lavendersparkle | (no subject)

In my perusing of the wedding planning part of the internet I'm getting increasingly irritable with non-religious brides who want to have an Anglican wedding so that they can get married in a pretty church but then bitch about unfair it is that the church:
a) won't let them get married in a different church to their parish church just because it's prettier and/or was in a film.
b) strongly encourages them to come to church a whole three times to hear the Banns read.
c) makes them meet with the vicar more than once and dares to try to explain Christian ideas of marriage during those meetings.
d) won't allow them to do things which it deems inappropriate during the service.
e) makes them use the liturgy of the Church of England.

The Church of England is a religious body, not a wedding and pretty building preservation service. Would these people wander into a Mosque because it was pretty and then get all uppity about how the imam wouldn't let them wear a strapless dress for the ceremony?

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In fairness to people who don't want a civil ceremony, the wording of the civil ceremony is a bit crap. I remember at my eldest brother's wedding it felt very odd, because the civil ceremony is so clearly modelled upon parts of the Anglican marriage ceremony with the stuff about G@d taken out. I don't think we really have a model of how to marry people in a non-religious way so the civil ceremony ends up being a pastiche of a Christian wedding.

Related to this, I think people are deeply confused about what marriage is and why you'd want to enter into it. If you're religious the answers are given by your religion, but why do non-religious people want to marry? My brother was very clear that he wanted to get married because he needed to marry his parter for her to be able to get a visa to go to Japan with him, but I don't think most people who get civilly married are quite so practical about their motivation.

Yes, I agree, one reason people might think registry office weddings are a bit crap is that many of them are a bit crap. Even when you really really eake out what you can do it's hard to make them last longer than 15 minutes, and you're so limited (cue tabloid stories about "I couldn't play Robbie William's Angels because it said "angel" in it")

I think people are deeply confused about what marriage is and why you'd want to enter into it. If you're religious the answers are given by your religion, but why do non-religious people want to marry?

I don't think I agree with you here (or at least, if there are confused people, there are confused religious and non-religious people, and it seems to make just as much sense for them both to marry) I don't think the sentiments expressed in your comment the other week* (which I guess only makes up a bit of how you feel about marriage, but still) apply any more to religious than non-religious people.

*"My relationship with my very closest friends are like familial ties. It's stopped being a matter of whether I feel luke warm about them, but rather that I have a deep sense of altruism and obligation toward them. I decided to propose to Alec when I realised that I already felt that we had the web of mutual concern and obligation which makes up a marriage. It only remained to formalise this commitment."

But if you don't believe in G@d then why would you need the Seal Of Approval? I mean you could just say "we have this thing of mutual obligation and trust and so forth, so that's a marriage then" and just get on with your life, recognising that you are now committed to each other. I don't understand the drive to get this thing legally recognised.

Maybe it's less a "Seal of Approval" and more a contract? Formalising things does make them easier for society. It is easy to give people offence if you don't know the intricate details of their relationships (eg asking Tracy how Fred is when they've just split up with Fred, inviting "Tracy and Fred" to your wedding when Fred is just a FWB and Tracy will be horrified at people assuming they're a *serious couple*, not inviting Fred to your wedding and having Tracy offended that you don't take their relationship seriously just because they're not married etc etc) If you know people are married, then it's easier to make a few ground assumptions about their relationship [Yes, I know you think people shouldn't make assumptions about anyone, ever, but given that I think the world couldn't actually work in this scenario it's better to formulise it so people make mainly-right assumptions, not mainly-wrong ones]

Also, it makes it easier to talk about stuff. You could just say "we have this thing of mutual obligation and trust etc etc" but there's a _lot_ of etc etc - it's easier to say "A standard marriage with a side order of X" than have to explain the whole thing from the bottom up.

I've been to a few civil weddings and yeah, it does seem very much "we took a CofE wedding and took out the GodTM", very odd.

I'm also not sure why people do it - but there are a range of benefits that the state hands out, not so much "less tax" these days but things like what happens if you end up in hospital, or if you die intestate, or parental responsibility for the father (or non-gestational mother; I guess that if neither parent is going to gestate the child you have to jump through hoops) with less hoop jumping and so on.

But people often claim things about how they can't feel committed without a wedding, which seems bizarely tied to the God thing (which is fine for people who believe in God, but not so much for people who claim loudly to not believe in God).

Or maybe they just want a stupidly expensive dress...

However bad the civil marriage ceremony is, it can't possible be as cringe-worthy as the civil partnership ceremony. A wedding ceremony with all the references to marriage and to God taken out and replaced with phrases like 'the civil partnership couple' and 'enter into a civil partnership contract'? Makes it sound rather like buying a house.