Hello? People? It's Just One Day out of your whole life

[oursin]

Really, really creepy article in today's Guardian Women's Page on women gearing up for Their Big Day, i.e. wedding.

Okay, given my own marriage issues (I didn't even play weddings or lust for bride dolls as a child), perhaps I am never going to Get It on this kind of thing, but how spooky is it to make all this insane effort for something that is

Comments

[m31andy]

Well there's that old quote (can't remember by whom, though) that marriage is what happens when a couple run out of things to say to each other...

[oursin]

So they decide to have a big wedding, which will give them all these fun topics of discussion?

[m31andy]

Absolutely. Eighteen months of arguing about table settings and hymns. And then, after the event, there's all the arguments about who's fault it was that Uncle Billy got *that* drunk and punched Michael from Accounting in the face.

Would keep a relationship going for years, that.

[oursin]

'There was enough said at our Edie's wedding...'
Longlasting fun for all the family!

[gillo]

I think the wedding is all about Performance - the one time in a girl's life when, however conditioned she is to patriarchal mores, she is not only entitled but expected to take centre stage, to be the focus of attention. Even for a shy, non-performer this is culturally conditioned - hence the whole "best day of your life" thing. And with any performance, "the readiness is all" - she has to do everything in her power to be as perfect, by her own standards and those of her peer group, as she can ever be.

[mrissa]

This comment is probably dead on, and it makes me extremely grateful to come from a family where what the bride is expected to be is a good hostess, and anyone who was heard to wail that it was her special day would immediately be sat on by four aunties and a cousin.

I didn't play weddings or have bride dolls as a kid, either, and while I want to be careful, assuming we manage to have a kid, about not creating forbidden fruit issues, I think there will be a ban on bride dolls for this household's offspring as well. Any child of mine will have better things to dream about.

[gillo]

Good luck with that. It's the ultimate dressing up game - it's either that or a "princess dress", which my six-year-old demanded. She's now 20 and still likes playing "dress-up".

anyone who was heard to wail that it was her special day would immediately be sat on by four aunties and a cousin.

Very much as it should be!

[mrissa]

I object to princess play a good deal less than wedding play, in part because it took an extremely small nudge from my mother to tip my own "princess" into "fairy princess," and once I was a fairy princess, I might as well be a sorceress, which was like a fairy princess but potentially evil if she felt like it. Cue maniacal 4-year-old laughter here. And then you have the rest of my life.

[oursin]

Yes, but if you're writing about the reasons why someone did what they did, and there are copious papers which surely provide significant clues if not outright mission statements en clair, it seems to me massively odd to work from secondary studies which were only skimming what's in the archive.

[oursin]

Some while ago I had a (British) colleague who was RC and intending to save it for the wedding night, and was also doing the obsessive dieting thing.

[heleninwales]

Both my son and my daughter had lived with their respective partners for a couple of years before they got married, so no, the sex part is not so likely to be an issue over here.

Re: random thoughts. better expressed in actual article but argh! must say stuff!

[oursin]

That whole thing about whether they can still fit in to the wedding dress... as if there would ever be any reason to do so.

And these days it's not just the photos, it's the video!

Re: random thoughts. better expressed in actual article but argh! must say stuff!

[moon_custafer]

and in a way the wedding is as much about the endless photos as anything else

That's why we took our own rather than hiring a professional photographer. We'd been to a couple of otherwise-enjoyable weddings in which the first hour of the reception consisted of waiting for the bride and groom to be released from the photo session so we could begin celebrating with them, or where the photographer wandered around trying to set up candid shots by making "humourous" comments like "Pretend you like each other."