Picking cotton

Tomorrow is our second wedding anniversary. According to some entirely unreliable source and some totally bogus tradition, that makes it our cotton anniversary. Although cotton lacks some of the whatsit of the gold, silver or diamond anniversaries--and dudes, you'd better believe that if we make it to our sixtieth anniversary, this nonagenarian and centenarian will be rocking the bling--it's not actually that hard to come up with gift ideas involving cotton. There are plenty of options. It's just that they all suck.

Blah blah, shirts, blah blah, sheets. Blah blah, towels. I'm trying to think big here, people! A bale of cotton? A cotton gin? The collected works of Cotton Mather?

Help a girl out. What's the awesomest cotton-themed gift you can imagine?

Very special, very unique

I probably wouldn't read the New York Times wedding announcements if I expected to find nothing in them to mock, but I don't read them solely to make fun of them. In fact, they've provided me with much useful information over the years.

But of all the ridiculous things that people do with or reveal in their wedding announcements, nothing entertains me more than the earnest attempts some couples make to "create new traditions" or cobble together meaning out of traditions that are not their own.

Today's winners: a coupla white folk getting married in a "traditional Inca ceremony" presided over by a shaman.

Wedding snapshots

So the whole wedding thing happened: parental and sibling meet & greet, rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, Sunday brunch at our place. And it was awesome. Somehow, although I'd thought through every damn detail with an eye toward its being fun, running smoothly, etc., I never paused to imagine my own pleasure. That is, there were things I thought would suck, and things I thought would be cool, but I was always imagining the events from the perspective of a guest. Turns out? When you design exactly the wedding you'd like to attend, it's really fun for you to attend it!

Herewith a few observations:

-The idea that weddings require gifts is deep-seated. We got gifts from people we've never met (my brother's girlfriend's parents), people we know only slightly (the parents of friends), and a whole bunch of people we love but couldn't invite. Maybe this shouldn't have astonished me, but it did.

-On the other hand, we got some sweet gifts. And lots of bucks.

-Advocates for same-sex marriage are right in wanting in on this--not the gifts per se, but whatever it is that causes people to feel a unique stake in relationships that are publicly validated and celebrated. (But the gifts are awesome too. Waterford crystal, yo!)

-The wedding coordinator provided by the church was horrible: exactly the opposite of everyone else who works for the church--including the priest--in her reflexive wedding orthodoxy. She acted like our procession (best man/best lady, Cosimo's parents, my parents, us) was the weirdest and most confusing thing in the world; she didn't know how to handle seating arrangements when there wasn't a parade of attendants, and she couldn't imagine how the priest could possibly introduce us to the congregation without using the formula "Mr. and Mrs. Cosimo de Medici."

-Fortunately, that was nearly our only encounter with that kind of attitude.


-The downside of doing everything yourself: you have to do everything yourself. And you wind up owning 12 white tablecloths and 14 pots of chrysanthemums.

-Wedding cannoli are infinitely superior to wedding cake.

-Happiness is having friends who, when you make a 4-hour dance mix (just in case!), stay, dancing, until the goddamn last song.

-Also, friends who bust out their break dancing moves. And aren't afraid of the air guitar.

-In fact, let's just say that happiness = friends who feel like family and family who feel like friends. And a weekend spent expanding both circles is extra-special awesome.

-I promised I'd give the price tag, so here it is: $6,200, for literally everything involved in a church ceremony and a luncheon reception for 75 people--all the way down to ring-sizing and postage and printing costs.

-It was a great weekend and it was exactly the wedding we wanted, but it's over and that's fine. There's life after wedding planning, and thank goodness.

Late papers and guests will be penalized at instructor's discretion

Planning a wedding liturgy is an awful lot like designing a syllabus. There's a set form with a variety of constraints, but so many moving and movable parts. What readings? What prayers? What hymns? In what order, and done by whom? And once you settle on all those individually-appealing parts, you have to decide if they work well together and add up to a coherent whole. At least there are no assignments to devise, no stern policies to articulate, and no anticipatory weariness at the thought of all the grading that awaits.

Ladies who change their names: feminist traitors? (Now with data!)

As a long-time reader of the New York Times Sunday wedding page, I like to think that I have a strong, albeit impressionistic sense of the mating and marriage patterns of the ruling class. Since the mid-90s, for example, I've seen a steady decline in pairings between investment bankers and grade-school-teachers-with-art-history-degrees-from-Brown, and a corresponding rise in the number of couples who met in law school or on the job and who seem to be professional peers. I've also kept a general eye on such things as age at first marriage and the frequency with which a woman takes her husband's name--but those are harder to gain an accurate sense of without tracking the numbers.

So this weekend, my dears, I decided to do some valuable procrastination in the service of collecting cold hard marriage data. I skimmed the 500 most recent NYT wedding announcements, from May 1st until yesterday, and recorded how many women in heterosexual partnerships kept their last names, took their husbands', or did something in between. I also recorded their ages.

And I'll state up front that I came to this project with a strong prejudice in favor of women keeping their birth names. About half of my own friends have taken their husbands' names, and that's cool: it's their choice, I'd never tell anyone what to do, blah blah--but I'm not going to pretend that, internally, I've had an entirely neutral reaction to what the women of my acquaintance chose to do in this arena. Moreover, it's been hard not to notice that lots of the women who submit announcements to the NYT and do take their husbands' names are women in their 30s and even 40s, women who went to fancy schools and seem to be high-powered doctors and lawyers--not just, as I would have assumed (and as actual real studies have found), younger women or women with less fully developed professional identities.

So armed with a primitive spreadsheet, I decided to investigate. I can break the numbers down in detail in the comments if anyone cares, but the short version is this: of 450 heterosexual marriage announcements, 75% clearly indicated whether the bride was changing or keeping her name. Of that number, 30% kept their birth name outright, with an additional 10% "continu[ing] to use [their] name professionally"; hyphenating their last names with their husbands'; forming a new shared surname; or indicating that they would be using their maiden name as a middle name, à la Hillary Rodham Clinton. The remaining 60% took their husbands' names.

Moreover, from this sample, there is not a strong correlation between the age of the bride and her decision to keep or change her name. Women who got married at age 26 and younger showed almost exactly the same 40/60 split as the data set as a whole.

*

The number of women keeping their own names surprised me; it was higher than I'd expected. But more importantly, the process of skimming 500 announcements, including an increasing number celebrating same-sex unions, made me. . . kinda not care any more. There's nothing I can imagine that would make me want to change my own name--but then, I'm in a profession where name-changing after one has established some kind of professional identity is extremely uncommon. However, I'm coming around to the position that for most women this isn't a major feminist issue.

This is not to say that I think the choice is negligible, or that it doesn't relate to important feminist issues (see this post by Historiann for a marriage in which the wife's decision not to change her name revealed what an insecure douchebag her husband was). But perhaps we shouldn't insist on its symbolic importance in every instance.

Here are factors to consider:

1. Women don't lose their maiden names or identities upon adopting a husband's name as completely as they once did. The internet has a lot to do with this. I've noticed that most of the women whom I went to high school with, virtually all of whom changed their names upon marriage, now identify themselves on Facebook according to the formula "Firstname Maidenname Lastname." This doesn't mean they've actually retained their maiden names legally, or that they use them professionally (my own mother, who has never to my knowledge used her maiden name in the 40-odd years since she got married at age 21, identifies herself thusly on Facebook). However, this informal retention of one's birth name is, I think, part of a larger, pragmatic trend: if adopting their spouse's name seems important to many women, so does retaining a clear link to their birth name.

2. The rise in legally-recognized same-sex unions. Though the sample size here is even smaller, and it's hard to tell what trends will develop over time, right now it's pretty rare for same-sex couples to change their names upon marriage (and when they do, it's usually by linking both names with a hyphen). How gay and lesbian couples choose to communicate their commitment is bound to have an effect on the rest of us, if only by making a wider range of options seem normal.

3. It's not all-or-nothing. Related to both of the above, I'm interested in the various compromises I've seen in the selection of wedding announcements I perused: women who continue to use their names professionally, women who merged their names somehow with their husbands', and a tiny minority of women who chose entirely new surnames for both themselves and their husbands. This strikes me as an age in which there's a lot of experimentation with naming conventions. So, you know: let a thousand flowers bloom.

4. Retaining one's birth name upon marriage may remain a minority custom, but it's now a well-established one. Thus it's unlikely suddenly to die out, be thought of as irremediably bizarre, or cause serious, regular problems for women who don't change their names. (Note: I reserve the right to retract this claim if, in a few years, I encounter such problems.)

So in sum: if you're fighting the good fight at home or in the workplace and making generally gender-conscious decisions? I really don't care what you call yourself.

But as always, readers, I trust you to tell me how I'm wrong

Not precious, not special, not unique

Further proof: my favorite wedding invitations on Etsy turn out to have been the wedding invitations of people I know from grad school.

Them's my values

So I'm planning a wedding. This is neither the high point of my existence nor something that causes me excruciating torment. I'm by nature a list-maker and an information gatherer--and I've got oceans of time and not a lot of felt imperatives about what a wedding should be.

My guiding principles are these:

1. All other things being equal, I'd prefer to throw some kind of party and invite people beyond our immediate family members.
2. I refuse to spend much money. Some years ago I heard that the average American wedding costs $10,000. Apparently that figure is now $20,000. I believe that number (if you want to be very afraid, go to the comments on this post), but that's not our ball game.

Given items 1 & 2, here's what I care about:

• A church wedding. Although the Catholic church fucks up almost everything having to do with sex, sexuality, and gender, I think it gets some important things right in defining marriage as a sacrament. (Also: my church is gorgeous. Church wedding = pagentrial loveliness for very little $$.)
• As for the reception, my values are these: open bar, good music, and enough food to keep people on the dance floor and from passing out drunk.

That's about it, really.

I don't care about flowers, photography, or a sit-down meal, much less about hair & makeup or a big white dress. Other people have other values, and that's fine; I get why those with larger budgets might pay upwards of $3,000 for a great photographer. But I really dislike the fact that there seem to be three dominant wedding discourses in this country: you're a traditionalist, or you're "making your own traditions," or you care fuck-all about weddings.

The first two tend to amount to the same thing, and often the same price: every detail is imagined as having huge personal significance and reflecting the couple's unique taste and sensibility--whether it's a princessy dress and 12 attendants in matching frocks and tailcoats or a rockabilly biker theme.

And if you're not consumed by such details, you're imagined as someone who officially Doesn't Care About Weddings, and you get married at City Hall.

All three kinds of weddings can be lovely, but they're not the only (or mutually-exclusive) options. Dudes. I'm getting married in a church in a blue-green cocktail dress from the 1960s. There will be a bunch of people and a party in a rented space, but it might involve hamburgers, an iPod, and former students acting as bartenders. That's not my special uniqueness; that's just what's happening.

No time for details

But nevertheless: Cosimo and I got engaged last weekend. In Union Square Park, in the benevolent shadows of Barnes & Noble and DSW.

I suppose I'm okay with the term fiancé/e (especially when pronounced with the comic upper-crusty accent on the "AN"). But I'm utterly opposed to "wife." Henceforth, I shall be lobbying for "spouse" as the all-purpose, gender- and sexual-orientation-neutral title of the future.

No fezzes, but plenty of ululation

I always love weddings, but I have to say that Victoria's was more fun than any I've been to in a long while. For one thing, the bride and groom did an aggressive job of introducing and integrating their many disparate groups of friends and relatives; for another, the setting and weather were gorgeous; and for a third, I suppose that I--being single for the first time in years--was socializing rather more thoroughly with the guests than I otherwise might have been. (All of a sudden, I recalled just why those weddings that I went to when I was 24 and 25 were so damn much fun.)

But part of the good times was surely thanks to the fact that the bride and groom are just Way More Glamorous Than You or I or Anyone We Know. (They are also, in the case of the bride, thinner than anyone we know.) Their guests included large numbers of Egyptians, Brits, Canadians, and other International Persons of Mystery; academics, art dealers, wine-store managers--and most of them smart, interesting, and hilarious. The events surrounding the wedding also went on and on, beginning days before and ending days later and featuring picnics and boat cruises, dining and drinking.

And that's the other reason that I love weddings: the illusion that such a convivial, fancy-dress version of life might always be within one’s reach.

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Some images:

Victoria's engagement ring--it's a seal-stone from Persia, dating back to about the seventh century. The image is a wild boar.



Victoria and me, at the garden reception the day before the wedding:*

[Image redacted]

The church:



The couple during the ceremony (the image is blurry and non-representative enough that I'm leaving the faces otherwise unobscured):

[Image redacted]

Just after we all arrived at the reception site--a gorgeous, 1930s deco museum set in an arboretum--a blue heron flew by and settled himseld in a nearby tree. It's hard to tell how big he is, but seriously: he was big.



Victoria and the Mancunian, this time obscuring their own faces:

[Image redacted]

Victoria and me at the reception. I wish I had a full-length photo of my dress, shoes, etc., but trust me when I say that the outfit was beyond fabulous (as, of course, was the bride's).

[Image redacted]

*Photos of persons will self-destruct relatively soon; the others will remain up. ETA: Sorry to those who missed them!

Speaking of those more successful than oneself. . .

It's no secret, to them that knows me, that I love the Sunday NYT wedding announcements. The fact that I don't have a paper subscription means that I don't peruse the thing very closely these days, but when I can get my hands on a hard copy, it's always an exquisitely enjoyable 30 minutes.

So when Stave (or possibly Def) sent me this link, you can imagine how much I loved it. You, too, will love it.

Go. Read. Now!