Is it wrong to feel that wedding ceremonies are kind of creepy?

Nah it’s a bit weird, it not wrong to feel what ya feel.
Don’t even get me started on the carried over the threshold thing…

@everephebe – What’s the carried over the threshold thing? Not sure what that means.

I do want to get married, not sure if I’ll have a wedding. Hmm…

@partyrock How old are you? If you don’t mind me asking.

@sophiesword – I’m 22 :) just turned 22

@sophiesword – What does my age have to do with anything?

The threshold thing is either reenactment of rape or the simulation of it. The bride is showing propitiatory less than enthusiasm toward being “deflowered,” so she must be carried id est forced into the bed chamber. Charming right?

@everephebe – Scary o_O

Oh what a world we live in. I would apologize on behalf of my sex, but I kinda disown them. Fuck patriarchy.

@everephebe – Do you ever want to get married ?

Sure, maybe in a tree. You know, on my own terms. Wait was that an offer? ;p

@everephebe – Maybe it was! and I love trees :) looks like the beginning to a beautiful Fluther friendship! lol. Logging off now. Hopefully in the morning there will be more answers lol

I see you like classic movies. I enjoy a little Claude Rains myself…
Should I mention how drunk I am at this point? Or is that bad form? I think Captain Hook says something about it being bad form to ask whether or not something is bad form… darn.

@everephebe What have you been drinking? Sure you can tell me how drunk you are :)

Well, it couldn’t be wrong, because it’s just how you feel. But I feel the same way, too.

@everephebe Men are rarely hotter than when they utter the phrase “fuck patriarchy”.

@partyrock My dear old friend whiskey, of the bourbonic variety, see I am American sometimes. Whiskey whets my wit, amoung other things.

@Aethelflaed Mmmmm…. I try and do my beft. :D

No, I hate weddings.
Just for the record, I’m married.

@everephebe @Aethelflaed Anyone know how I can move this question to Social? I’m new and don’t know how to move it.

@ANef_is_Enuf Do you like being married or do you hate wedding ceremonies in general ? Did you have a wedding at all ?

I like being married, I love my husband. I had a wedding, but it was not a typical wedding.

@ANef_is_Enuf – Was your wedding dress white? Did you invite a lot of people?

@ANef_is_Enuf – Would it still be considered a wedding of mine if only me and my future husband are present lol ? That’s what I’m thinking of doing.

My dress was off-white. We invited immediate family to the ceremony, which was in my parent’s living room, and it was a secular ceremony. The whole thing lasted like 10 minutes. Then we threw a party. It was very casual and relaxed, which is what I wanted. Certain aspects of my wedding were slightly traditional, like wearing a wedding dress, because my husband wanted some semblance of a traditional wedding.

If you don’t want any guests you can just go to a court house.

@partyrock Ask a moderator to move it for you.

@everephebe – Thanks I just did :)

@ANef_is_Enuf I don’t want to get married in a court house. I’ll probably do what Megan Fox did, a wedding on the beach. It was just her, her husband Brian, and her stepson. And the priest who did the ceremony.

I never knew that was the reason for the carrying the bride over the threshhold! I bet a lot of brides would avoid that if they knew what it meant!

I don’t believe that is how the tradition started. I call BS on that one @everephebe.

I love weddings. They always make me cry with emotion when I watch a couple starting a new life together.

@bkcunningham Looks like that one might be for real… :(

@Aethelflaed, if you read the entire part, “Threshold, Carry over,” that you linked; it disputes the capture and rape belief.

You don’t have to have a traditional wedding if you don’t want to. :) We wrote our own vows, etc.

I’ve seen couples have parents accompany both bride and groom to the altar, and where neither person has parents. It’s up to what you and your sweetie want, and what your religion dictates (if you want a ceremony from that religion).

It is kind of creepy! ;) So we did it our way.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling the way you do. You can have any kind of ceremony you want to have. My husband and I had a Justice of the Peace perform a ceremony for us in front of a river in Texas with two of his friend’s there as witnesses (because in some states you must have two witnesses sign the marriage certificate). The friends also took pictures which worked out since we didn’t have anyone else there.

Mark Twain had an interesting take on this…

“Why is it that we rejoice at a wedding and cry at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”

My parents walked me down the aisle. My husband’s parents walked him down the aisle. Our entire immediate family stood under the chupah, including my grandmother. They counted as the wedding party. I don’t feel like our parents gave us away, I feel our family was present to witness my wedding and join in the celebration. It is symbolic in a way, that I moving from my parents home to my new home with my husband. Not his home, but our home, and our new life together. I had already been living on my own for several years, but since I was still fairly young it didn’t feel weird. If I were to remarry later in life, then the walking down the aisle with my parents would seem very odd I think.

I can understand how it can seem creepy or not feel right though. When and if you get married you should do it in a way that feels perfect for you.

Some people find all the rituals with the church creepy or odd. Depending on ones religion there is more or less regiment to it. In the Catholic church young girls wear pseudo wedding dresses for most of the rituals, like first communion and confirmation. I know many people find it very odd to see 6 year olds in white dresses like that.

Your avatar is you and a black cat and you think weddings are creepy? Kidding, they are.

Definitely have the wedding you want.
My first was not awful, but it wasn’t what we wanted and we got strong-armed into a somewhat traditional one. All the logistics and expense was awful. That marriage didn’t last anyway, not because of the wedding.
My second we put together ourselves, and even though the ceremony lasted two hours everyone was mesmerized wondering what was going to happen next. It wasn’t a circus, but it was so unusual our relatives and friends have never seen anything like it before or since.
We didn’t have the space and budget to accommodate everyone who would be invited to a ‘traditional’ wedding but no body seemed to hold it against us.

I don’t find it creepy, but if you do, you can arrange your ceremony to suit yourself and your groom.

For example, not all brides wear white dresses. You two could walk up the aisle together hand in hand.

I think that first dress, the blue dress, is gorgeous, @marinelife.

The wedding in the movie Breaking Dawn was creepy…

@marinelife Wow!! They’re all so beautiful!

@bkcunningham I call bs on your bs! :D The exact origin may be murky or contested but it’s not a dismissible theory.

I don’t know about “creepy”, but, I do think that it’s a waste to spend thousands of dollars on a wedding ceremony.
My daughter is 24 and so is her boyfriend, they have been together almost 3 years and they feel the same.
Think it’s a waste to put out the big bucks on dresses and the whole scene.
If they get married they want a simple, immediate family only little thing and then throw a party.

I was married in the early 80’s and my wedding was modest but nice, still cost about 6k and that was 30 years ago in 1981.
Good for me, the mom, because there is no way I would spend 20 or 30k on a wedding. lol
I’d rather give them a down payment towards a house or a honeymoon vacation. :-)

In answer to your question. Yes. It is wrong. You should only feel how I tell you to feel. You are getting sleepy. Watch the watch. That’s good. Now you will believe that weddings are the best thing ever. You will have exactly 78 of them. You will be the wedding queen of the universe!

Holy smokes! What kind of question is that?

You can feel whatever you want to feel. Own your own feelings. You need no approval from anyone else.

As to weddings—it’s your wedding. You can do anything you want. You may have to pay for it yourself, if your mother doesn’t like what you have in mind and refuses to chip in, but do your own wedding.

We did our own vows… sort of. We had a minister, but that was because my wife wanted one on account of her mother. I would have done without, since I’m an atheist. However we did get our own songs in to the ceremony and we did a dance, which commemorated how we met.

The main purpose of a wedding is to ask the community to support your relationship. That may seem creepy and you may think the community has no business being involved in your marriage, but only people who have never had trouble with a relationship can say that.

We all need help. We may not want people prying, but we do want support.When you say your vows in front of family and friends you are telling them what you mean to each other and asking them to participate as a social support.

Perhaps most importantly, you are introducing them all to each other. You are building a community of support so both families know each other and your friends get to know them all.

People who do a very small wedding or do it on their own are foregoing that support. Often times, they do it because they are eloping and they know they won’t get the support. Other times they are doing it because they want to do it quickly or they think it is a private thing. Some people just want it to be them and nature. Or them and four other people.

We each have our own set of relationships with our community. Some people have giant weddings, perhaps because they are important people and they have to show their wealth or their political connections or whatever. It is necessary for social reasons to do this.

It would be interesting to do a study about size of wedding and longevity of marriage. I think I would expect a parabolic curve—where the smallest and largest weddings are more likely to end in divorce than the more medium sized weddings. Kind of a Goldilocks thing. Too much pressure on big marriages and too little on little ones.

I don’t think it’s “wrong” for you to feel that way, but maybe a little strange. I know a lot of people who don’t like weddings, but I’ve never heard anyone say they think weddings are creepy. But hey, you can’t help how you feel about things like that.

You definitely do not have to go traditional for a wedding, though, so keep that in mind. You can keep it as small as you want, you can wear a black wedding dress, you can get married while holding your cat if you want, lol. It’s all about how you want to do it, and to hell with anyone who has a problem with it.

No offense, @everephebe, but Bride and Groom website as a source? Really? I think the book @Aethelflaed linked trumps Bride and Groom.

@partyrock You said the tradition of western weddings, so I wondered where you live and if you identify with a particular religion? Is the white wedding dress not typical for you nationality or culture, but you live in a western country? Or, is it typical and you are questioning it?

I have been to enough weddings that I know the most interesting, and often most fun, are those that are designed by the bride and groom, and are not in a church.

Some friends had everyone (200 people) camp out on a huge property that doubled as a summer camp. It had a river running through it. The ceremony was held in the river with everyone else standing on shore, the vows were about the joining of waters and the water’s journey to the sea representing the flow of life. It was a beautiful wedding.

I don’t like them. I don’t want to be married like that either. It seems too big and planned for me. I don’t like planning. Or dresses for that matter.

Most are, because as @everephebe mentioned, partiarchy sucks (and ditto on the “fuck patriarchy”). Because patriarchy reduces living beings to property, in many ways it makes real relationships impossible. It impedes honest relationships.

Historically, weddings have been simply contracts between equal adults. Too much of the civilized traditions impede that. Weddings don’t have to be creepy, but often are.

No, you’re not wrong to feel that way. As @incendiary_dan notes, a lot of these traditions originated in a time when women were considered property.

@incendiary_dan Like I’ve always thought it’s stupid guys can consider getting married for months and girls have the 30 seconds men give them after they propose.

@TheIntern55 “guys can consider getting married for months and girls have the 30 seconds”
You have been watching too many diamond ring ads, that have to get it all over with in less than a minute. Or the stupid verite youtubes where the poor woman is confronted with the question in public in front of all sorts of friends and strangers.

If a guy is asking his gal to marry him and she hasn’t already given the idea a lot of thought then the guy is delusional and / or there is something very wrong with communication in the relationship.
And what nut would only give his gal 30 seconds to give him an answer to the marriage question? Any sane person wants the fully considered answer whether it takes 10 seconds, 10 hours, or ten days. (...that’s on the verge of an effective “no” unless there are extenuating reasons for taking longer to come to a decision.)

You can always get married in India in a Hindu ceremony and dance around a fire (inside an enclosed building in 100F temperature) seven times to get married :-p

@bkcunningham No offense taken. I did realize that the link on wikipedia wasn’t to the single most credible institution ever. I did not have the time this morning to find an absolute authority on the subject… as I was late to school. That all said, the point was: I wasn’t just making shit up. It’s a relatively common theory. I don’t think the entire onus is on me to prove this theory, especially with you simply refuting it without including sources of your own. Whether or not my assertion is correct, it is not bullshit. And your dismissal of my comment, without evidence of your own, with what seems to be an a priori argument. Intuitively you may disagree, that is fine. I can’t change that. I’ll find proper sources later.

Apparently now is later.

If it is a Pater familias “transfer of ownership” or symbolic resistance of defloration by a “pure” maiden… it is still a form of violence towards women. “The English word ‘rape’ is a conventional translation of Latin raptio, which in this context means ‘abduction’ rather than its prevalent modern meaning of sexual violation.” Marriage used to be via abduction in some cases, See Bride kidnapping.

“It continues also a custom at this very day for the bride not of herself to pass her husband’s threshold, but to be lifted over, in memory that the Sabine virgins were carried in by violence, and did not go in of their own will. Some say, too, the custom of parting the bride’s hair with the head of a spear was in token their marriages began at first by war and acts of hostility, of which I have spoken more fully in my book of Questions.” Plutarch • Life of Romulus

When and if I get married, I’m going to walk hand and hand with my spouse over the threshold like we’re damn equals. I say like equals cause I don’t expect to necessarily be wearing the pants, at least not for long. :D

I appreciate that you went to so much trouble, @everephebe. I was feeling a little frisky this morning when I called your post BS. I don’t usually do that to people and I apologize to you sincerely. I was dismissive and rude to you. I wasn’t thinking when I typed those two little letters. I’m sorry now that I did. Thank you for the very interesting links. If I wasn’t married, I’d marry you and carry you across the threshold.

@bkcunningham Apology accepted. :p No. No apology necessary, I was feeling frisky right back. :D It’s all good. You can lift 160–170 pounds / 73–77 kg right? Should I start losing weight? :p

No, you are perfect. I’ll get in shape while I’m devising a plan to get rid of my husband.

Sounds like a plan. :D

@JLeslie – I live in Hollywood, California :) I don’t identify with any particular religion, but I am spiritual. I like studying about religions.

It is your wedding, so you can do as you wish.

No, I agree. Sort of a like deja vu zombie procession of bodies. The happy couple usually only survives for a time, in spite of the histrionics, cool gifts, and insanely heart wrenching corny speeches.

No, it’s not wrong at all. Besides, a person’s marriage should be more important to him or her than his or her wedding ceremony. ^_^