Monday, July 25, 2016

Getting married!

When I first met VOMD he told me that he would never get married. If he did, it would not be with a ceremony and signing papers and matching wedding bands. I liked the idea of marriage; I'm not too hot on the religious aspects, but the idea of binding yourself to someone in front of your friends and families, and signing your name next to theirs in a big book full of other people who also bound themselves to their partners seemed romantic.

Here we are a little more than 2 years later and we are 32 days out from our wedding day with the ceremony and the signing papers, and guess what...we even have matching wedding bands. And I don't think that either of us could imagine it any other way.

All that said, though, there is a part of me who has been thinking about what marriage means, and then this other part of me is worrying that I am thinking too much about what marriage means. Because, really, who gives a shit what marriage means to anyone else? To me it means committing to spend the rest of my life with the most fun, kind, passionate and wonderful man I have ever met

But it does matter what it means to everyone else. An amazing, intelligent and insightful friend told me this weekend that she, while she is married, refuses to be addressed as Mrs. I had never considered the significance of the concept of Mrs. She explained what the concept of Mrs. implies. You are a Miss. You are unmarried, and potentially threatening to married women as a potential target for some philandering man. As a Miss you belong to your parents. As a Mrs. you belong to your husband.

Boys and men are all Mister, because they belong to themselves.

Connected to this disturbing realization is my discomfort with the more traditional aspects of the wedding ceremony we are about to take part in. My father will walk me down the aisle and give me away. VOMD will receive me. The implication of my beautiful engagement ring, and the wedding band which matches is, is that it demonstrates that I am soon to belong to him. I wear it on a specific finger so that others can see that I am not available for courtship. Did you know that the Romans used wedding rings to denote ownership? I guess we still sort of do that.

More than this, though, is the realization that to our more traditional family members marriage means that we are about to be bound in "holy"matrimony, and that I will be bound to VOMD to honor and obey him until one of us dies. To them, we will no longer be living in sin. To them, we will be allowed to have children, because it will finally be acceptable for us to have sex.

To us, it means we get to share our commitment to each other with one another and our loved ones.

But it comes with lots of baggage.



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