Wedding preparations
We are going to a family wedding in a few weeks. Weddings are becoming more and more frustrating for me. This is not because I don’t wish the couples well or I resent helping re-equip the houses of people who’ve lived together for years and earn more than I do, but because at every wedding we attend, I and my ‘Significant Other’ are beleaguered by people asking us when we are going to tie the knot ourselves.
Weddings are quite possibly the least appropriate time to ask this question. For one, I never know how to respond appropriately. Do I brush the question aside (as I usually do) or just be honest and risk offending the asker?
I have been thinking that the time has come to be honest. It’s that or people continuing to ask the same question for the next 20 years. So I am going to throw caution to the wind, come out on this blog and rehearse my response.
Initial short answer:
‘We are not getting married because we don’t want to. We don’t really think that it’s right for us.’
Longer answer for more persistent, curious people:
‘We’ve decided not to get married for various reasons.
- We don’t particularly feel that we need to have our relationship either recognised or validated by the state.
- We are not religious so we don’t really need the church involved either.
- The marriage ceremony is fundamentally sexist. If marriage is based on equality, then why is the actual ceremony full of old-fashioned traditions like the couple being pronounced ‘man and wife’? Why is it still traditional for the father to hand over his daughter to her husband to be? Why does society only ‘permit’ a woman to ask a man to marry her on one day in every four years?
- The high divorce rate makes a mockery of marriage. We can’t understand how a piece of paper and a public declaration of love make someone else’s relationship any more secure than ours.
- Marriage for us is not a romantic concept at all. It’s an economic transaction and it always has been. Why dress it up as anything else? [Sadly this last point will probably get us in the end if anything does. The one real reason to get married, particularly since we don't want children, is tax benefits.]
Defensive, angsty answer for after I’ve had a few drinks:
‘We just don’t want to get married ok. Why are you even asking – why did you get married? Do you honestly think that I would want to dress up like a pavlova anyway?’
Somehow I don’t think that Grandma is going to respond well to any of these…
March 10th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I find questions like that incredibly impertinent (the other one that needles is ‘why haven’t you had any kids, and hadn’t you better get on with it?’), and make a point of never, EVER asking them…these issues are (quite rightly) completely subjectively decided and therefore should not be up for judgement or comment. But, all too often, people love a good ‘judge’, don’t they?
March 10th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
The funny thing about the ‘When are you going to get married?’ question and indeed its ’sibling’ question ‘When are you going to have children?’ are that they are almost always asked in a ‘judging’ kind of way. And if it’s not judging it’s pitying (you wouldn’t believe how many people kindly reminded me that this year is a leap year as though I was being strung along by a lazy man who just hadn’t got round to it yet).
Thankfully though, more and more people are just starting to write me off as the weirdo of the family…
March 18th, 2008 at 3:52 am
oh my God. I can’t tell you how much I agree with this. Perfectly put. Especially the pavlova bit.
I have to confess to a slight weakness though. I don’t want to do the wedding / marriage thing AT ALL despite heaps of nagging from all and sundry but i am a bit insulted that I’ve never been asked by anyone to marry them. You know, that my life partner could have put in a bit of an effort to the relationship dynamic. Even big bossy bogans like my SIL have been asked – More Than Once I might add.
I’m a friend of Alison’s by the way. Hi.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Hello Stomper Girl and welcome. You’ve no idea how pleased I am that someone else agrees with me and has publically admitted it. I was a bit nervous about even writing this post as people just naturally intend to take issue or see it as a personal attack, so thanks! And do we have the same SIL?!