Two Weddings
Q. A young couple who lived together for a year and then were married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse have just—six months later— issued invitations to a large, formal church wedding and all of the additional traditional accompaniments—rehearsal dinner, reception at the country club, etc. They are being advised and encouraged by their parents, who should know better. I am only a friend, but it hurts to hear the critical, and sometimes cruel, comments being made about this plan. Many people treat it as a joke, or say it is just a way to get the presents not received after the private civil ceremony. Are two such weddings proper? It seems odd to me. Perhaps I am way behind the times.
A. Miss Ultimate Wedding, too, finds it is extremely odd that the wedding, as a social event, has become increasingly divorced, if one may use that term, from the actual marriage ceremony. What your friends did is not unique. Weddings are commonly being held now for already-married couples, with various explanations. If it is during the first year, they say that the necessity of having the actual ceremony earlier (more usually for reasons of taxes than pregnancy, which seems to be no longer in the urgent category) didn't give them time to plan the party. If it is even longer after that, they say that the original wedding wasn't the wedding of their dreams, or, if it was, that they want to renew this dream.
Miss Ultimate Wedding can understand the ceremonial yearning, if you will. But the idea of satisfying it totally aside from the reality of the sacred and legal union at the heart of it gives the couple a sort of unpleasant air of entitlement. Surely, the sentiment connected with the real exchange of vows ought to be powerful enough to remain unique, however simply it was done, and whatever festive parties are later given in celebration of it.
In other words, there is nothing wrong with a newly married couple giving a later reception or dinner, however formal they wish it to be, or for a couple married longer to have a fancy anniversary party. Of course they want to celebrate their marriage with family and friends in an elaborate way.
When guests find that they have been invited to a wedding that turns out to be only a reenactment, they do feel that some sort of fraud is being perpetrated. Mind you, Miss Ultimate Wedding does not approve of such carping. Those who are fond of the couple should participate in what is offered and those who are not should politely decline. But she does understand why they do not feel the same solemnity that they do about witnessing two people actually joining themselves in marriage.
Gay Wedding Etiquette
Q. My wife and I have been invited to the Episcopal commitment ceremony of a male couple. I work with one of the gentlemen and my wife and I have entertained the couple many times over the years. We are honored to witness the union of these fine people, but are unsure of the etiquette surrounding a same-sex ceremony. Specifically, are gifts expected? Where does one sit? Are grade-school-age children permitted? My wife suggests that when in doubt, we defer to the etiquette of traditional weddings. Is this advised?
A. As this ceremony is intended to simulate a wedding, you would do well to follow your wife's suggestion of following the etiquette observed at weddings. Since weddings are public ceremonies, the first rule is not to get too interested in the sexual angle. So stop worrying about which is the bride's side and which the bridegroom's. Besides, as you are friends of both, it wouldn't matter. Sit where an usher indicates or where you find places.
One should never bring uninvited guests anywhere. If your children were not invited, they should not attend, no matter what their age. No one is ever supposed to expect presents, although Miss Ultimate Wedding has heard enough of such expectations to last a lifetime. But as these people are your friends, she imagines you will want to send them something to commemorate the occasion.
The Mock Wedding
Q. My daughter and her fiance are planning a public "ceremony" with family and close friends in attendance, at which time they will share their vows of love and commitment for one another. They do not plan to legally wed.
What is the procedure in this situation—how is the announcement/invitation worded? Are showers/gifts appropriate? I am totally in the dark on this one. Any light you can shed would be gratefully received.
A. Goodness gracious, if these people haven't gone and reinvented the mock wedding! Miss Ultimate Wedding has always said that if you live long enough, you will see everything come back into fashion, no matter how foolish.
The mock wedding was a staple of nineteenth-century melodrama, although its antecedents are more ancient. Traditionally, it was planned by the bridegroom, with the aid of some rascally friends, in order to delude the bride into thinking she had been legally wed. The custom was for the bridegroom to point out to her shortly afterward— sometimes the next morning—that she was not and to bid her adieu. Showers, gifts, invitations, and announcements were all unnecessary.
When the bride is in on the planning, as in this case, the mock wedding seems to lose its point. Why simulate a wedding in order to have two people announce in public that they are in love? Can't they just carve their initials on a tree like everyone else?
The Repeat Wedding
There seem to be an increasing number of people around who want to have second weddings without all the fuss and expense of divorce. So they are staging repeat weddings, in which, as long-married couples, they "renew" or "reaffirm" their wedding vows, with varying amounts of bridal trimming.
Considering the state of marriage nowadays, Miss Ultimate Wedding would like to congratulate these couples. She would also like to inject a note of caution about their desire to elicit more than congratulations from their friends.
An established married couple should not lightly ask others to shower them with bridal honors—as opposed simply to attending an anniversary party—just because they have lived happily ever after. That is, after all, what they promised to do the first time.
It may not seem fair that those who stage repeated weddings with different partners have glutted the market, but the patience of potential wedding guests has been sorely tried. At the very least, a repeat wedding should be a decent interval after the original one—preferably measured in quarters of centuries.
The rule about inviting people to wedding renewals is the opposite of that for first weddings: At first weddings, the more elaborate the arrangements, the more people you can invite. At repeats, one's entire circle of friends can be invited to a party given after the simple participation in a religious service, or during which the vows are just spoken, almost as if the couple were toasting each other.
If there is to be a serious restaging, only people who are very closely and dearly attached to the couple, such as their descendants, the original bridal party, and really intimate friends, should be expected to think them charming in their original wedding clothes—or the outfits they had always wanted but couldn't afford when they were young.
This brings Miss Ultimate Wedding to the motivation for restaging a wedding, when one can have all the festivities of a celebration without the ceremonial repetition. She supposes that the most endearing reason for wanting a repeat wedding is to act on the lovely sentiment of "I'd marry you all over again today." After all, most people married that long were married in an era when one had to take a leap of faith without knowing the other person's daily household habits. Another reason may be that a couple had omitted the religious ceremony, which they now want to celebrate. Miss Ultimate Wedding can also imagine that couples whose wedding vows got damaged and then repaired might crave a formal fresh start.
Miss Ultimate Wedding is aware that she antagonizes people by her lack of enthusiasm for the newly popular renewal-of-vows ceremonies, in a time when congratulations seem in order for every week that a married couple actually manages to stay married. But however often wedding vows are broken, they are still serious vows, made for the length of life itself. They are not limited business contracts, with options to renew every year. To remake an eternal vow after only one year seems to make a joke out of the permanence that the marriage vow states.
Miss Ultimate Wedding should not have to caution decent people that one does not have a repeat wedding as a fund-raising drive for one's favorite cause—such as a trip one could not otherwise afford to take, or a pension to continue the marriage. She does have to warn those who are properly horrified that the event might be taken for such that there is only one correct way to head off making guests feel obligated to send presents for an announced repeat wedding or anniversary party and that is to issue party invitations—formal or informal—without telling people in advance what the occasion is. They will be pleasantly surprised when they get there, and will keep murmuring, "I wish I'd known—I would have liked to get you something," but that is not to be taken literally.
The Fifty-Year-Old Wedding
Q. My parents did not have a traditional wedding, since they eloped, and therefore my mother wants as many of the trappings of a regular wedding as she can get for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Their plans include having six of the youngest grandchildren (age four to twelve) walk up the aisle, dressed in coordinating, but not matching, outfits. She'd like my sister, my brother and me walking up the aisle in procession, but I felt that our position in the front pew and participating in a reading during the Mass would be more appropriate. When she started talking about whether her original maid of honor or I, as elder daughter, should "stand for her" I began to think this has gone too far. My dad has just asked my brother to "stand for him" as his original best man is deceased.
I understand my mother's motivation, but I'd like to know how one draws the line in good taste between what's appropriate for a Golden Anniversary and what's just plain silly—as is my mother's hinting at wearing a veil. I don't want to begrudge my parents their legitimate cause to celebrate, but even my father has begun to wonder what is appropriate here.
A. After many years in this trade, Miss Ultimate Wedding is only now beginning to realize the hold the ritual of the formal wedding has over the American female imagination. Rather than being merely one ceremonial choice among many proper and traditional choices of styles in which to be married, the formal wedding is thought of, obsessively, as an entitlement. Not only do those who were unable to be married formally seem to count this as a permanent lack in their lives, but those who made another deliberate choice—who eloped or married informally because that is what they wanted at the time—also feel that the world owes them a formal wedding.
So here we have your mother, after fifty years of successful marriage, out to collect her place in a ritual to which she believes every lady who marries is entitled. And she is far from alone in this yearning. Superfluous wedding ceremonies on the part of people who are already married are becoming astonishingly common.
The formal wedding ceremony presupposed a young lady, shyly veiled and surrounded by her girlhood friends, going from her father's household to her bridegroom's. While we retain an affection for these forms, to make them apply to obviously independent ladies, there is such a thing as stretching it too far.
Like you, Miss Ultimate Wedding finds your mother's hopes slightly ridiculous. The bathos of a respectable older lady publicly revealing her dream of appearing as a young bride, is bound to seem foolish, however touching it may also be.
There is, then, a trade-off between pleasing your mother and subjecting her to ridicule. The family should try to gauge whether this event will be taken in a sympathetic spirit by those whom they propose to invite. Meanwhile, Miss Ultimate Wedding is thinking of revoking new couples' freedom to declare that they don't want any wedding fuss and to be married without such trappings. It creates too much trouble for the rest of us later on down, the line. Then, too, people who underwent elaborate weddings seem to have acquired some sense of proportion about it all: Many of them claim that they wished they had eloped.
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