Wedding Fever

Let the wedding season begin! 

The summer that stretches in front of me will be punctuated by weekends away celebrating love and watching friends launch off the platform of happiness, hope, friends and family. 

Last weekend I was in Dorset for a very English wedding in the sun and rain with too much booze and the traditional trio of men giving speeches. 

Although fewer and fewer people marry now, for those that do, we are starting to reinvent these rituals and traditions.  We reinvent them when we make the myriad miniscule decisions from what to wear (does the bride wear white as a symbol of a new start rather than virginity, and is the groom formal? Can a guest wear white?), to where they marry (in a church because it’s a religious ritual, or because it symbolises your childhood community or tradition, or in a registry office or a field), whether the groom wears a ring (to symbolise equality? – both wear rings), who gives a speech, whether you ‘cut the cake’, whether the bride and groom stay apart the night before and leave on the night of the wedding. Each small decision and big decision – what vows are said, religious or atheist ceremony – is shaping the ritual and its meaning.

I think rituals can have a transformative power, not just for those directly involved, but for everyone there. They mark passages of time, they bond those there and they collectively reinforce values. So if you marry in a church you are probably consciously or unconsciously reinforcing your traditional values. A wedding creates a public space where your community comes together. When your community is fragmented, online, global, not just where you live and grew up, this is a modern way of creating a community in the physical, binding you to it, and giving it a part in supporting your relationship.

But it’s not about the hype and madness of a ‘fairytale wedding’ that will somehow magically transform your relationship into one of perfect romance. If we reinvent the ritual to symbolise crazy feats of perfection where the bride has to look the best she ever will and is treated like a princess, what does that symbolise? The more ‘perfect’ the wedding, aesthetically and materially, the more perfect will be your marriage. I prefer the story of friends of ours who married with two week’s notice in Mexico with a handful of friends and family, found a band on the street, asked a local family to cook the food and off they went. The focus became the excitement of life after the spontaneous romance. 

Marriage should be liberation, setting you free to live your life with someone who loves and supports you, setting off on an adventure together, not ‘settling down’. And the weddings that reflects that are the most inspiring and the ones you most enjoy

Mind you, our wedding was a drunken festival so I’m not sure what that symbolises for our married life.