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| Maroon 5 playing at a wedding. From the music video for "Sugar." Image source. |
The topic for the February 2024 Carnival of Aros is "The Meaning of 'Romance' Across Time and Place." I haven't written for the Carnival of Aros before, because I am totally the opposite of aromantic, but I'm an American living in China, married to a Chinese man, so I have some things to say about this one.
So, as I said, I'm the opposite of aromantic. In college I used to dream about the kind of wedding I wanted to have, because I had SO MUCH romantic desire, and wanted to find one magical romantic partner I could be with forever to fulfill that romantic desire, and I viewed the wedding traditions as important symbols of getting those desires fulfilled.
Fast forward a few years, and I got engaged to a Chinese man (Hendrix). We had our wedding in the US, so we did all the American wedding traditions that I wanted, but we live in China so I had the chance to talk to Chinese people about Chinese wedding traditions, and I've attended weddings in China, and the traditions are very different! It was sort of surprising to me, how these traditions- which I viewed as big important romantic milestones that I couldn't live without- just totally DO NOT EXIST in Chinese culture. They have different traditions instead.
In this post I'll list a few of the traditions that were very important to me, and how they are TOTALLY DIFFERENT in China.
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Getting engaged
So, Hendrix proposed to me with a diamond ring and big romantic gesture, just like the American traditions say you should do. It was great! Very happy with that!
When I told my friends in the US, they were all like "How did he ask???!!!" expecting to hear a grand romantic story- and yes, I told them the grand romantic story. And my relatives were calling on the phone, telling him "welcome to the family!"
Then when I told friends in China, none of them were like "How did he ask?" And Hendrix's family members didn't really act like anything was different.
Nowadays in China, because of influence from western countries, people do propose to their girlfriends with a ring and romantic gesture. But this is kind of new thing; it's not at all an established tradition in Chinese culture- seems like the older generation doesn't have much of a concept of it.
No, in China, instead of getting engaged, I would say the sort-of equivalent thing is getting the marriage license.
See, in China, getting the marriage license (ie, getting legally married) is a completely separate thing from the wedding. What?! I was shocked when I found out about this. In the US, the wedding is the event at which you get legally married- that's the definition of a wedding. In China, this is not the case!
We ended up getting our marriage license in China (because of immigration reasons that made more sense than doing it in the US) and then having our wedding in the US. I was a bit worried... if my relatives knew that we were already legally married, would they think our wedding was not "real"?
I remember asking a Chinese friend how you define which day is your anniversary- since the day you get legally married is different than the wedding day. She didn't seem that concerned about it. She said you can decide for yourself which one is meaningful to you. She said she felt like, getting the marriage license was about just you and your partner, and then the wedding is something you do for your family, so for her, getting the marriage license was more important.
And since I was raised in purity culture, which made a big huge deal about how you can't have sex till marriage, I was super confused about "how do you know when you can have sex?" Is it when you get the marriage license, or is it after the wedding itself? (Fortunately I quit believing in "purity" and decided we can just make our own decision without having our wedding be the way we announce the world that we're about to have sex, eww.)
And the day we got our marriage license, Hendrix's relatives took us out for a fancy dinner. See, turns out that's the "welcome to the family" moment, from a Chinese perspective. Not when you get the engagement ring. (There are also Chinese traditions about the bride and groom's family negotiating about how much money the groom's family is going to give the bride's family, but we didn't do any of that.)
I remember a Chinese friend asking me about getting engaged and what it means in US culture, and he asked, "Do some people get married without getting engaged first?" And I interpreted that to mean if a couple just goes and elopes without telling anyone- and their family and friends would probably be unhappy about not being invited to the wedding. But actually I don't think that's what he was asking. I think he wasn't aware that it's not really possible to invite people to your wedding without being engaged- like, if you're planning a wedding and sending out invitations, you ARE engaged. He was probably thinking you get the marriage license, then you plan the wedding, then you have the wedding- and getting engaged sounded like an unnecessary step before that.
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The wedding dress
In US culture, shopping for the wedding dress is a big deal. Finding that one perfect dress- THE dress. And then there's a tradition that your partner isn't allowed to see the dress until the wedding day.
In China it's totally different.
First of all, at Chinese weddings, the tradition is that the bride wears a bunch of different outfits. The traditional color for weddings is red, so basically she wears a series of different red dresses- but now that China is borrowing [the appearance of] some traditions from western culture, many brides add a white dress to the mix too. So there's not like a "THE dress" - you wear a bunch of dresses, and I don't really know what the romantic/emotional significance of it is.
And here's what really shocked me: In China, the couple gets their "wedding photos" taken as a completely separate thing from the actual wedding itself. Really, "wedding photos" is not the right translation of "婚纱照"- I would translate it as "wedding dress photos." Because these are NOT photos from the wedding, they are photos of the couple wearing wedding clothes. This is something that's done before the wedding.
Totally shocking to me, because, what about the tradition that your spouse can't see your wedding dress before the big day? (Yeah, not a thing in China.) And also, the dress that the bride wears in the photos isn't even THE dress. You go to a photo studio and pick from the dresses they have there, and you wear that in the photos, and that has no relation at all to the dress(es) you actually wear on your wedding day. (In fact, I've been to weddings in China where they show a slideshow of photos of the couple, and these "wedding dress photos" are part of the slideshow- making it really obvious that they were taken beforehand and aren't photos from the actual wedding. This is completely normal in China.)
I remember when I found out about this, it made me feel like the wedding photos in China were "fake." Because it's not your actual wedding day, and that's not your actual wedding dress. But it's not "fake"- it's just that they have different traditions for this.
We went and got photos taken in China when we got our marriage license. We wore the traditional red clothes that the photo studio provided. My mother-in-law also wanted me to do photos wearing a white wedding dress, but I totally refused. I can't be wearing a white wedding dress if it's not my wedding day and it's not my wedding dress- that would be a lie! The only reason I would ever do that would be maybe if I was shopping for dresses, trying on different ones, sending a photo to my sister to get her opinion- but beyond that, no, no way am I letting anyone see me in a white wedding dress if it's not my wedding day.
So we just did the photos with the red Chinese clothes, and that was fine.
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Dancing
Dancing is my FAVORITE part of weddings. But in Chinese tradition, there's no dancing at a wedding at all. To some extent, for Chinese weddings that are more "westernized", they kinda-sorta add some dancing to it- the bride and groom have their first dance on stage, and the bride has the dance with her father, on stage- but it's basically just a performance on the stage, not something that you eventually get all the guests to join into. There's no dance floor, there's no hours and hours of everyone dancing.
Really surprising to me, because dancing with everybody was one of the things I looked forward to the MOST (and our wedding was in the US, we had a DJ and dance floor and everything, it was great) but in China it's just not a thing at all.
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And there are so many other wedding traditions which are completely different in China- I just discussed these 3 here because these were the ones that were most surprising to me, because they were extremely meaningful to me but just aren't part of Chinese tradition at all.
I'm writing this for the Carnival of Aros because it shows how romance is so culturally constructed. To some extent, there are things that will be the same in all cultures- most people have romantic feelings, most people fall in love- but the specific ways that those feelings manifest is super-dependent on the unique cultural symbols of romance, and those aren't universal at all. I spent so much time dreaming about my first dance at my wedding- there are cultures where people simply don't do that, because they don't have a first dance. They may have similar romantic feelings to me, but it doesn't cause them to dream about their first dance. It comes out in other ways.
So if you're aromantic and don't care about romantic traditions, well, whatever, billions of other people don't care about those specific traditions either. And even if you have romantic feelings, that doesn't mean you have to care about roses or diamond rings or whatever. All these things are just cultural symbols- there's no intrinsic reason they need to be viewed as "romantic."
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Related:
Getting Engaged Isn’t Exactly a Thing in China
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