When we started wedding planning, Matt and I signed up on one of those wedding-planning-helper websites. (The Knot, if you care, although I can’t imagine why you would.) It’s been helpful–it’s got a guest-list database for us to use, and a checklist that reminds us when we’re supposed to do all of those eight million things you apparently need to do, and vendor recommendations and stuff. It’s also got a little dashboard thinger that pops up at the bottom of the page every time you go there, and the little dashboard thinger has a countdown, how many days to the wedding. When that number was, say, 258, that was kind of fun. When the countdown ticker says, as it does today, 17 days, it’s not kind of fun anymore. I love weddings, I think I’m going to love my wedding, and I even enjoy the clockwork-building puzzle-solving nature of putting together a big event like this. That said, I’m done. I am officially tired of being in the “getting married” phase. I just want to have the party, see my friends, marry my guy, be done with it.
If you’re me, by which I mean if you’re an over-analytical habitually-introspective active feminist in her mid-thirties living in the heart of urban American privilege, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance attached to getting married. There are so many things about this process that I have trouble with that I find myself stumbling and freezing up when I try talking about any of it. I am troubled by the ritualized consumerism, the systematic gender essentialism, the weird infantilization of women that seems built in to the process–why do all of the wedding websites and vendors and references insist on calling the women in the wedding party “the girls” or “the maids”? My “maids” are all grown damn women. (And then there’s the disturbing intersections between these factors–to take but one of many possible examples, there’s practically a cottage industry grown up around encouraging brides to buy “Daddy’s Little Girl”-themed gifts to give to their fathers on the day of the wedding.)
And underlying all of this is the marriage equality problem. The basic injustice of this, of all of this, stays with me. My anger and frustration and sadness over the state of marriage rights in this country is like a toxin that’s seeped into the groundwater of this wedding-planning process, curdling some of the joy that this marriage brings me. I have no answer, no remedy. All I have is the knowledge that by getting married I’m making myself complicit in this problem.
I don’t know where to go from here. There’s still so much joy, so much fun, so much I’m looking forward to. The tensions and frustrations and cognitive dissonance are there, but the good parts are there as well. It’s going to be a beautiful day, and our guests are going to have fun, and I think we’re going to have fun too. I just kind of want to be done with the checklists and the details and the dissonance. I want to get on to the part where my friends and family listen to pretty music and eat tasty food and smile a lot.
Posted Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 6:41 am. Filed under: Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
My “maids” are all grown damn women.
*ahem*
:)
Oh, you know what I mean. But that’s one more part of the problem–the systematic assumption that Matt’s closest friends are all men and my closest friends are all women. Not to mention the genteel horror expressed at the dress shop over the fact that I’m not dictating shoe-heel-height and hairstyle to the women.
I had that problem too with the brides maid stuff. So I just called them my side of the bridal party as my Maid of Honor was a man.
Make sure to sleep as much as you can before the wedding as I was completely tired by the time the party came around and I don’t remember a big portion of it. Thank goodness for photos.
Grats again! It’ll be a great time.
Yeah, and the kicker is, the marriage equality thing would help to fix it: I didn’t really feel GOOD about my wedding until several years later, when I went to my lesbian friends’ Quick-Get-Married-Before-Prop-8-Passes shotgun wedding. And there they were, these two women who had be so uncomfortable with all the gender assumptions inherent in my wedding, flipping out in spite of themselves over dresses and tux fittings and meals and decor and flowers and cakes. It was truly, wonderfully liberating.
and re: genteel horror: I told my bridal party I couldn’t be bothered to pick out dresses or color schemes, and they should each just wear whatever they liked, as long as it was dressy and they could afford it until I paid them back. It worked out in the end, but two of the three women initially reacted as if I’d told them to find the cutest kittens available at the local animal shelter and hurl them out of attic windows.