Sherri Rosen is touched by the story of two people who simpy want to build a life together — not prove that they’ve already made it.
I was very touched this week when my partner in crime for writing these blogs, Tyler Blanski, wrote about his upcoming marriage and wedding to his lady love on his blog site TylerBlanski.Com.
“If you’re looking for a wedding that jumped off the pages of a magazine, I’m afraid you might not want to come to mine. There will be no five-star catering, no Super Bowl halftime show or paparazzi photographers. The ceremony will look more like someone’s First Communion or Confirmation than a glamorous photo shoot. In fact, the whole thing will feel rather…plain. This is because my fiancée and I are not only young: we are also poor.
I can already hear all the Aunt Bettys gasp (especially since my wife-to-be is, you know, a woman): “What?! You’re getting married when you’re young? What about your career? What about travel? What about buying a condo and dating six thousand guys?”
These days, if you are not either rich or old, you get a lot of flack for wanting to marry: supposedly a wedding ceremony is not about two people starting a life together, but a chance to show off how you’ve both already “made it.” It’s the new American Dream: we young adults are supposed to spend at least a decade climbing the corporate ladder, visiting martini bars, and filling our Facebook photo albums with pictures from around the world. We are told we need “to live a little” before we get “tied down” with marriage and family.
For young women, especially, the pressure to do something—anything!—but marry and start a family is high. “Don’t make commitments with anything except your 401K,” is the new motto for the twenty-something, as if an accumulation of financial investments and postcards is more important than real people in real relationship.
The irony is, if we were to ask these Aunt Bettys what they live for, they would likely say family. This is because behind all the propaganda, we can still catch a glimpse of the truth. We were made for relationship. People are more important than things. And family life is a helluva lot more adventurous and satisfying than a late night down town. The whole idea of piling money and experiences and one-night stands sky-high sounds kinda narci and materialistic to me.
And so my fiancée and I do not want our wedding to be about how we’ve already “made it,” but about how we are just two young people who are launching out into a life together—a life of responsibility, commitment, shared joys and shared struggles. A life not of accumulation and getting, but of self-giving and sharing.
Marriage might sit in decaying splendor, but it will never one day face demolition. It is one of God’s gifts to us, an integral part of our humanity. You might find our marriage ceremony to be rather plain, but (we hope) plain with that true, salt-of-the-earth modesty you just don’t find every day. It will be elegant, yes, but only because it will be one of the oldest rites around—the rite of Holy Matrimony.”
I don’t want to come off as shaming people who marry later, or never marry (is there such a thing as shame shaming?), but I concur with a lot of this. The NY Times wedding announcements page is kind of an extreme venue, but so many of the marriages there come off sounding like corporate or dynastic mergers, with just the right notes of perfectly accessorized hubris and cleverness. I think there is a gross over-emphasis on the fairy tale perception of marriage, and not enough on the fact that it is in fact a union of two imperfect people.… Read more »