Dear Salon

As someone getting married in three weeks, I hated your article. It's pretty hard to be a bride, actually-- to feel called upon to build community between families,

to build a community of friends, that the small and petty and yet very important work of building this institution falls to you. Event planning is old and not very glamorous work that has traditionally fallen to women, and though valuable, has the somewhat disempowered feeling that any delegating in a small domestic sphere always brings. It's FLAWED, goddamit, and brings up all kinds of insecurities, but maybe it's also got a lot to say for it.

Suppose you want a wedding? Your friends don't live in the same city as you do, your families live in different cities.

You try to bring those people you most love together in one place so that they can meet eachother, and so the bonds of the community that will support you during your married life will be strengthened. Your article is another in the list of articles about these bad bad bridal days, another that finger points at the bride (In fact this seems like a part of the culture that disrespects a traditionally female sphere for its apparent fippery. Why are women so easy to make fun of? Those dumb social rituals, those silly teas? The suspect nature of ladies that lunch! The meaninglessness of silly suburban lives, the way that they stay home to mother! Women-- brides!!!! Have we come nowhere since the 19th century?)

First of all, we brides feel it too. It's very easy to be a self hating bride, to hate the culture of consumption, even while partaking of it. I also hate the culture of fast food even while I occasionally partake. But you miss the meaning her: I have asked my dearest friends to be with me and become a piece of the body of my marriage, to witness it, to support it. I did DO this by asking them to tailor raw silk dresses in a color of thier choice. Maybe they hate them, and maybe they have hated me. I know I asked them to spend time and money, but I will also spend money and time on them, even if they don't get married, at a time when it is meaningful to them. I will fly across continents if need be, though I hope that I can do this in moderation.

I have to admit, I have felt the emotional and demanding evil undertow. I don't like the consumption, even as we've gone into debt. I have felt bossy and irrational and blundered socially, and felt the fear of blundering socially. But I hate articles like this because they ridicule something I have spent time on and value; because they don't acknowledge the joy of community that inspired me to want to gather people, because they do the same thing that they accuse these weddings of doing: reducing it to something commercial and meaningless. We do that with Christmas too, name its overblown meaninglessness, and blame the consumer society, etc, etc, without perhaps finding the strength actually to acknowledge the places where we do find meaning, even through decidedly imperfect means.

That in itself is its own failing. That in itself strips rituals of meaning. There's a DH Lawrence poem that says something like, "those that go searching for love only demonstrate their own lovelessness"-- it may be that those that find no meaning in rituals only demonstrate their own feeling of being emotionally bereft.

What's more-- why, why blame the poor bride again? She has tried, in her way, to make something for her community, and the communities of the family she comes from and the one she is marrying into. She has navigated potential criticisms from all sides already, felt guilty either for choosing to spend money or not choosing to, to have a big weddding or not to have one. Its exhausting right now to find another source of potential fear for her: Why not wish her all the best in the hard work of embarking on married life?

I feel like this article just creates another scylla to the bridal charybdis, and another way of giving brides a hard time, another thing on the checklist (but AM I BEING A BRIDEZILLA?) of things to worry about. The feeling of being between a rock and a hard place only makes for more pressure. There is surely something sick about the culture in which this all takes place. It is rife with excess. Certainly we don't live in the old world where my grandmother's friend Louise Hudson had her wedding for $50 including the cost of the shears she used to make her own dress, with her family and friends all traveling only the length of the state of Mississippi to be there.

I don't know what to make of that. I love my friends, and despite carbon and personal costs, I am so glad and so grateful they are coming, that I am grateful we're doing this, and that I am attuned to the deeper roots in which this is an old and not perhaps perfect institution into which I am entering, through a decidedly imperfect process. And underneath it all, behind the scenes, there is a major life transition, that my fiance and I keep finding extremely meaningful.

So I'll be stuffing cotton in my ears as I walk down the aisle, scylla, charybdis, sirens and all, and heading on out into wedded matrimony. I am looking forward to it, even though I am wholly exhausted by the vagaries and internal demands of wedding-mania, I am looking so forward to seeing all my beloveds in one place and dancing and dancing with them.