Letters to the Editor
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Don't go to the wedding!
Everyone knows that part of the ceremony, that cinematically overdone moment where the officiant asks if anyone present objects to the marriage and warns them that if they don't speak now, they must "forever hold their peace".
To attend when you do not and will not support the marriage (which is very, very different from supporting your niece) is immoral. In fact, you have a moral obligation to not only not attend the wedding, you have a moral obligation to not allow your daughter to stand up for her cousin. Your brother and sister-in-law have had no qualms in indoctrinating/brainwashing their child to the degree that she's willing to sacrifice her entire future to a marriage at 16. Take advantage of the same opportunity to indoctrinate your own daughter(s) with your own belief system of freedom and opportunity. If you don't stand up for your beliefs now, what kind of message are you sending to them?
Yes, this will cause a family rift. You should hope it causes a big one. Because it's the only way you're going to get the message to your niece that there's a bigger world out there than the one her parents have allowed her to see. That if she's a little bit patient she will have opportunities in life that she never even imagined - opportunities that will certainly pass her by when she has her first child at 17, her second at 18, and so on.
It's funny how people compromise on important issues just because (1) they don't want other people to get mad at them or (2) whatever they are confronting has assumed the mantle of religion.
It's time we stop standing idly by while our children are pimped out in the name of God. If you really love your niece, you'll do everything you can - no matter how unpopular it makes you - to help her in her hour of need.
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This is what you do.
You go to the wedding.
The gifts you give are:
- a gift certificate to babeland.com
- some information about birth control
- some information about how to manage money and plan for the future
- some book(s) about adolescent development, and telephone numbers to couples therapists, sex therapists, and cognitive psychologists near to them.
If you can, give them books about managing money and how to deal with common relationship problems as engagement presents.
You explain to your children why you are doing this: It is in support of the children themselves. You are not degrading the marriage, you are helping them out in advance of their nearly-certain marital problems.
And then you can be freely happy for them! What optimists!
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I disagree with Cary too
Don't go to the wedding! If one of your children, say, turned out to be gay and wanted to marry his or her same-sex partner in Canada or Massachusetts or something, I'll bet your religious relatives wouldn't attend due to their own disapproval. And that is certainly their right. So don't go if you don't approve. Send a nice present and a good-luck-I-wish-you-well note. And if anyone asks, you can say "I don't approve of people so young getting married". And that's it.
You know, we can tolerate without approving. You're not crusading to make laws against 16-year-olds getting married. You're simply saying that this makes you uncomfortable, and you don't approve.
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Don't go....
Ick!
Don't go to the wedding. Sixteen is way too young for a lot of things, and marriage tops the list. Most states require parental permission for marriage under age 18, for very good reasons. Children at 16 do not have the intellectual or emotional maturity to enter into the contract of marriage.
I wouldn't want to be party to such a thing, and I certainly wouldn't want to expose my kids to it. In particular, I would really struggle with the sexual implications of the wedding. By allowing the wedding, this girl's parents are implying that there is nothing wrong with their daughter being sexually active at such a young age, if done within the marriage contract. I think that sends a very disturbing message, particularly to parents who want their children to have a more measured and gradual entrance into their sexual life, hopefully a few years after 16.
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It's unusual because most kids wouldn't dream of getting married
The line about LW being "afraid that [her children] will think that marrying at 16 is OK, even desirable" is kinda crazy and nonsensical, don't you think?
I mean, who are these kids? I've never known a mainstream soul that wanted to get married at 16. Here lies the line where LW's genuine concern about a somewhat weird situation morphs into a not-so-nice campaign. What this couple (brainwashed or not) is about to embark on will have, I'm guessing, almost no effect on her own children.
There's a lot of rational thought in the letter. But the fear in that sentence just isn't justified.
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About your daughter
You're not close to your brother-in-law and his family, so I think you've really just got to throw up your hands at the niece's marriage. Extended family is weird; they do funky things you would never dream of doing, that your own children would never dream of doing.
And that's the thing about your worries that your own daughter will be influenced by her cousin's crazy choice: your daughter, as much as she might enjoy the romance of her cousin's act in a sixteen-year-old way, is YOUR daughter, saturated in your world view and highly unlikely to follow in her cousin's steps. Highly unlikely. You want to know why your daughter's excited? Because of getting to be the maid of honor in a grown-up seeming ceremony. At that age, those pristine brides on magazine covers and the idea of perfect love are like candy. Being a maid of honor is important and special, and that's what she's excited about. A part of her might even be excited by the idea of marriage, but make no mistake: she's not excited because she wants truly to be the one walking down the aisle.
So don't worry about that part. If you probed, you'd probably find out that she has no desire whatsoever to get married soon. My fundamentalist Christian cousins both got married really young, and I remember the tone around my house at that time: it was basically one of amusement and a little regret, a kind of "what can you do" attitude. Then we returned to our lives. This may sound arrogant, but we saw them as strange creatures with bizarre customs that had very little to do with us. It was their life, and they're still married with lots of kids who will probably marry early too. My sister and I are in our twenties and thirties now, still unmarried, working on advanced degrees, doing our thing.
It worked out this way because we belong to a family that instilled those kinds of ideas in us and we always knew we'd take our time and do our thing and that family would come whenever. And the cousins, they had God and babies on the brain and that's cool too. Your daughter's entire nurtured worldview will not be dismantled by one frilly wedding.
Oh, and: go ahead and attend the wedding. It will be weird and you can practice just observing it and being a good person. It's not a threat to you just by existing; if anything, you give it more power by staging a protest, giving it forbidden status, a significance it doesn't deserve, getting so worked up over it that you boycott.