negative contexts.

    Certainly, I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell my parents about the sexual abuse I witnessed happening to some of my friends. When I wanted to avoid going over to one friend’s house in particular because of the things her brother did, I would feign illness or become sullen; my parents, not knowing what was going on, would become irritated with me.

    Are children who are taught sex education from a young age better equipped to protect themselves and advocate for themselves during and after dangerous situations? I’d like to know this. If the evidence says yes, perhaps more parents, teachers and other concerned adults can view sex education as being a matter of physical and mental/emotional health.

    Popularity: 24% [?]

    Jul

    18

    Getting Married Phase 2: Why Am I Doing This?

    Filed Under gender, heteropatriarchy, life changes, love, questions, quotes | 4 Comments

    All this talk about the theology of marriage has me thinking about my own impending (is this the right word?) marriage.

    Why get married? I could easily answer that: Michael and I love each other, and want to, as he put it, “Walk on the path of life together.” Of course, we could do that without being wedded. Marriage is a way of saying to our friends and family, “Hey ya’ll, we’re serious about this thing! You don’t have to worry about us anymore!”

    But I think the real reasons we’re getting married are

    I never wrote the entry about Phase 1 of Getting Married (subtitled I’m Gonna Be Bona-Fide), but if I had it would have reflected on how the (much appreciated) post-proposal kudos and congratulations I received made me feel, the barrage of questions about the wedding, and how Michael started opening serious discussions about our relationship with, “Now that we’re going to be married, we really need to work on ….”

    But we’re already on to Phase 2, so I’ll stick with that for the moment. Now that I know the reasons we’re getting married, what does that mean? Does why a couple gets married have any bearing on the marriage (to be distinguished from the wedding) at all? Will we be doing anything differently day-to-day than what we’re doing now?

    A year ago if you’d ask me if I’d live together with a man before marrying him I’d have said “Uhh, NO!” But here we are. Part of the reason I was so adamant against the notion of living with my future husband before the wedding was because I wanted a clear marker between “not being married” and “being married.” To me, “being married” meant things like moving in together, sharing finances, planning for the future together, etc. So much for that. Yesterday we were at the bank, opening up joint checking and savings accounts so that I can put us on a “budget.”

    Without those kind of clear differences, it’s hard to anticipate what will change. Given that our relationship is getting progressively stronger, it seems likely that our public vows will bring us closer together, just as the engagement and getting our own place has done.

    In his thoughtful article, How We Confuse Symbols & Things P. Lutus writes,

    Marriage was originally conceived (no pun intended) as a way to signal the presence of a special bond between two people. At that time, marriage had no special significance itself, it was merely a social signaling device, and to some extent it also represented a contract with mutual obligations . In those times marriage stood as a mere symbol for something of actual substance — a relationship between people that would have existed whether or not the symbol of marriage was also present.

    For my part, I feel very comfortable with this notion of marriage. I want to avoid seeing marriage as a status, even as I try to avoid feeling “engaged” is some sort of status. It just feels wrong, especially as most of my friends are neither engaged nor married. This can be hard, though, especially when that perception comes from other people. It’s also confused by the fact that I’m an older young adult who feels apprehension about “outgrowing” certain things. Is getting married and “settling down” going to mean isolation from my friends? Do I have to go out and find “couple friends” now? *sigh* These kinds of questions are thankfully already being addressed by other women, such as at indiebride.com, which was suggested to me by a long-distance UU friend.

    I guess, to wrap this up (rather weakly), I would say that I want my marriage to be a continuation of what Michael and I already started. Michael half jokes that he needs the marriage to feel secure that I won’t leave him (!), and I guess I intend to use the fact that we’re married as an inverted force field for when the going gets rough. But even then, the power in marriage is in what it symbolizes. We, the people who will be getting married, get to decide what it actually is.

    Popularity: 26% [?]

    Dec

    18

    Progress (?) for the Islamic Society of North America

    Filed Under gender, islam | 6 Comments

    I read today that in August of 2006, Dr. Ingrid Mattson was the first woman elected as President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). But what really took me by surprise - but not really - was that she is also the first native-born North American, and the first Muslim convert to hold that position.

    ISNA was established in 1963, so it’s been a long time coming! I have to say that even ten years ago, it didn’t seem like this was about to happen any time in the foreseeable future. While I think it’s a step in the right direction, I also shake my head at the fact that it’s taken 43 years.

    Popularity: 11% [?]

    Nov

    16

    Speaking Engagements

    Filed Under being creative, events, gender, uu culture | 2 Comments

    I finally checked my mail today and found a letter informing me that my proposal for the 26th Annual Lewis & Clark Gender Studies Symposium had been accepted. I wonder if they accept all proposals because the acceptance letter came very quickly. I presented there once before, in 2004, with other students from a class at Marylhurst University. In that case, my professor had submitted the proposal so it was a slightly foreign process to me this time around.

    I had to look it up, but the name of the panel session from 2004 was Writing Our Other(ness): Memoir as Response to Intersections of Race and Gender in African-American Autobiography! I’m always amused at how academics have such long explanations for what they’re talking about; that one is no exception, and yet it really was a good description of what our papers were about. My piece was called The Title Goes Right Here, because I really didn’t know what to call it at the time the proposal went in. I meant to change it later but forgot, and that’s how it was printed up.

    The title of the piece I’m going to write for this upcoming Symposium is The Only Sane One in the House, and it’s a personal essay about how my grandmother, my mother and I have each come to find our “voices” within our families and respective communities.

    It will be interesting to check in mid-December to see who I am grouped with for the moderated panel discussion. The major speakers for the Symposium this year are very exciting and I’m looking forward to attending as much of the conference as possible.

    **
    I’m scheduled to present a sermon at a UU church in Seattle this January, and have been bouncing around ideas for some time now. This is very hard. I’ve never written a sermon before, and have no interest in being a minister. What’s more, this is a congregation I don’t know. What do I even have to say to these, particular people? I agreed to do this because it frightened me, and I wanted to do more things that induced fear in me. Now I’m not afraid of being awful or offending anyone - but of being irrelevant. Fortunately, I have a contact from there so I can probably work with him to get a better sense of the congregation’s sensibilities.

    All of that was to say that I want to write something about voices for that event, too. What does it mean to come to something with your whole heart, for example? How can we stop being afraid? How do we derive our own truths and speak them? I’m not a wise person, or very learned, so I hope I don’t come off as telling people what to do. The Sunday I will be delivering this topic is during the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, so it goes without saying that he will be part of the sermon. This whole issue of speaking up, and holding yourself responsible for living in accordance with your beliefs is at the forefront of my mind these days. Well, we shall see.

    Popularity: 10% [?]

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