A Wedding: Two People…and Their Entire Teams

When two people marry, they form a new union. And in so doing, they also create an far-reaching set of relationships between two families who were previously unconnected. A wedding ceremony, with that exchange of vows as the centerpiece, brings its own kind of alchemy.

Cel-e-bration!

We — my husband and kids — recently attended one such joyous occasion. Actually, it was an event that stretched over five fun-filled days in my hometown, along with my brothers and their families. Having their wedding right in the middle of the summer turned out to be a very wise call on the part of the bride and groom because we needed both the preparation and the follow-up time. We looked forward to (and made arrangements for) the festivities little by little in July; now, in August, we’re doing a lot of reflecting back.

This was my beloved niece marrying the boyfriend she first met a decade ago, during their freshman year at college. It was, in part, a lake in upstate New York that first brought them together.

She spotted him at a party wearing a sweatshirt that said “Skaneateles” and discovered that his hometown was the same place she’d visited thanks to the fact that her uncle had a cottage there. I won’t try to re-create their opening conversation, but with enthusiasm I will call the whole thing a perfect ice-breaker. In fact, a mutual love of ice (hockey, in particular) would provide more reason for their relationship to deepen and then, eventually, to result in a complete commitment to one another.

Beautiful as this particular story is, I introduce it as a kind of entryway into the broader subject of marriage as a whole. And in that this subject is, we could all agree, VAST, I need to be clear that I’m interested here mostly in the way that a single wedding works to draw a whole network of lines, almost like a transit system with a couple of hubs and then various routes, between people who had, in most cases, never met before. Now, they get a way to travel.

Family Matters

One the one hand, it’s all about just the couple: two hands, firmly grasped together.

And yet, since the two partners are almost never completely independent of their people, the day is also very much about recognizing exactly who “comes with” each partner.

Here’s a photograph taken in Kampala, Uganda. The smiling groom must have his arm around his mother; it’s not so clear which man is his father, but probably those are brothers standing behind him. On the bride’s side, most likely her mother and father are right next to her, with the other women being aunts. We can’t be totally sure, but what matters most is that there was an interest in taking this “both sides” picture at all. It represents how, for the central man and woman, life will now include the other’s relatives. There’s no telling how often this group of people will re-convene as time goes on, of course; maybe the two families live many miles apart. There’s a possibility, also, that there will be some significant differences that emerge between customs, beliefs, ways of doing things, in the two families. But then again, there’s a good chance that there were already a crop of differences between certain individuals within just one family, before the wedding — maybe even some serious rifts.

Who Wants All the Same?

Since when are differences (and here I mean the kind that can co-exist without causing real ruptures) bad, anyway? The whole premise of this blog, after all, the whole reason I started this site, is to hold up the fact that even within marriage, being unified does not have to mean being of the same mind about everything. Indeed, fruitfulness can actually result from a certain degree of heterogeneity, or to use common parlance, “mixing it up.”

So if it’s true that two individuals, making a life together, inevitably bring in elements from each of their families, then it stands to reason that they might tussle sometimes with just how to do things, particularly when it comes to cultural or religious traditions — if these exist in a distinct way. Or, it could be that they’ve already carved out their own way of doing things, together.

Doing a little research on what’s out there on this topic, I discovered an entire Reality TV series in Australia focused on how actual couples navigate big differences, even potentially explosive ones, starting right from the wedding ceremony. It’s hard to know how to take the tone of the title– is it more of a “please do this because I can’t live without you” or a “take it or leave it” approach?

This couple seems to have the “lost in you” quality that is essential. Presumably, though, they’re not alone and not everyone who matters to them is jumping right on board this love train.

Here’s the trailer for Season Two:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOjMCrYtpzY

You’ll hear the announcer try to tantalize us by saying, “The choices we make can shake families to the core.” I haven’t seen a full episode yet, but I’m guessing that whoever the uneasy relatives might be, they mostly get put in their place eventually. After all, when it comes right down to it, the two primary people need space to create their own new little world. If they are burdened by what everyone else around them thinks — especially about matters that don’t really bear on the devotion each person has for the other — they’ll be too weighed down, distracted, off their game. This is clutter they don’t need.

Fortunately, this degree of cross-cultural tension is probably quite rare in weddings, but it makes good TV.

There’s a reason why, towards the end of the wedding ceremony as written in The Book of Common Prayer, there’s a part when the officiant asks the guests: “Will you do all in your power to support these two persons…?” The two persons have done so much to get here — they’ve even built a whole transportation system so that everyone in their two families can move around and make new friends, learn new things, discover new territories.

The Water’s Fine

After the party’s over — and now I am returning to the memory of the family wedding we just had — there’s a shimmering sense of an enlarged community. It looks something like a transit map, but since we don’t generally think of subways or buses as “shimmering,” let’s go ahead and change the metaphor. I know! This feeling of expansiveness is more like what we get from looking at a lake, say in upstate New York, on a sparkling day. You could start at your own dock, or on the public beach maybe, and head out in any number of directions, feeling the spray on your face.

Have you been a wedding guest somewhere this summer? What kind of imprint did it leave on your soul?