The idea of a wedding

Originally posted at The White Mist.

Among our friends and family, marriage and the wedding that formalises it are not de rigeur, nor necessarily the way one would want to define a relationship. Talking to others about our decision to do both has therefore meant some reflection, on top of the reflection that preceded the decision in the first place.

My own thinking about this has been affected by my relationship with my family, particularly my mother’s family. My ancestors were frequently mobile people whose circumstances were at times limited, and whose trace in the historical record is consequently light. Their marriages are the things that have enabled us, when looking, to find them in the archives, to trace where they were, and when, and to infer or imagine a little of what they were like.

Now this is not to say that I am happy to marry because I want to leave an archival trace for any of our descendants, but it is to explain one of the ways in state-legitimated relationships have been of benefit to our family, in ways that the original members would not anticipate. Even to say “of benefit” is to make an assumption, in which we would rather know who our ancestors were and a little of the details of their lives, than know nothing. This may be contrary to their original intentions: my grandfather, for example, knew nothing of his father’s first wife, who died when she was nineteen, even though he had close relationships as a child with his father’s children from his second (or, first, as my grandfather thought) marriage.

In an era when our lives are no longer held in the parish records–baptism, confirmation, marriage, funeral–a formal marriage consigns our trace to the record in a way that neighbourhood life would once have done more regularly. It’s an opportunity that doesn’t extend, as I wish it did, to same-sex couples for whom the civil union (as it does for opposite-sex couples too) is a synonymous equivalent, but it stands in for the forgetfulness of family memory for what we were, and where and with whom.

A wedding is a complex matter in a different way. Many, if not most, aspects of the traditional, which is to say, post-Victorian, hybrid model are not for me. A perusal of plus-size bridal gowns online, for example, gave me actual physical nausea, and even the thought of wearing white puts me in mind of myself as a kind of Death Star of love, orbiting our guests with a cold, avaricious eye, but that does not preclude my enthusiasm for the thought of our dressing up, with the friends and family we love, and being not only lively but also merry at the fact of our commitment. Yet even to make plans for a wedding is to indicate some relationship to those traditions I purport to abhor, so it seems appropriate enough that I explain a little how I think I, as one half of this wedding, fit in to the customs I’m receiving.

This is where my thinking shifts into the visual. I grew up with my mother’s stories about her wedding, and later my grandmother’s. We were fortunate that both marriages were lasting. The people, the planning, the locations, the costumes, each came to form a piece of a family jigsaw and the stories as a whole were each synecdochal of family life.

I find, then, the strongest reason I have for wanting a wedding is to have in turn my own part in that family story, to form a visual succession of my grandmother and my mother before me. I look at the images of their weddings and wish I could shout down time: I’m here, I want to say, and everything turned out okay. My grandparents are both dead now; I loved them dearly and I miss them. How dear now is this wedding day shot: their young and hopeful faces (he twenty-eight, she nineteen), the promises they made and the lives they would lead as a result.

Concerning my parents I don’t yet presume to be so definitive, since they are still well and thriving (even though my father’s beard is not quite so full).

Tagged as: marriage, the white mist, weddings