weddings

My sister informs me that one of my twin nieces plans to marry. Her fiancé Carlos is to ask her father, my former brother-in-law, a pompous and obnoxious git, for her hand. I do more than scoff. My niece plans on the full white wedding which my sister is expected to help pay for. By now I’m apoplectic.

My son Mo rings to ask about mail still arriving here for him and Katie. I mention his cousin’s intended nuptials. He tells me he will probably soon ask Katie’s father if he can marry her. They’ve been talking about engagement for a couple of months. Katie would like to marry and Mo is happy to please her. It’s an endearing quality in him. He assures me any ceremony will be modest.

I’m sort of chuffed that a lovely young woman wants to marry my son. On the other hand, I hope they realise that it is against my principles to contribute a red cent toward the cost of such an event.

My mother and I come to verbal blows over the whole business. She finds the cost of the ‘full catastrophe’ ridiculous, but regards marriage as you’d expect a woman of her generation to regard it. The prospective groom asking the bride’s father for her hand is a tradition worth upholding, a courtesy. She likes courtesies, politeness.

I regard it as a tradition hung over from another age, both sexist and patriarchal. Why, I ask, should the bride not ask the groom’s mother for her son’s hand in marriage? Is not the underlying notion of asking the bride’s father tantamount to viewing a woman as a chattel to be given away?

I ask my good woman why the bride doesn’t ask the groom’s mother for his hand in marriage. She laughs: because she will never give her son away, she says. Such wisdom. When her former husband Viktor asked my good woman’s father if he could marry her, her father suggested Viktor was asking the wrong person, and told him to ask her.

I don’t care for weddings. I’ve never been to one I enjoyed. Partly it’s my cynicism, that this really is the start of the end. And it’s my belief that marriage is a dead institution, a religious construct to allow churches get their grubby sanctimonious paws all over people’s lives, and a social construct to enable goods and chattels to remain within ‘the family’.

As a statement of two people’s intention to reside in the same house and commit to try to make a relationship work, a business contract seems better than a public squandering of an obscene amount of money.

Include me out!

Rock on.