I've never seen the point of weddings, especially the big fancy ones costing tens of thousands. All the traditions around them like black cats, something old, something new something borrowed and something blue, the ride and groom not seeing them until the ceremoney and the groom not being allowed to see the wedding dress, all that stuff. Let alone the embarassment of having to do it all IN PUBLIC!
It's odd, I can give lectures, talks and do public speaking fine, I'm in professional mode, I'm prepared and know my stuff, but something unscripted like a wedding and I have a melt down. I hate being the centre of attention for something I've not studied and worked for. I've not been to many weddings, I think I went to one before my own, so it was all unfamiliar territory for me, it was a small do and we dispensed with as much as we possibly could, but people got upset. I think it was mostly his family that got upset because they do big family events with all the extended family and everything, it was in a registry office, not a church, I didn't have a "proper" dress or ring, no photographs, I had to tell my new brother in law that when I said no photographs that meant his too.
Being married didn't feel any different to having lived together, in fact nothing felt different, it just seemed to cause more disagreements, I refused to be addressed as Mrs and that caused arguments as its legality, many people think it's a legal requirement for a woman to change her name and it isn't. For me the best bit about getting married was getting divorced.
I wanted to get married, love being married, was happy that my wife was happy.
But I found the day itself very tough - I was in constant fight or flight (it's always flight for me!), but was simultaneously overjoyed to see how much my wife was in her element. My face actually hurt from all the smiling that I had to do.
Wedding is a very public thing for the community as much as anything else. A marriage is something everyone in the community is meant to know about and still having a public ceremony to declare that someone is married serves the function of announcing the marriage to the community. It also helps act as a guarantor of the marriages taking place freely without any kind of undue duress or coercion. The community can see there isn’t a shotgun held behind anybody when it’s happening.
A lot of the traditions around the weddings come from the functions used to perform. So like having a best man; The thing that he’s meant to be best at fighting. Because weddings tended to get interrupted by angry family members who want to stop them. In mediaeval times the church said people get to choose who they marry but parents often think they ought to be able to decide who the children married. So having a good fighter there to deal with people storming the wedding was a good idea.
I would argue even bridesmaids have a kind of community function. You are showcasing the eligible young women still available in the community. Weddings draw a lot of people together. And it puts the young men in the community in The right headspace to think about who they might want to marry. Literally putting the eligible young women upfront in a uniform to mark them out is quite useful. Although my understanding is that the tradition of having bridesmaids wear the same dresses is relatively recent.
The father giving the bride away also makes a lot of sense he’s paid for the wedding, traditionally, and up until this point he would probably have paid all of her living expenses. any money she made would probably have gone straight to him because women didn’t really have professionals outside of their family homes. So in a sense he is handing over his financial obligation to support his daughter to somebody else.
some of these traditions like having a best man and the father giving away the bride don’t really make sense anymore. Some of them like having bridesmaids are actually quite useful, except these days generally they’re not ‘maids’. You get quite a few married bridesmaids.
but I still think in general the idea of a wedding being an event for the community collectively still makes a lot of sense.
Being married to my wife is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I love being married, its everything I ever dreamed it would be.
However, I disliked much of my wedding day. I hated the idea of having a wedding and a lot of it felt like an ordeal I had to get through rather than something to enjoy. I didn't understand why I had to wear a shirt and tie and invite all these people and have it so public. Me and my wife initially wanted to just elope and get married in a registry office up north with no one there and no fuss but we bowed to societal pressure in the end
A lot of these traditions make no sense and also the social occasions that come with them are extremely overwhelming
Yes it is possible to have a cheaper wedding! And to pick and choose which traditions to bother with or not. We saved money by hiring the local church hall not a posh hotel, and doing the decor ourselves with help from friends and family, letting the church ladies do the flowers in the church and various other ways. Our wedding was lovely, personal to us and not overly expensive. My cousin got married the same year as me, but chose to save money by limiting who got invited, which is another approach.
I'm not generally a ceremony person either, but weddings aren't just about one person. Mostly the couple, but also to some level the family and friends depending on how close one is to them. And if they have a religious faith that can be an important aspect. I agree in not understanding why anyone would bankrupt themselves on fancy crap for a single day when it is not that hard to have a lovely wedding on a small budget. I could have done it on a smaller budget too if my parents had wanted to spend less.
I was not bothered about how many people were there as I have done academic talks and performed music in front of more people, which was scarier. Poor husband had to take max dose of imodium though! Even though he had also done drama to try and overcome fear of audiences, but he never managed to shake that fear.
As for where traditions start, you have studied history and stuff, people have always marked transitions, birth, death, coming of age, marriage etc. Not everyone probably feels the need, but enough people find them important to mark by doing something. Many of the traditions will also be marking tribal identity too. I don't know specifically where ours all come from, not looked into it, it might be interesting, but I have other things I am more interested in at the moment.
I thought it was Queen Victoria who started the tradition for brides wearing white, before that many people married in other colours.
Not all marriages were arranged ones, only those for people of a higher social status, us peasants married where we pleased, sometimes for love and sometimes because interests coincided, sometimes for companionship.
The church didn't have weddings as we think of them for quite some centuries, people were married at the church door or porch not inside and the words of the "traditional" marriage vows were written by a monk.
I didn't have any of that stuff when I got married and even by the time of the ceremony I was fed up with managing the expectations of others.
I'm phobic of weddings I'd never marry again and I won't go to anybody elses wedding either.
Something old/new/borrowed/blue - a tradition based on an Old English rhyme that dates back to 19th-century Lancashire: "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, a sixpence in your shoe." The belief was that if the bride carries each of these items as she walks down the aisle, she will enjoy a successful and happy marriage.
Brides wearing white dates back thousands of years and this verse explains why: “Married in white, you will have chosen all right. Married in grey, you will go far away. Married in black, you will wish yourself back. Married in red, you’ll wish yourself dead. Married in blue, you will always be true. Married in pearl, you’ll live in a whirl. Married in green, ashamed to be seen. Married in yellow, ashamed of the fellow. Married in brown, you’ll live out of town. Married in pink, your spirits will sink.”
Veils: The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that a bride needed to wear a veil to make her less susceptible to the curses and hexes of jealous witches and evil spirits who wanted to steal her happiness. Once her face was obscured, so too were their vexes.
But you can marry without bankrupting yourself. I don't get all the traditions around weddings, where did they all come from and how did they start?
I'm not a ceremonial person, I can't be doing with to much ritual and as I say doing it in public makes my skin crawl.
There are lots of things I value, but I don't feel the need to have a ceremony about them.
Same reason for any kind of ceremony. To honour something you value.
Tradition is the social glue that helps hold a culture together. Over time these traditions can change as our cultures evolve. For example, it used to be the norm as late as the 1950's for men to wear hats whenever they went outside. If meeting a woman, they were expected to doff their hats. There was an entire etiquette built around the wearing of hats, such as removing a hat when one entered a building.
I don't see weddings as being any different. A wedding is a social celebration of the union of two people. As you have already noted, a wedding is filled with all sorts of traditions.
Our world is full of all sorts of traditions such as the shaking of hands when strangers meet, the western tradition of putting up Christmas trees, and exchanging gifts during holidays. The Chinese for example exchange gifts during their Lunar New Year. In the western hemisphere we tend to exchange gifts during Christmas. The Muslims exchange gifts during two of their holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.
Different cultures have different traditions. The Chinese hand out red envelopes filled with money for participants who attend a funeral. They also wear white instead of black at their funerals. Asians in general believe in taking their shoes off when entering a home. The Bedouin tend to eat from a common platter, using onlythe three middle fingers of right hands to scoop up food, It is absolutely forbidden to use the left hand because in the Bedouin culture, this hand is used for wiping one's self after having used the bathroom. In the Ashanti culture, a newborn is carried by his mother on her back throughout their village. The mother is then given gifts and money.
While laws provide the legal structural framework of our respective societies, cultural traditions provide norm referenced guidelines for our behavior and help with defining how we interact with others.
