[image from flickr]
I was recently talking to someone who ‘doesn’t get the whole wedding thing’. It was an exasperated: ‘WHY? Can you please tell me WHY? WHY do people bother? I JUST DON’T GET IT!’
It was in interesting excercise in getting me to articulate aloud the reasons I do want to get married.
My fiance and I have been together a long time. By the time we marry, we’ll have been together for eight years, and spent six of those years living together. Amongst our circle of friends, getting married isn’t automatically assumed as the done thing. Marriage is something that has become increasingly recognised as a personal choice of the couple rather than a social expectation. And living together without being married is considered the norm rather than ‘living in sin’!
From the outside, I guess it’s like we have been like a married couple for years now. So why bother legalising it? Will ‘having a piece of paper’ make any difference?
For me, I don’t see getting married as being just about getting that piece of paper. I do feel there has been a shift of mentality for us since getting engaged. And despite being together for a long time before we got engaged, I do remember that after the initial tears of happiness at getting engaged, we sat on the couch together, clutching hands with an expression of slight terror of our faces feeling this was an enormous step into the abyss we were taking together. Like, we were deciding to be grown ups, get married, have children and do all the things adults do!
But when questioned WHY I want to get married and why it means so much to me… and my idea of a good marriage, my mind drifted to friends whose relationships I admire and am inspired by. I have some dear friends who have married in the past couple of years and have seen how becoming married really has transformed their relationships and it indeed did make a difference. I see the way their faces light up and the joy they take in calling each other “husband” and “wife” and how their bond has noticeably strengthened since they tied the knot.
When we were thinking about what kind of wedding we want to have, AA said “I don’t just want it to be a celebration of what we have, I want it to mark the start of something NEW” and I guess that’s the thing for us. We could just continue living together, have children together, and be with one another for the rest of our lives without getting married. There’s nothing stopping us from doing that.
When I explained this, the response was “Oh ok, I can kind of get that now. It’s like a punctuation” and I guess perhaps that’s one way of describing it. To me, getting married isn’t so much the ’signing the piece of paper’. The important part to me is the wedding ceremony – it feels like an incredible powerful and symbolic ritual. It’s calling upon our dearest friends and family to witness us make lifelong vows to each other, and to hold us and support us in those vows. This ceremony will be something I will feel much more bound by than a piece of paper.
And that is why AA and I want to write our ceremony from scratch and have it “officiated” by someone we know rather than a stranger who is a celebrant. For this reason we have decided that a couple of days before our ‘wedding day’ we will go to the registry office with our parents to sign the legal documents to make us husband and wife before the law. We will not exchange rings but just say the words and sign the documents that make it all legit. But on our wedding day in front of our closest ones, we are going to have a friend lead a ceremony that we have written together and is most meaningful to us. It isn’t the traditional way of doing things but we feel is the best and most honest way for us to express our vows.
I’d love to hear from anyone else whose been put on the spot, to articulate their own reasons for getting married!
I feel that I get questioned about decision to marry quite a lot..
I usually just tell people its because it feels right for us and leave it at that
To us getting married is a big commitment, one made even more significant because we will be making it in front of our family and friends.
Its an important step for us, as individuals and as a couple.
I think people who say “its just a peice of paper” know in their heart of hearts its more than that.
I know marriage isnt for everyone, but I suspect people usually have other reasons for not doing it than ‘the bother’
wow – i have a lot to say about this! especially since we married relatively young and fairly soon into our relationship. people look to me as if i hold the key to getting their long term boyfriend to marry them and i just look at them, eyes pleading with them “don’t ask me that – i never had a wedding scrapbook. i never even envisioned getting married. it was just a nice idea!” people ask ‘why’ and i guess i say ‘why not’. and i’m a child of divorced parents and my husband is a child of hippies that ran away and had kids in a commune. so our families didn’t really understand it at all! i didn’t even feel all grown up doing it. it just felt really natural. and because neither of us pinned a lifelong dream of ‘getting married’ on the whole concept and day it was just really ‘organic’ y’know? i found the most challenging part was working out the whole concept of wow, our families are blended and we are starting our own history/family here. it was challenging becoming a ‘daughter in law’. and now, after 2 years of marriage, i can still say i think it’s a piece of paper. only because it is not this piece of paper that will ensure we remain respectful and loving towards each other. that, at the end of the day, is up to us!!!! happy organising!
Hi there, just stumbled across your blog today! This is a great post & I was nodding along the whole way through.
We’re getting hitched in 5 weeks, after being together for 17 years. I’d say the most common response from people has been “are you pregnant”. I have found it quite frustrating at times. A few times (after I’ve said no, i’m not pregnant) I’ve been asked why bother. I usually reply why not? or we decided it was time.
I’ve not had to strongly justify our choice. For us it was a (long) natural progression. There was no proposal, just a joint decision that it was time. For me it has always been about the public declaration of my/our commitment to our relationship (not the piece of paper).
I certainly agree that our relationship has become much stronger since deciding to marry; we’ve been more supportive of each other as well.
Great post. I love the idea of marriage being a punctuation.
I think going through the ritual of a wedding does change a relationship for the better.
Luckily Mr B’s Aunt can marry us – I didn’t like the idea of a stranger either. Your idea of getting the legal part done and then having someone important to you do the ceremony is wonderful.
This is a very good question.
There are so many things going on with a marriage, some of which I am not able to articulate.
For me getting married did two obvious things – made a lifetime commitment, and involved our friends and community in supporting our lifetime commitment.
Our wedding was a promise that neither of us will ever have to wonder if this fight or issue we’re having will break us up, because we’ve promised to love and forgive. It also opened the door to a level of intimacy and trust that I had not realised existed until I was in the middle of it – and realised it was what was necessary to *make sure* that fights and ‘issues’ wont break us up, to make sure that we keep our promise. No one wants to hear from or tell their partner in love that they worry they made a mistake marrying them, or that they are attracted to someone else, but for us, we have to tell each other these things and deal with them together, or else we risk not being able to keep our vows or our love. I didn’t experience this kind of depth of relationship until we had a marriage, and I didn’t even realise I didn’t have it. (Your milage may vary!)
Secondly, by ‘having a wedding’, which is not necessary to get married, I made the commitment in front of friends and family, I made myself accountable to them for keeping my promise, and I enlisted their support in keeping my promise. You can never have too many people on your side.
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This is really lovely. I like this explanation. It really does summarize what this is all about. Making these public vows does really seem like a huge game changer, no?
I just wrote about this, but I think you captured it better