Why Have a Wedding?

They're expensive, stressful, and onerous -- and sometimes, they're worth it.

Photo by Al Elmes on Unsplash

Congratulations to all of you for making it nearly to the end of Wedding Season, which in the US runs roughly from Memorial Day weekend through October 31. If you are a reasonably social person of a certain age — in your 20s if you’re in the south or the midwest, your 30s if you’re on the liberal coasts — your summer and fall weekends are likely dotted with wedding celebrations of many kinds. Maybe you are like me and you find these events delightful and touching. Maybe you are grouchier and find them overly demanding but decide to attend anyway, or maybe they’re less fun if you are feeling less than great about your own love life. Maybe you feel, as a lot of people do, that weddings are a waste: More about a party than a marriage; a pricey show, when that money could be better spent on, say, a down payment on a house.

Here’s a perhaps surprising view from a feminist who is at best ambivalent about marriage as a useful mechanism for social organization: Have a wedding.

That comes with some caveats. Can’t afford any kind of wedding without pulling money from something much more crucial? Don’t have a wedding. Hate big group events? Don’t have a wedding. Object to the entire concept of weddings? Don’t have a wedding. Really don’t want to plan a wedding? Don’t have a wedding. Aren’t getting married? Then you probably shouldn’t have a wedding.

But you should still throw a party.

You should celebrate the big, important moments in your life and your loved ones’ lives. You should gather those around you, including those who aren’t your very best friends and those who you would invite primarily out of obligation. You should show those people you care for them in ways big and small, and you should reflect on what these relationships mean and how you want to show up to them. And when you gather with your loved ones and even your obligation-driven ones, you should all share a meal and you should refill everyone’s wine glasses and you should say thank you and you should definitely dance too enthusiastically. There are so precious few times in our brief existence when we get to gather our most-loved people and our longest-known people in one place for collective celebration and collective joy. Weddings are one of them.

Do I wish that there were other socially-sanctioned excuses for getting everyone you love together in one place? Absolutely. Is it totally weird that marriage — less a personal achievement than a matter of luck and straightforward decision-making — is one of them? Also yes. But so much of what socially connects us is on the decline. We are more connected online, but far less so in person. Long-standing institutions that were home for in-person gathering — churches, centers of civic life — are shuttering, often because these same spaces brought with them exclusion and hierarchy and abuse of power. Space for connective and collective ritual, especially across generations, is waning. Weddings offer us a place to come back together, to gather in community support for a couple we all love (or at least tangentially know and wish the best for), and to reflect on some core lessons: The importance of carefully tending to our relationships, whether those are romantic or platonic or familial; the perpetual tick-on of time and changes it brings; the unmatched ecstasy of collective joy.

When else do we invite just about everyone we care about and / or have known for a long time to gather in one place? For me, not very often. I assume the next time will be at my funeral. And I don’t think I’ll enjoy that quite as much (I hope no one else does, either).

We are increasingly lonely people. Fewer of us are married, which can be both good and bad: Good if it means greater freedom from patriarchal constraints (which it does) and the advent of new ways of relationship- and community-building (which it does for some, but doesn’t for most); bad if it means less connection and a more solitary life. And broadly, Americans are living less connected and more solitary lives. Nearly half of Americans say they have three or fewer friends. One in five has one or none. A different poll found that 22% of Millennials say they have no friends at all.

And even those of us with friends, partners, and / or children are spending much, much more time alone, a trend that pre-dated the Covid pandemic but was badly exacerbated by it. The time that Americans used to spend with friends didn’t get transferred over to other loved ones, like spouses or kids. It just went to solo time.

A big part of that is likely our phones: Much of the time we used to spend on in-person socializing is now directed to social media, which isn’t all that social at all. And part of it is a result of this decline in real-life friendships.

Making friends takes practice. Like any other skill, social skills can atrophy, something many of us experienced during the pandemic. And I also suspect that the pre-Covid decline in things like church attendance and civic group participation made the social recovery from Covid all the more difficult: There simply weren’t as many low-stakes baked-in social activities to attend, where one could reestablish one’s social bearings and social skills. And Covid’s aftermath has continued to keep many of us at home. A lot of people have been socially left behind, which only exacerbates the problem and makes re-socializing all the more challenging.

For most people, the institutions of church / civic organizations / school / work have also been the primary sources of friendship. These institutions have also allowed for the broader acquaintance-making that may not be as deeply resonant as our closest friendships, but is still a powerful and necessary community-builder, especially when life becomes difficult. When we work from home, as I do, we lose out on those connections. When students were sent home from school, they lost out on crucial friendship-building years. When we don’t have institutions that function as social centers, we lose out on socializing and bond-making and friendship-forming; what could be a vast web of interwoven connections begins to look a little more like a handful of planets revolving around a single sun.

Weddings aren’t going to make everyone socially adept again, nor necessarily create new friendships. But they are spaces for low-stakes socializing. They are spaces where people who have lost touch or haven’t been in close touch can come back together. They fundamentally remind us that we are a part of a larger community of people — a reminder that feels good any time, and can be deeply necessary during our darker days. And at best, they remind us that our community of people contains a lot of good, even if the people who make it up aren’t all our nearest and dearest, or even our particular cup of tea. In our more-segmented and more-online and at-home lives, it’s easier than ever to only be around people we choose. Weddings — hosting or attending — can remind us that our communities are more varied that we imagine, and that there is strength and personal growth in being connected, even loosely, to people who aren’t all like us.

Weddings are also resonant cultural symbols. That’s not always good, especially at opposite-sex weddings: From a bride’s father “giving her away” to her new husband, to a bride vowing to honor and obey, to a new couple being announced as “Mr. and Mrs. His Name,” wedding traditions can symbolize the longstanding cultural assumption (and, until pretty recently, actual law) that wives are absorbed into their husbands in marriage — that by marrying a man, she ceases to legally exist as an independent entity. It’s 2023 and the overwhelming majority of women continue to cede their identity when they marry, taking their husband’s name in about as overt an act of patriarchal dominance and female erasure as the law still allows. So some of the rituals that are traditional at weddings continue to symbolize some pretty regressive and misogynist values. And I frankly hate the “best day of my life” / Disney princess wedding fantasy that has given weddings a strong symbolic power, but made them more about a woman reaching her life’s potential by being deemed wife material by a man. I’m not a pro-wedding partisan because of the (at best) fraught history and present of marriage, or because of how many weddings actually function.

I’m a pro-wedding partisan because there is power in handed-down rituals: in discarding those that no longer represent who we are, and in creating new ones that suit us and that connect us. I’m a pro-wedding partisan because, in addition to having fewer and fewer spaces to socialize with people who we didn’t intentionally court as friends, we have far fewer spaces where we are asked to reflect, to consider a group’s values in relation to our own, to take stock of our lives, and to see ourselves as members of a greater whole.