Kids and weddings: fantasies, toxic messages and the value of ritual

As a child, did you fantasize about your future wedding? Did you think about what you would wear, who you would marry or anything beyond the wedding day? Do you think your this bore any relation to your gender or the gender you were assumed to be?

This week, I am looking back at my thoughts, desires and creativities to do with weddings as a young child, and considering what they all mean about how we present weddings to girl children, and whether they can shed light on what is valuable about weddings and what isn’t. Unfortunately, I can’t find data on percentages of boy and girl children who fantasize about their wedding day. I suspect that the stereotype that all girls do this is exaggerated, but at the same time I do think more girls engage in these kinds of fantasies than boys. However, I definitely don’t think this is because of some innate biological drive to start a family and nurture everyone in sight.

I did fantasize about my wedding day, but I saw this as entirely separate to some future marriage that also might occur. As a very young child I promised myself to one of my best friends (my family-friend best friend), which I think was mostly because he was one of the only boys in my life who did not possess “boy germs”. However, in my wedding fantasies he didn’t appear at all. These fantasies were almost entirely limited to aesthetic concerns regarding my dress, hair, and general appearance. But basically I concentrated on the dress, which I designed at least three times over my tumbling young life, all of which I can remember with perfect clarity:

1) White, with poofy skirt and sleeves aka The Disney Princess

2) White, A-line silk gown, spaghetti straps and a top layer of something sheer, which made one of those scoopy medieval sleeves on one side but left a bare arm on the other (retrospectively quite proud of this one) and lastly

3) Early 2000s abomination of green shimmer satin and tulle, with a corset bodice that only met the skirt at the hips, covered in sequins and beads.

I don’t have the space, time or willpower here to go much into my own gendered activity as a young child. Suffice it to say it was a complex mixture of following gendered expectations, deliberately breaking out of them because they were expected, intense discomfort when I was assumed to be a boy as a result, internalized misogyny that caused me to reject anything I considered “too girly”, and a genuine love for both the the snails and puppy dog tails that little boys are supposedly made of, and for princesses, fairies and tutus.

To paint a picture, I was that kid in the tutu and tiara sitting at the top of a tree throwing acorns down at people walking by. I was also that kid who cut off all my hair at age 6 (as well as that of my barbies), then subsequently declared that I would only wear dresses and skirts henceforth after being mistaken for a boy a few times.

The reason I bring this up is that I can’t quite decide whether to be surprised or not at all about the extent to which I fantasized about my wedding. Though I scorned “girliness”, looking back there were a lot of stereotypically “girly” things that I was really into. Obviously, wedding fantasies fit into the realm of things that may be considered “girly” but not “too girly” to allow myself. I can’t really remember how I thought about it at the time. But considering how bombarded young girls are with the notion of the ideal wedding, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that this permeated my consciousness enough to create a yearning, or at the very least a way to pass the time.

And they really are bombarded – so many of the stories marketed to be consumed by young girls end in a wedding, the key word being end. We don’t see what happens to Cinderella’s life after she marries Prince Charming – Does she champion the working class after having experienced something of what their lives are like? Or does she simply revel in a life of leisure as the tasks she used to be responsible for are passed on to actual probably underpaid female servants? It doesn’t matter, because the “story” part of her life is now over, in a climax of an extravagant wedding.

But the wedding fantasies of little girls are far too realistic to be inspired solely by Disney movies. I’m not sure if I was just a particularly unimaginative child (other evidence points to the contrary), but I didn’t think I would have flocks of doves or singing horses at my wedding. I thought of it as something that would really occur, and I planned my fantasies accordingly. But as I said before, my fantasies were 100% wedding-dress related and 0% marriage related. So besides the expectation of marriage, what is it about the way young girl children see weddings that make them something to fantasize about?

Like any good (read: lazy) researcher, I turned to Google. I found this shockingly stereotyped article in Elite daily detailing “8 reasons why a woman’s wedding day is her greatest fantasy”. Spoiler: not one of the reasons was celebrating the connection between you and the person you want to spend your life with. In fact, the final reason mentioned was “she will finally receive a stamp of approval”. Upsettingly, I think this misconstrued article holds a kernel of truth. The first reason on the list was “she is treated like royalty for a day”, which included the sentence, “For one special day, she doesn’t have to be humble and shrink her existence to make room for other women to shine”.

Now, I violently question the idea that a woman’s main obstacle to being confident and shining is other women. However, there is truth in the fact that throughout their lives, women are taught that they should put others’ needs above their own, and that making themselves smaller is a good thing. One of the few exceptions to this is their wedding day. For many women, a wedding is the one day that people actually pay attention to her, and the one day she gets to make decisions based on her own desires without being labeled selfish or bossy. Maybe a wedding, to some young girls, represents a fleeting moment where they can wield a power they don’t see themselves as having in their day to day lives. If this is the case, it is highly pernicious. Relegating all this to a wedding day would work to keep women disempowered in the places that really matter and create a pressure cooker of expectations for a perfect wedding, which bear no relation to the marriage that comes after. And all this skillfully manipulated by advertisers to create the wedding industrial complex. So, with all this toxicity swirling around, could there possibly be any genuine value in a wedding?

Well, this is what I ask myself all the time, and part of why I started this blog. And I have one more childhood wedding story up my sleeve that could shed light on this question.

Somewhere in the space between 5 and 8, one of my best friends and I (this time my next-door-neighbour best friend) cooked up the scheme that we would get “friendship married”. We would walk up her garden path in white dresses, our families and pets would all be there, there would be flowers and tiaras and cake, and we would vow to each other that we would always be friends. Nothing about this plan seemed at all strange to us. Our parents were generally benign about this idea, but nobody had the willpower to make it happen, not least our excitable, changeable and childish selves.

But I really think this picture of a wedding that we created was a healthy one. It didn’t involve expectations of a certain type of lifestyle, or a sense of obligation, or a perception of differing and unequal roles for the two of us. It didn't mean we were now bound to only be friends with each other and it didn’t involve pleasing other people. It was just about commitment to each other as important forces in each others’ lives, a sense of ceremony, and pretty dresses. And I’m beginning to think that if there’s anything truly valuable in a wedding for its own sake, (apart from the practical considerations of insurance or raising children, or the fact that you get to see all the people you love together), it is this sense of the magic of ritual and ceremony. The focusing of attention on the connection between two people in a moment, the stillness that comes with it, and the accompanying fullness of feeling.

I don’t think my relationship with my person has fundamentally changed since we got married. We are just as loving and committed to each other now as we were before. I don’t think that getting married meant giving some kind of hard and fast promise of being together forever, and I don’t think our relationship is somehow stronger, better, or more legitimate simply due to the fact that we’re now married. In fact, the legal wedding we had at Home Affairs felt very insignificant. But the ritual process that we went through for our own personal wedding ceremony held with it a kind of power and magic.

I have no idea what this magic is! As a totally non-religious and even non-spiritual person it’s not connected to something sanctified or holy or supernatural to me. But everyone knows that ritual and ceremony holds power. If you’ve ever seen the way parents and students cry at graduation ceremonies, felt the emotion at coming-of-age ceremonies, or the solemnity involved in initiation to some group (even if it’s just a sports team), you understand this. Ceremony doesn’t have to be linked to religion or spirituality to hold power. So it’s natural that putting such a ceremony into a wedding day is going to imbue it with rich memories of deep feeling and importance, whether or not you think life will be fundamentally different after the ceremony or not. And there’s value in that power, as such memories can warm you on lonely nights apart or thaw you after spats and disagreements.

This ceremonial aspect is certainly not all there is to a wedding, which is what makes them so complicated. There’s all the baggage, historical and present, of gender role segregation, of economics (of the survival and diplomatic kind), of ideas of ownership and of property. There’s the legal aspect, and the religious one, both of which can be connected to exclusion and hate. The sense of ritual can be so intertwined in all of this that to some people, weddings are simply too toxic to justify the positive aspects. In fact, maybe one of the best lessons from my “friendship wedding” plan is that there is no reason why the only relationships deserving of pomp and ceremony are romantic ones. Why the hell aren’t friendship weddings a thing? For many, the relationships they have with their friends are far more important than any romantic relationships they may have. Why shouldn’t these folks get a day to celebrate their love for one another?

In many ways, a wedding is a culmination of a bunch of different cultural and social discourses that are all pretty different but somehow get lumped together. The aesthetics is not the ceremony is not the wedding is not the marriage. Each of these things might be valuable to you or not but they don’t have to go together. So if you find yourself lamenting the fact that you want something that usually goes with a wedding but you don’t want a marriage / don’t have someone to marry, why not have a friendship wedding?

And if you do, you have to invite me or otherwise I’m suing you for copyright infringement.

#weddings #kids #weddingfantasies #ritual #ceremony #disney #dreamwedding #weddingindustrialcomplex #gender #girlchildren