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[engaged in the d] Bride on Bride – Part Two

by Steph | Leave a comment

Bride on Bride: Patriarchy, Bride Culture, and Space to Be Queer
Part Two

Engaged in the D blog post by Katherine [Read Part One]

…So we had to find other ways to plan our wedding, ways that didn’t require us to designate one partner as the bride and the other as secondary. We had to try to figure out how to play to our individual strengths while supporting each other and checking in with each other. Because we both identify as “brides” and neither of us feels like a “groom”, this might have been easier for us than for some straight couples. I’m not actually sure. Like I said, I’ve never gotten married before.

We’ve been taking on individual tasks where we can, doing a lot together, and trying to be honest about what we are capable of. I’ve heard it said that nothing will test the staying power of your relationship quite like planning a wedding, and that might be true. I’ll be honest – it isn’t all lovey-dovey. We’ve certainly had our share of disagreements. We try to remember that our wedding, like our marriage, isn’t something one person is doing and the other is going along with. It’s something we are doing together. It should reflect that.

That doesn’t mean that we both have to do every single thing. For example, Chelsea gets kind of freaked out by numbers, and I get kind of freaked out by making phone calls. One of our first agreements about the wedding was that she is in charge of calling people, and I’m in charge of drawing up the budget. Sometimes I’m a bit more planning-oriented than she is, which means that often times I’ve been the one bringing ideas to the table, and then we make decisions together. But it’s not exclusively like that, and I don’t make decisions about the wedding without her, or vice versa. I won’t sign up for any site that offers me a “community of other brides” and asks me to list us as “Katherine” first and “and her partner Chelsea” second. It may seem like a little thing, but language matters.

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It feels particularly important because we are trying to do this whole getting married thing as ethically as possible. One of our biggest values as a couple is being in an egalitarian partnership, and one of the best things about our particular egalitarian partnership (we’ve both said this, at various points) is that we help to push each other to live according to our values. So when we discussed the possibility of hiring a caterer, we needed to talk to each other about what our ethical requirements would be for that (local business? locally sourced ingredients? plant-based foods? where is it ok to compromise and where is compromise off the table?) and how that would play out before we could look into any specific options. We aren’t either of us perfect, and our wedding won’t be perfect either.

But for it to be the best that it can be, we need to be doing it together.

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Readers: Are you and your fiancé/e splitting up the wedding planning tasks? If so, how?

[engaged in the d] Bride on Bride – Part One

by Steph | 1 Comment

Bride on Bride: Patriarchy, Bride Culture, and Space to Be Queer
Part One

Engaged in the D blog post by Katherine

First, a confession: Sometimes I spend a lot of time on Facebook. It can be both a useful tool for staying connected with people, and a time-suck that drains all of one’s emotional energy and leaves one sort of generically angry and displeased with the world, and yeah, I use it for both. Now that that’s out of the way.

Last year, before I was engaged, nearly all the ads I saw on Facebook were for engagement rings. That’s not particularly surprising, I’m a mid-late twenty-something, and I listed myself as “in a relationship”, I’m sure without knowing anything else about me, that made me part of the prime market for such a thing as far as the algorithms were concerned. It did feel a little eerie, though, to see those ads all the time, while I was nervously ordering Chelsea’s ring and planning the proposal.

And then, I proposed. And then, yeah, we had to change our relationship status on the internet. It was easier than calling every single person we know.

And then, like magic, the ring ads disappeared.

What came next was an awful lot of ads to help us plan our wedding. I’ve never planned a wedding before (first and only time doing this!) and so I found myself wondering which, if any, of these sites that were being advertised would be helpful to me. I even clicked a couple of them.

And then the problem became apparent. Did I say “ads to help us plan our wedding?” because that isn’t actually correct. I meant “ads to help me plan my wedding.” That’s when I discovered what I now refer to as “Bride Culture.”

Bride Culture is the culture of immense pressure put specifically on engaged women. It was that the wedding is mostly about the woman, mostly about the dress. It says that everything has to be perfect, and by perfect, we of course mean perfect according to your 8-year-old self who watched too many princess movies, regardless of whether or not your values and goals have changed since then. Bride Culture assumes that your wedding is the most important day of your life, and that it is planned by the Bride (and maybe her mother) with very limited input from whom she is marrying.

And just in case it isn’t obvious, Bride Culture is definitely part of patriarchy.

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Now I don’t have a problem with how anyone else has their relationship, or how anyone else plans their wedding. If you determine that one partner has more interest in or time for planning the event than the other partner, cool, that person should probably plan it! If that person happens to be a lady, that’s cool too. The problem that I have is the cultural assumption that women are the ones planning weddings, and the implication that there are these crowds of disinterested partners (mostly grooms, but I found the same assumptions on plenty of gay wedding sites as well) just waiting in the wings for their blushing brides to finish making all the decisions.

Put quite simply, it just wasn’t us.

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Want to learn how Katherine and Chelsea have shifted away from the Bride Culture paradigm in their wedding planning process? Come back to LoveintheD next week to read more!