Brace Yourselves, Wedding Posts Are Coming

A bride using a laptop. Image source.

So, I got engaged! Yay! For the purposes of blogging, my fiance has decided he wants to use the name Hendrix, so that's what y'all can call him. (I tried to convince him to use a nerdy math name like me, like Fermat's Little or Countable Infinity or The Set Of All Sets That Do Not Contain Themselves, but no luck. Or Mersenne Prime, except that's a little bit too, ahem, explicit.) Go ahead and start cross-stitching your "Perfect Number + Hendrix 4ever" pillows.

So now that I'm thinking about weddings and marriage, I suddenly have a ton of things to blog about. Here are some topics I plan to cover:

1. Purity culture. When you get that engagement ring on your finger, that's when you can finally stop guarding your heart. That's when you can finally fully love a romantic partner. And then the wedding- and the wedding night- that's what us purity culture girls all dreamed about and looked forward to, all those lonely nights we spent because we weren't allowed to love. Um, yeah... I plan to blog about everything that happens differently from the myth that purity culture promised. (Check back next week for a post called "He's Not 'My Future Husband.'")
2. Feminism. So, making a wedding feminist is an interesting task. So many traditions are based on the whole "the woman is property being given to the man" sort of thing. But people (including me) really love a lot of those traditions, so I don't want to just get rid of anything that has roots in patriarchy. Like for example, I'm sure my dad really really really wants to walk me down the aisle, so we'll do that. But there will be no talk of "giving me away."
3. Chinese culture. So Hendrix is Chinese and we're going to do 2 weddings- one in China, one in the US. Traditional Chinese weddings are very different from anything I would have imagined when hearing the word "wedding." So, we'll have to figure out that whole thing. And I'm sure I will have a lot of things to say about the different cultural expectations about weddings and marriage. Like for example, in the US, when a woman gets engaged, everyone is like "oh my goodness let me see the ring! How did he ask?" and they want to hear some super-romantic story. In China, not so much.
4. All the fun and chaos that is wedding planning. Yeah. Fun and chaos and gender essentialism and cultural expectations. Like it's assumed that the bride is going to plan the whole thing and the grooom's just going to nod along. And how people always say "it's the happiest day of your life" as if that's just axiomatically true- uh, what the heck? That's ridiculous. The wedding should be a pretty good day, possibly the best day, but not definitely the best day. This whole "it's the happiest day of your life" myth puts a ton of pressure on you to be happy or else you're being a bride wrong, and if some details don't work out perfect then you'll be all worried that you've ruined "the happiest day of your life." And after that, the rest of your life will be all downhill. Yeah, that's just so absurd it's laughable. (Pretty much as laughable as "your virginity is the most precious gift you can give your husband." lolololol why would anyone say that? [note: yeah I totally used to believe that])
5. Marriage. So I'm realizing that marriage is A REALLY BIG DEAL. Like, we're deciding to spend our whole lives togther. Wow. In purity culture it's just assumed that everyone's going to get married- but wow, I mean WOW getting married is a HUGE decision.

So to all my wonderful readers, thanks for reading and being awesome! I'm excited to write about all the stuff I learn about weddings and marriage. <3