So I’m aware that I’ve been remiss in my duties here – it’s been well over a month since I posted. The reason for that is kind of my thoughts for this week’s blog. My husband and I had our wedding ceremony on Lughnasadh, and the two months prior ate up all of my free time. I failed to comprehend just how much work goes into planning something like that! I feel like my life hasn’t actually managed to recover yet – work went crazy while I was gone, and my husband and I didn’t have much time to take care of the house during those months, so we’re still recovering from oodles of mess.
My post today is kind of a strange one, I think. Because of my life craziness, I don’t have the time to do a well-researched post, but I want to talk a bit about marriage because of the events in my personal life coinciding with the repeal on Proposition 8. That’s where I’m headed with this post: my thoughts on the institution of marriage. But first, a bit of history for me and my husband.
We decided to get married in May of 2009. We found a beautiful location up in the mountains, close to home, and we put down a deposit. We started making plans and putting down more deposits. And then several months later we realized that we were going to be moving so he could return to finish up his bachelor’s degree. I had always wanted a Lughnasadh wedding. In Ireland, Lughnasadh was the time of year when anything relating to legality was dealt with, and I wanted to say my vows in front of friends, family, and gods on Lughnasadh in honor of that history and tradition.
But we found out that insurance through my husband’s school sucked. It was horrible. So we needed to get him on my insurance several months after open enrollment. Which meant a change of status – and the easiest way was to document marriage. So six months before the wedding we signed our paperwork, I changed my name, and then I had to deal with all the crap from my extended family (“if you’re already married, why have the ceremony?”).
Marriage became split for me, and I had to spend a lot of time thinking about the different aspects of it. The legal bit was very important. But it was only half of the process. The religious side was vital to me, even if our ceremony was only ten minutes long. Standing up there, hearing our officiant invoke our gods, and knowing that we were making our vows before everyone and everything important to us – I can’t express how important that was. As a heathen, the making of an oath is done before friends, family, and gods, and this was the most important oath of my life to date.
Shortly after we got back, I got wind of Prop 8. And I cheered like mad. Then I heard that Mexico City is ordering the entire country to recognize any marriage performed there, hetero- or homo- sexual in nature. And again, I cheered like mad. Iceland has legalized gay marriage, too.
Because what I learned during my marriage fiasco is that marriage is important legally and spiritually. I love the family I was born into, don’t get me wrong, but I want my spouse to be able to make important decisions if I’m incapable of making them. I want him authorizing medical procedures or financial procedures because I have chosen him to trust with those important decisions. Marriage – and love, in my opinion – isn’t bound by gender, nor should it be. It’s about individual people, oathing to take care of each other financially, emotionally, medically, physically, spiritually. And if the state can’t recognize that it’s about the people involved in the relationship, gay or straight, two or three or twenty people, the state is trying to determine for those people what is right and who can take care of you. They’re forcing that decision to be out of the control of the people, and rewarding what they think of as “correct” behavior. And we’re in a much more modern time, where people think for themselves and act for themselves. Let them marry as they will, so long as they uphold the oaths they make to each other.
As a side note, here are the vows my husband and I made to each other:
Do you promise to be a good spouse? Do you promise to display courage, truth, honor, frith, discipline, hospitality, self-reliance, industriousness, and perseverance in your marriage? Do you promise to challenge x and help him grow?
We are one when together
We are one when parted
We share all
We will raise warriors*
*These four lines I can attribute to Karen Traviss. They’re the Mandalorian wedding vows, and we felt the need to incorporate them into our wedding. It was partly honoring the ethics we both hold dear and partly playing on our geekish love of Star Wars.
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Congratuations on having an open Pagan wedding. Mine was Beltane 1995.
It grits my teeth when people say same-sex marriage changes the definition of marriage. Wrong; it changes the scope of marriage. If it didn’t keep the definition the same, it would not be sought.
The following article I was pointed at today tells some interesting facts about what some of the actual “traditions” of weddings and marriage were, and about how recently in history some of what the Religious Reich is claiming to be “Traditional Marriage” were created.
Traditional Marriage Perverts the Tradition of Marriage
http://archielevine.blogspot.com/2008/11/traditional-marriage-perve...
by Jeff Goode (Californian)
I get a 404 error on that link, Ananta.
Traditional Marriage Perverts the Tradition of Marriage
http://archielevine.blogspot.com/2008/11/traditional-marriage-perverts-tradition.html
by Jeff Goode (Californian)
About a decade ago, as a young playwright, I was hired to write a script for the Renaissance Festival of Kansas City. It was a period piece about knights and jousts and intrigues of the court, building up to a lavish royal wedding between a prince and a princess, restoring peace to the troubled land.
This was one of my first professional writing assignments, so I was really excited about doing all the research and making sure that everything was historically accurate, especially the royal wedding which needed to follow all the traditions exactly.
Over a summer of research, I learned a lot of surprising facts about the history of marriage and weddings, but by far the most shocking discovery of all was that the tradition of marriage-as-we-know-it simply did not exist in those days. Almost everything we have come to associate with marriage and weddings — the white dress, the holy vows, the fancy cake and the birdseed — dates back a mere 50 or 100 years at the most. In many cases less.
And the handful of traditions that do go back farther than that are, frankly, horrifying. The tossing of the garter, for example, evolved from a 14th Century tradition of ripping the clothing off of the bride’s body as she left the ceremony in order to “loosen her up” for the wedding night. Wedding guests fought over the choicest bits of undergarment, with the garter being the greatest prize.
Savvy brides got in the habit of carrying extra garters in their bodice to throw to the male guests in hopes of escaping the ceremony with some shred of modesty intact!
It turns out that marriage, in days of old, was a barbaric custom which was little more than a crude exchange of livestock at its most civilized, and a little less than ritualized abduction at its worst. That’s why you’ll find no reference to white weddings in the Bible, or the union of one man and one woman. Because up until fairly recently, there was nothing religious about it.
You will of course find plenty of biblical bigamy, practiced by even the most godly of heroes — Noah, Abraham, David, Solomon — because that’s what marriage was in those days. Even in more enlightened New Testament times, the only wedding worth mentioning (the one at Cana) is notable only for the miraculous amount of wine consumed.
In the 21st Century, we’ve heard a lot about the sanctity of marriage, as if that were something that has been around forever, but in reality the phrase was invented in 2004. Google it for yourself and see if you can find a single reference to the “sanctity of marriage” before the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized same-sex unions in that state. The proverbial Sanctity of Marriage sprang into being because opponents of gay marriage needed a logical reason to overturn an established legal precedent. And the only thing that trumps the Constitution is God himself.
Unfortunately, God is still pretty new to the whole marriage game (or he might have made an honest woman out of the Virgin Mary, am I right? Try the veal!)
The truth is that marriage has always been more a secular tradition rather than a religious one. Up until the early Renaissance, in fact, couples were traditionally married on the church’s front doorstep, because wedding ceremonies were considered too vulgar to be performed inside the building: After all, there was implied sex in the vows and shameless public displays of affection. No clergyman in his right mind would have allowed such an unholy abomination on the premises.
But as times changed, ideas and attitudes about marriage also changed. So when people became religious, matrimony became holy. When people became nudists, clothing became optional. And so on throughout history.
And the wonderful thing about the institution of marriage — the reason it has remained strong and relevant through thousands of years of ever-changing times — is its unique ability to change with those times.
Marriage is, and always has been, a constantly evolving tradition that never fails to incorporate the latest shifts in culture and climate, changing social habits, fashions and even fads. (Because, seriously, that chicken dance is not in the Bible.)
Thus, in the 1800s when the sole purpose of marriage was procreation and housekeeping, marriage between an older man and a hard-working tween girl was considered perfectly normal. Today we call it pedophilia.
For thousands of years marriage was essentially a business transaction between the parents of the bride and groom. But in the last century or so, we’ve finally seen the triumph of this new-fangled notion that marriage should be about a loving relationship between two consenting adults.
Followers of the Mormon faith can tell you that the traditions of their forefathers included a devout belief that polygamy was appropriate and sanctified. But modern Mormons generally don’t support that vision of happiness for their daughters.
And during the Civil Rights era, when opponents of interracial marriage tried to pass laws making such couples illegal, we came to realize that they, too, were wrong in trying to redefine marriage to prevent those newfound relationships.
Always marriage has triumphed by becoming a timely celebration of our society, rather than a backlash against it. It’s strange, then, to see “tradition” used as a weapon against change, when change is the source of all its greatest traditions.
?
Just ask the white dress: In 1840, Queen Victoria of England married Prince Albert wearing a beautiful white lace dress — in defiance of tradition — in order to promote the sale of English lace! The image was so powerful that practically overnight the white wedding gown became de rigueur for the well-heeled bride. And then it became de rigueur for every bride.??
By the dawn of the 20th Century, the white dress had also inexplicably come to symbolize chastity. (Even though blue was traditionally the color of virginity — “something borrowed, something blue…”)??
And the new equation of white with virginity eventually achieved such a rigid orthodoxy that older readers may remember a time when wedding guests who happened to know that the bride was not perfectly pure would have felt a moral obligation to demand that she change into something off-white before walking down the aisle.??
Fortunately, as cultural norms eased during the Sexual Revolution, a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy took hold where all brides were required to wear white regardless of their virtue and the less said about it the better.??
In recent years, as a generation of divorcees have remarried and a generation of young people have entered wedlock with some degree of “experience”, the pretense of a connection between literal virginity and the bridal gown has become entirely obsolete. A colorful journey for a custom which has always seemed iron clad, even as it was evolving over time.??
And not all traditions have to do with changing sexual standards. The long-time custom of pelting the newlyweds with birdseed did not exist before the 1970s when animal-lovers realized that songbirds were bloating on dried rice that they found on the ground after the former custom.??
Economic times have caused families to rethink the age-old convention of the bride’s father paying for the entire ceremony — a last vestige of the days of dowries when a young man had to be bribed to take a free-loading daughter off her parents’ hands — that well-established custom has gradually given way to a more humane approach to sharing the financial burden.??
Even religious traditions of marriage have experienced constant metamorphosis over the years. As more interfaith couples have wed, we have seen the emergence of multi-disciplinary ceremonies where couples have chosen not to follow the out-dated tradition of rejecting one or both of their faiths as a prerequisite of holy matrimony.??
One of the most beautiful weddings I ever attended was between a young Jewish fellow and his Catholic fiancé, whose mother was born in France. The ceremony was performed by both a rabbi and a priest with intertwining vows in English, Latin, Hebrew and French. A perfect expression of the union of their two families, yet one which would have been unthinkable just a generation before.??
But, again, marriage has such a long history of changing with the ever-changing times, that the last thing we should expect from it is to stop growing and changing. We know today that marriage is not a rote ritual handed down by God to Adam & Eve and preserved verbatim for thousands of years. It is, rather, an expression of how each community, each culture, and each faith, chooses to celebrate the joining of loved ones who have decided to make a life together.??
Christians do not expect Jesus to be central to a Buddhist wedding, nor do Jews refuse to acknowledge Lutheran unions because they didn’t include a reading from the Torah. Marriage is what we each make of it. And that’s the way it always should be.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the traditional marriage argument is that it seeks to preserve a singular tradition that has, in fact, never existed at any point in history.?? Because, honestly, which traditional definition of marriage do we want our Constitution to protect?
??
• The one from Book of Genesis when family values meant multiple wives and concubines?
?
• Or the marriages of the Middle Ages when women were traded like cattle and weddings were too bawdy for church?
• Since this is America, should we preserve marriage as it existed in 1776 when arranged marriages were still commonplace?
• Or the traditions of 1850 when California became a state and marriage was customarily between one man and one woman-or-girl of age 11 and up?
• Or are we really seeking to protect a more modern vision of traditional marriage, say from the 1950s when it was illegal for whites to wed blacks or Hispanics?
• Or the traditional marriage of the late 1960s when couples were routinely excommunicated for marrying outside their faith???
No, the truth of the matter is, that we’re trying to preserve traditional marriage the way it “was and always has been” during a very narrow period in the late 70s / early 80s – just before most of us found out that gays even existed: Between one man and one woman of legal age and willing consent. Regardless of race or religion (within reason). Plus the chicken dance and the birdseed. Those are okay.?
But there’s something profoundly disturbing about amending the Constitution to define anything about the 1970s as “the way God intended it.”
Wonderful screed!
nice article.
Hi Laura and CONGRATZ!
I hope your wedding was everything you wanted and more!
My husband and I have been together for over 14 years now, 12 of which we’ve been legally wed. We met on NYE, ’95 and have been an immediate, exclusive item since. But, because both of us wanted to make sure we wouldn’t split up right away, we waited 2-1/2 years before marrying.
We went for the quickie downtown courthouse wedding, as neither of us could justify dropping money on anything lavish, and I think Ron didn’t want to jinx anything. I /did/ have a pretty black dress though, with lace and sequins, even though the dog destroyed it shortly afterward. (And why black? Because I love black, and I hate white and anything pastel. That, and hey- we had a 6yo standing right there. Who was I kidding?! LOL!)
So with that said, believe me when I say I love hearing people think things through! I think you two will do just fine together! Just remember to dedicate some time to yourselves every single day, even if it’s just a peck on the cheek in the morning to wish each other a good day. Never take each other for granted, but don’t expect a Harlequin novel. Even when you feel like shit and feeling grumpy as hell, thank your partner for being there for you. Appreciate the little things. And, most importantly, you can never thank someone enough!!!