Shameless Wife


Now that our house is finally coming together, it’s time for our next big project – to begin to wedding plan in earnest (again). We’ve toyed with sticking with the Mexico idea, with eloping to Costa Rica or City Hall, with having an immediate-family-only wedding, with having a larger wedding here in Cali and in all our discussions the underlying question has been identifying what a wedding would mean to us. We both have a very clear idea what our marriage will mean because we have spent a lot of time talking about it and preparing for it, but a wedding?

I am not one of the those women who has spent my whole life planning wedding details. I thought I would be lucky if I could find a man who could keep up with me and I’ve always wanted a family but the wedding part just didn’t cross my mind.

So it’s been difficult for us to get motivated about planning because in all honesty, it just doesn’t sound like any fun. Steve would rather be on his bike than calling caterers and I would rather be taking pictures than dealing with equipment rentals and we want to be married, but don’t really want to deal with all the stuff that comes with it.

I believe traditions can be truly sacred, but in order to have meaning, they have to resonate and for me? Most wedding traditions just don’t. Traditional vows just don’t begin to cover the marriage we plan to build and I know that anyone giving me away would feel infantalizing and the bouquet toss would feel awkward (I cringe at the implication that every woman is just itching to marry), and the registering rather presumptuous and we couldn’t even figure out what wedding cakes are supposed to symbolize (in case you are curious, a quick google search led me to this. An excerpt: The groom would eat part of a loaf of barley bread baked especially for the nuptials and break the rest over his bride’s head. History tells us that breaking the bread symbolized the breaking of the bride’s virginal state and the subsequent dominance of the groom over her.).

I just wasn’t feeling it, which made me not excited, which made wedding planning feel like a such a chore. And yet without those traditions to string together the fabric of the day, what would a wedding be? If we were to eschew all the trappings that are expected, what would we be left with?

This is a question we have grappled with often on Sunday mornings. One of us will say, we really should start some wedding planning today, and the other would say totally, and then we’d go eat some scones at the coffee shop and go for a bike ride instead. And then we talk about eloping over dinner because wouldn’t you rather spend our savings on a trip to Asia, but something about that never sits quite right either.

And then last weekend we went to a beautiful beach wedding, the first Steve has been to since he was in his early teens, and the first I’ve been to since I was 18 and it was joyous and it hit us smack in the head. We shook the sand out of our shoes and held hands on our rather tipsy walk to the B&B and confessed to each other that yes we really do want a wedding after all.

Of course, of course weddings are not about the trappings or the traditions. It doesn’t matter that I don’t care about any of that because (despite what the wedding-industrial complex would like me to believe) those things don’t make a wedding, and they certainly don’t make a marriage. Our wedding at its core will be about all the things we hold dearest – celebrating the coming together of our families and the beautiful community we have found. It will be about affirming and celebrating our partnership with the support of those we love. It will be about joy and dancing until our legs feel like jelly.

And so I think we will have a wedding after all. Thoughtful ritual has an important place in our culture and in our lives, and we can honor it while remembering that everything else is truly just details. And all of the pieces and traditions that don’t resonate just won’t be present and that will make some people uncomfortable, and that just has to be okay. We’ll let go of all of the things we “have to” do and start from scratch and I am confident we’ll end up with a day that is meaningful and that reflects both our values and our lives, and that? that makes me very excited.