We went to a family wedding recently and the first words I heard after the ceremony were from my brother-in-law, who turned to us and said:
“Well, that was the antithesis of your wedding.”
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Sometimes, both beforehand in the planning process and afterwards in the bliss of newly-weddedness, you forget how GAY your wedding was. Maybe it’s that I haven’t been to many weddings, or that everything about my life has always been fairly non-traditional, or that when I started planning my own wedding I stuck to non-traditional resources like the many queer and quirky blogs and online communities that provided inspiration, excitement, and support for any kind of crazy wedding you could dream up, but I started to feel like my own wedding wasn’t really anything much out of the ordinary.
Then I went to a Southern Methodist wedding in Alabama, and I was like “Oh yeah… this is what wedding means to a lot of people.”
Their wedding was as traditional as it could be (in specifically a white, upper-middle class, Protestant sense). This was especially true of how gendered it was, on the part of every family member involved. To me this served as a reminder that “man and wife” really is inseparable from the idea of marriage for so many people. In the ceremony there was a lot of talk about God’s plan for marriage, and I imagine it all rang true for just about every other guest there. I should mention that their wedding was lovely, we had a fantastic time, and it was so great to be a part of their celebration. But it was an interesting occasion for me to reflect on the institution that queer marriage is really standing within, outside of, alongside, and against.
And I have to admit that a little part of me felt very distant from the idea of marriage that was being played out there that day.
If you’ve followed any of my own wedding planning or recaps here then you’ll know that while I’ve spoke some about my reservations about the institution of marriage and how it fits into my own queer life, I’ve not delved into it in great detail. I’ve fretted, worried, and over-thought it plenty on my own, but when it comes to writing here I often just assume everyone is on the same page. And maybe that’s true, but maybe it’s not. Being queer you spend so much time experiencing the world from skewed angles, oftentimes from a very outsider perspective – you learn pretty early on that a lot of what is going on doesn’t apply to you. But that becomes your norm and you don’t notice it as much, and when it comes to getting married… over-analyzing every inch of your wedding from that perspective gets to be too much. Mostly because marriage itself is built on a foundation of gender, religion, family, home economics, and social structures – all the things that are experienced and lived differently as a queer person. So as great as the queer and quirky blogs are for making you feel simultaneously like your wedding is a unique and precious little snowflake and that you have a community to which you and your marriage belong… we don’t have the shorthand of centuries deep tradition as a, quite literal, equalizer.
So are we on the same page? as each other? as straight marrying couples? More importantly, do we need to be on the same page? Maybe not, but wasn’t that the purpose served by marriage – an established and recognizable institution that was legally and socially upheld for the benefit not only of the parties involved but also for the community to which they belong? Maybe we are on the same page, maybe “love” is the page. Or just two people shacking up and calling themselves a family is the page. The couple whose traditional wedding we just attended had attended our wedding 5 months earlier, and after seeing their wedding I have to wonder “What must they have thought of our wedding?” How do they relate to our experience of wedding, of marriage?
As the first wedding we went to since our own, it was definitely a big contrast. Was it, as my brother-in-law said, the antithesis of ours? Word-for-word, definitely. In sentiment, not really. Will it be true of our marriages? I don’t think so. But what’s interesting is that in the family they’re like our straight couple counterpart: the same age as us, married around the same time, we’ll probably have kids around the same time… we’re going to have a lifetime to watch our two little families grow inside of the bigger extended family, and I’m curious to see the similarities and differences that will surface specifically out of our queerness.
Love that you wrote this!!
Getting married in rural California, after so much planning, I REALLY had to remind myself that Alex and I weren’t ‘normal’–It kept completing escaping my mind!!!
“Being queer you spend so much time experiencing the world from skewed angles, oftentimes from a very outsider perspective – you learn pretty early on that a lot of what is going on doesn’t apply to you. ”
I think you have hit it right on the head with this statement. I have been struggling often with the idea of sameness. On one hand, I have always cherished the idea of being an individual. But, at the same time, I feel the need for everyone that is important to me to see my wedding as a “real wedding”. I do not want my wedding to feel like a sham in any way. I struggle to stay true to us as a couple, while still including enough tradition to keep a sense of “marriage” about the day. Though our state will not recognize us as married when we come home, we will still know that our being “different” is now something special.
[...] ‘different!’ (Kind of like when Mandy was reminded that a family wedding was the ‘antithesis‘ of hers…)I think maybe it started as a serious joke. Something I said in passing to [...]