Wedding Traditions They Don't Have in China

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 

My Chinese Marriage License

Wedding Posts Round-Up

Wedding Posts Round-Up

A Star-Trek-themed wedding cake. It has the Starfleet badge, cake toppers of a man and woman in Starfleet uniforms, and the words "Live long and prosper." Image source.

HEY DID I MENTION HENDRIX AND I GOT MARRIED THIS YEAR?

As an ex-evangelical, ex-purity-culture feminist, I figured I would have a lot of opinions about experiencing the actual reality of a wedding and all the ways it's different than the "ideal" I was taught in purity culture or absorbed from mainstream society. So I said I was going to write a LOT of blog posts about getting married. And I did.

Here's a list of all of them. (You can also find them in the "engaged" tag.)

Feminism and Traditions
We're Not Doing the Garter Thing
Kiss the Groom
Here's What We're Doing With Our Last Names
The "Groom's Cake" Tradition is So Sexist
I Do Care About the Invitations
I Don't Expect My Wedding to be "The Happiest Day of My Life"
On Perfect Weddings

Marriage in Chinese Culture
My Chinese Marriage License
Getting Engaged Isn’t Exactly a Thing in China
Giving Candy to All My Coworkers Because I'm Getting Married

Purity Culture and Breaking the "Good Christian" Rules
I'm Really Really REALLY Glad I Had Sex Before Marriage
You know that whole "white dress means virginity"? Yeah, not actually a real thing.
He's Not "My Future Husband"
We Don't Need Anyone's Permission to Love
So I Gave My Fiance the "Letters To My Future Husband"
Worth the Wait?
Now that I'm engaged, I'm all like "hell no" on the whole "wifely submission" thing
I Told Them We Already Live Like We're Married
In Purity Land, a First Date is a Bigger Decision Than Marriage
I'm dating a nonchristian and I want to marry him. Here's why I believe that's not a problem.
I Know We'll Have a Good Marriage, BECAUSE We're Not Pure
On Marriage and Knowing Each Other

What Marriage Means To Me
I'm not sure if a wedding is a beginning or an end
I Can't Write Wedding Vows Without Thinking About Divorce

I Told Them We Already Live Like We're Married

A bride and groom. Image source.

At our wedding ceremony, I read out loud this thing that I wrote. It was about how Hendrix and I already love each other and are committed to each other. We already support each other for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. We already live together and share everything we have. At the wedding, when we make vows, we're not promising something completely new and different; we're stating out loud the promises that already exist in the way we live every day.

It was important to me to read this at my wedding because it's extremely anti-purity-culture. In purity culture, you can't love each other fully until you're married. In terms of tangible rules, that means you can't have sex or live together until you're married. But it's more than that- there's this romantic ideal of "two becoming one" and that sort of thing, as if the wedding day marks a massive change in the very nature of the relationship. Like it changes it into a completely different thing. Before the wedding, you're not a family yet, you're not 100% committed, and then after the wedding you have fully given yourselves to each other, you're "one flesh"*, having awesome honeymoon sex that's awesome because you waited and all that.

Back when I was in purity culture, I believed this myth about romantic relationships having "phases" which were very distinct and the transitions were marked by big, obvious events. Something like this:

1. Dating: You need to "guard your heart." You should be careful about loving your partner "too much" because there's a possibility that you might break up and then that would be the end of the world. Allowable physical contact: Holding hands, hugging.
2. Engaged: It's finally okay to be in love, you don't have to "guard your heart" anymore, because there's no longer any risk of breaking up. Finally you can let yourself feel your emotions, happy emotions of love and attraction. Allowable physical contact: Kissing. DEFINITELY NOT ANYTHING INVOLVING ANYONE'S GENITALS.
3. Married: Wow finally you can fully love- share your heart, your body, your home, your possessions, your dreams. Allowable physical contact: Sex. But not anything "depraved" like porn or non-monogamy.

Different purity-culture adherents would, of course, sort the "allowable physical contact" differently between those 3 categories. (This is the subject of endless "where is the line?" discussions in youth groups everywhere.) But my point is, in purity culture I envisioned a system where there were strict rules for physical contact with one's partner, and those rules would change drastically, instantaneously on the day you get an engagement ring and on the day you have your wedding. The rules about the physical side were the most obvious part of this "three phases" perspective, but the emotional side of the relationship would also change drastically, I believed. The relationship would suddenly become a completely different type of relationship.

That's not reality though. Here in the real world, relationships grow and change gradually. People live as committed partners for several years before the wedding. Couples have discussions about whether or not they want to get married- the proposal doesn't just come out of nowhere. It's not a fairy tale where you just meet Prince Charming one day and then you're suddenly in happily-ever-after, never look back.

But even though that's not what a wedding really is, I couldn't help but feel like that's what we were pretending. I felt like a wedding is sort of a performance where you come in as two separate people and leave as a couple, as if you want your guests to believe the myth that it is a big drastic change in the entire nature of the relationship. I felt like there was this ideal we were pretending to follow, where we don't fully love each other and share our whole lives with each other until the wedding day. Like, yeah we know that's not reality, but we should be ashamed of our reality and at least put on an act.

So that's why I had to read my little reading at the wedding. To explicitly say that no, we're NOT drastically changing our relationship today. We're already committed to each other, and our wedding ceremony is a way to show the world our love and commitment- it's not somehow the cause of that love and commitment. I felt a bit weird, like I was telling everybody "our wedding's not real, because we already love each other for better or worse." But I had to do it, for me.

Probably none of the wedding guests really understood what it meant. They were probably just like "aww that's nice." For me it was a very anti-purity-culture statement, and there's no way I, Perfect Number, could have had a wedding that didn't include some anti-purity-culture statement. But I didn't mention purity culture specifically. I didn't mention sex. I did say we live together, which I know is quite the dog whistle for good church people, even though it's the most boring, normal thing for "secular" people.

It's important to me that, at our wedding ceremony, I stated that Hendrix and I were already fully committed to each other and the wedding isn't the start of that. Part of me felt weird, like I was saying our wedding isn't real, and that's not something I should admit in front of all the guests; I should at least pretend to follow the "ideal." But that's exactly why I needed to do that. I don't believe in purity culture anymore, and I don't believe the "ideal" understanding of a wedding is one where the entire relationship changes in one day.

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* As a white woman married to a Chinese man, I have some opinions about this whole "one flesh" thing. My "flesh" is very different from my husband's. Like literally a different color and not the same at all. And no matter how long we're married, that's never going to change. We're not "one flesh."

I'm Really Really REALLY Glad I Had Sex Before Marriage

Fear, Joy, and Disgust. (From "Inside Out.") Image source.

Hi everyone! I'm very excited to tell you today I have a guest post on Love, Joy, Feminism: I'm Really Really REALLY Glad I Had Sex Before Marriage

Some related posts you may also like:

For This Asexual, Purity Culture Was All About Fear
Worth the Wait?
He's Not "My Future Husband"
I Know We'll Have a Good Marriage, BECAUSE We're Not Pure

Worth the Wait?

Bride and groom. Image source.

DID I MENTION I GOT MARRIED? Such a good decision. Being married to Hendrix is great.

And now I have some opinions about "worth the wait."

"Worth the wait" is a phrase used in purity culture. It means that if you wait and don't ever have sex until your wedding day, it will be, apparently, "worth the wait."

Now let's examine this concept and see if makes any sense. First of all, it's only meaningful to say something is "worth the wait" if one also had the option to not wait, and waiting and not waiting yield two different outcomes which can be compared.

For example, let's say you are looking forward to "Star Wars: The Last Jedi", which will be released in the US on December 15, 2017. Suppose you wait and wait until that day, and you go see the movie, and you love it- would it be correct to say it was "worth the wait"? NO. Because, assuming you don't work for Disney, you had no control over when the movie was released. You had no other option besides waiting until December 15, and your ability to see the movie on that day is not dependent on anything you did during that waiting time. "Worth the wait" means the decision to wait was a good one- it makes no sense if there was no decision.

If, on the other hand, you work at Disney and you ask yourself "should we just throw together a crappy movie, or should we spend enough time on it so it's actually good?" then the concept of "worth the wait" is meaningful. You are making the CHOICE to have the fans wait longer, but you believe the final product will be so good that it's "worth the wait."

Continuing with this example, suppose you are a devoted Star Wars fan who dresses up as an Ewok and camps out at the movie theater 24 hours in advance so you can be the first one in to the midnight showing. Then you are making the choice to wait there for 24 hours, and the result is different than if you hadn't made that choice. (Maybe if you hadn't come and waited in line for hours, you wouldn't be able to get a seat at the first midnight showing and you'd have to watch it the next day instead.) For some people, it's worth the wait, and others are more like "ain't nobody got time for that, I'll just see it on a different day, it doesn't matter."

My point is, it only makes sense to say something is "worth the wait" if you also had the option of NOT waiting, and the result from not waiting is different than the result from waiting. It only makes sense to discuss whether something is "worth" some cost if you can compare it to the result if you hadn't chosen to pay that cost.

All right, so when we talk about if sex is "worth the wait," let me first say this: I believe I never even had the option of having sex until after I started dating Hendrix. I was sheltered and clueless and scared of the idea of sex- it was described by purity-culture teachers as something that just *happened* suddenly when people lose control of their bodies. And I was asexual and didn't know it. I dated other boys before Hendrix, but back then I viewed sex as a horrific sin that OF COURSE was not a normal thing to do with one's boyfriend. In that mindset, there was no chance I could have consented to sex.

So to me it doesn't make sense to talk about the concept of "worth the wait" as it applies to the period of my life before I met Hendrix, because back then I WASN'T choosing to not have sex. There were so many mental and emotional barriers that it's just not realistic to say that sex is a thing I could have chosen back then.

In fact, I always used to wonder what people meant when they said "it's so hard to stay pure." That statement has 2 possible meanings:

1. "Because I don't have a sexual partner, I feel lonely, and I don't like living this way."
2. "I have many opportunities to have sex, but I know I must say no to all of them, even though I wish I could say yes."

I could very much relate to Statement 1 (though, as it turns out, I don't actually have sexual attraction, though I have strong romantic and sensual attraction). Statement 2 was... sometimes it seemed like that's what people meant, when they said "it's so hard to stay pure." Like when they would talk about how very few people are able to successfully get to their wedding day as virgins. But it didn't make any sense to me. I wasn't choosing not to have sex; I couldn't imagine any circumstance in my day-to-day life where the opportunity to have sex would present itself. (I was, however, very much CHOOSING to stomp down my romantic desires and "guard my heart." But that's a subject for another post.)

I remember one time, in high school, I overheard some gossip about how so-and-so's boyfriend is cheating on her. And I was very confused- did they mean "cheating" as in "having sex with someone else"? Because, we're just high school kids, surely nobody is having sex. (As an asexual, I have to ask: Were people having sex in high school? But... how? Like I know the statistics that say yes, a lot of people in high school are having sex. But I just... can't imagine ... I'm not judging or anything, I'm just ... sex was the farthest thing from my mind back then- I only thought about it in the context of "don't do it." And not because any part of me desired to do it, but because church people made such a big deal about "don't do it.")

(No joke y'all, when I first heard the song, "Let's Talk About Sex," I was baffled at what on earth there could be to talk about. Just "we're not going to do it"- what else could there possibly be, on the topic of sex, to discuss with your boyfriend or girlfriend? I seriously could not think of anything.)

(And then when I started reading feminist blogs, many of them talked about how it's important to have sex ed in school, and I was all "yes I agree, it's good to be educated about health and your own body, we don't have to be scared of information like I was in purity culture." And then, much later, I discovered that many of these feminist bloggers believed that it was important to have good sex ed for students AS A PRACTICAL THING BECAUSE MANY OF THOSE STUDENTS WILL BE HAVING SEX. And I was just TOTALLY ASTONISHED. I had NO IDEA that one of the main concerns in the sex-ed debate was "a lot of kids will be having sex, we need to teach them how to be healthy when they do." I had NO IDEA. My opinion was more along the lines of "purity culture taught me to be scared of my own body- how about we don't teach kids that".)

(I did not mean to make this a blog post about "All the Times Perfect Number Didn't Realize She Was Asexual" but it seems that's what's happened.)

ALL RIGHT MOVING ON. For the term "worth the wait" to be meaningful, there must be 2 different outcomes being compared: one where you chose to wait, and one where you didn't. But is there a difference in your married sex if you had sex before marriage vs if you didn't?

Purity culture claims that there IS a difference. They say that if you had sex with an ex and broke up, you'll never get over it, and it will haunt you for the whole entire future of your marriage. They said when you have sex with your spouse, you'll be comparing them to your ex, and you won't be able to really give all your love to your spouse.

I can't speak from experience on this- I've only had sex with Hendrix, who is now my husband, but I have heard from people who have had sex with more than one person during their lifetime, and they laugh at the absurdity of "it will haunt you forever and you'll never get over it and you'll always be comparing."

And another thing: Sometimes purity-culture proponents phrase it as, "you're worth the wait." Like in the "Purity Bear" video. I cannot find the original (if anybody can find the original, PLEASE send me a link, that thing is a masterpiece of creepiness) but here is a remake, and believe me, the original is pretty much exactly as bizarre and awkward. (Update: Thanks so much to the reader who found a link to the original!) "You're worth the wait." Instead of "sex is worth the wait", it's "you're worth the wait"- essentially equating "you" with "having sex with you." Creepy as hell, but yes, this is totally consistent with all the f***ed-up language about "giving yourself away" as a euphemism for sex. Purity culture is full of that kind of crap. (And then they turn around and tell queer people "don't define yourself by your sexuality." Yeah, okay.)

"You're worth the wait" makes no sense. Because there aren't two different possible versions of you, one that's the result of waiting and one that isn't. Purity-culture proponents present it like it's about respecting and valuing someone, when you refuse to have sex with them- but this can't be what is meant by "you're worth the wait." If your partner doesn't have sex with you now, and then they do have sex with you on your wedding day, are they getting a better "you" than if they did have sex with you before and also on the wedding day? Isn't the "you" on the wedding night the same "you"?

"You're worth the wait" is only a meaningful statement if premarital sex literally damages a person and makes them less valuable. Not just damages their sex life, but actually DAMAGES and REDUCES THEIR VALUE AS A PERSON. (Which, yeah, actually that is exactly what purity culture teaches.)

Anyway what I want to say is, I didn't wait til my wedding day to have sex, and I'm glad I didn't. After the wedding Hendrix and I came back to the hotel room, and I was in the shower washing off the sweat and makeup and thinking "wow I'm SO GLAD I'm not getting ready to have sex for the first time right now." It would have been one more thing to think about and worry about on an already-busy day. And it would have meant that, at that point, I would have still been living under the weight of worry and fear over the questions "what is sex and will it actually ruin my life?"- thank goodness I got those resolved YEARS before the wedding. And also, turns out sex is just getting together with someone else and stimulating each other's genitals, it's not a mind-blowing amazing thing, it's just, like, exactly as weird as "getting together with someone else and stimulating each other's genitals" sounds. Also, really glad I figured out I'm asexual and, because I had sex way before the wedding day, I didn't have to spend all that time looking forward to and obsessing over something that actually turned out not to be that interesting.

Wow, can you imagine if we "waited" and then had sex on the wedding night- I would have been like "wait, that's what sex is? Yeah there's no reason we couldn't have done that a long time ago. Would have saved me a lot of worrying."

(Perhaps for some people, they choose not to have sex before marriage and it is "worth the wait." It depends on the specifics of your situation. For me, "waiting" would have been terrible for my mental health.)

You know what was worth the wait though? The wedding. We were engaged for a year and a half, and that felt like a really long engagement- but it legitimately did require that much time to plan such a good wedding. We're in China and the wedding was in the US- and I'm only in the US twice a year. I needed to look at venues and get a dress, and those are things that had to be done in the US. And people had to plan for international travel, get visas, all that. And I wanted it to be in the summer instead of at Christmas (those are the only two options for when I would be in the US) because I have a bunch of extended family who are much more able to travel in the summer.

It really had to take that much time to get all this together. And the wedding was so amazing. I'm glad everything went the way it did. If we had tried to throw something together in 6 months or a year, if I had to find a dress in China without my mom and sisters, if we had to just pick a venue without looking at it first, if we had to find a different photographer (because the one we got probably would have been booked already if we were working on a shorter timescale), etc- the wedding wouldn't have been as good.

See, a wedding is the kind of thing you (in theory) only do once, and it takes a huge amount of time, money, and effort- a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Sex, not so much. I'm glad I had sex before marriage. It SO would NOT have been "worth the wait."

On Marriage and Knowing Each Other

A couple's AT-AT cosplay. Image source.

So I'm married now. And I thought married people totally know each other- but we don't. And I thought being married would mean we're perfect Christians who always sacrifice to serve each other- but we're not.

Purity culture always made a big deal about sex being the ultimate way to know someone and be vulnerable with them and give yourself to them. That was why they said you're only allowed to have sex when you're married- because if you had sex with some ex in the past, then that ex knew you in the deep way that only your spouse was supposed to know you.

And I've heard Christians talk about how if you have sex with someone and then break up with them, it's the most devastating thing ever. I specifically remember one Christian speaker who said "when someone knows every curve of your body, and then they reject you..." But that's ridiculous. As close and intimate as sex is, it's mostly about knowing someone's body. Really knowing a person is so much more than that. By having sex, you know someone in a unique way that maybe nobody else (or very few people) have known them, but that doesn't mean you know what's really important about them. It doesn't mean you know them better than their friends or family.

I can understand why many people would only choose to be known in a sexual way by someone whom they're also very close with in other ways. (That's what I choose too, being asexual and all.) But that doesn't mean having sex is somehow equivalent to being truly known, such that a breakup after having sex is by definition more painful than if you didn't have sex.

(Also I have heard pastors say "sex is the highest form of communication", which, like, what does that even mean? As an asexual, umm, no.)

Anyway my point is, coming from a purity culture background, I basically understood the phrases "you're married", "you're having sex with them", and "you know them fully" to be equivalent. But now I'm married to Hendrix and I don't know everything about him. And how could I? Even though we're married, we'll always be 2 different people, with our own independent minds.

Back when I was in purity culture and dreaming about "my future husband", I imagined that he would read my journals. Because I would be totally okay with him knowing everything, no secrets. And now I don't have a journal anymore; I have a blog, but Hendrix doesn't read my blog. It's all in English, and mostly about a particular subculture of American Christianity that he doesn't have any experience with at all. (Yes, he can read English, but he doesn't really want to spend so much of his spare time reading such a huge amount of text that's not his first language.) But I talk to him about my blog all the time. If I have feelings about something I'm writing about, I tell him and he listens. And that works. I can just tell him the things that I want him to know. He doesn't have to read the whole entire thing.

Here's another example: I've read articles where someone was writing about some childhood trauma she had experienced, and she mentioned in her article about telling her husband about it, because she had never told him before- and I was so confused. Because aren't married people supposed to totally know each other? How could the husband not already know?

But with Hendrix and I, yeah of course there are tons of things that have happened to us in the past that we haven't told each other about. Not because they're secrets, but because we just never happened to mention them to each other. Maybe at some point I'll have a bunch of feelings about something that happened to me a long time ago, and then I'll tell Hendrix, because he is so sweet and caring and I like to tell him how I feel. But otherwise, yeah sure there could be things I've never told him about, just because I don't really think about them.

We know everything about each other's daily habits. I know what kind of food he likes, what kind of clothes he wears, his favorite music and movies and TV shows and websites. All that stuff about each other's day-to-day lives, we know fully. He can often predict what I'm going to say, which is kind of annoying and kind of hilarious.

He doesn't really know what I do at my job though. I'm an engineer, he's not. I tell him about what I do at work, but he doesn't really understand it.

And actually, there are a lot of areas where my husband doesn't have the necessary background experience to really totally understand me. And that's why I need ex-evangelical friends. I need American friends. I need my family. I need math nerd friends. I need friends who make fan theories about Disney princesses. I need friends who know the appropriate things to yell at the TV while watching football. And it's a good thing that I have friends who can understand those parts of me in a way my husband can't. It's not like some kind of competition where someone is threatening my husband because they understand some particular aspect of me better than he does.

Also, purity culture led me to believe that being married would mean I'm a perfect Christian. How many times have I heard people questioning why God hasn't set them up with their designated future spouse yet, and the answer given by good church people is "God wants you to work on your own character right now. Don't try to find the right person- try to BECOME the right person."

Or that absurd advice about two people both following God so hard and that's how they end up getting together. Here are some completely awful images I've seen promoting this crap:

Image text: "A woman's heart should be so lost in God that a man needs to seek him in order to find her." Image source.

An equilateral triangle with God at the top corner and a boyfriend and girlfriend at the bottom corners. There are arrows that indicate when the boyfriend and girlfriend are moving towards each other on the bottom edge of the triangle, that's the "wrong focus" and when they are both moving up the sides towards God, that's the "right focus". Image source.

This triangle thing is telling us that when both partners are working on moving closer to God, they actually become closer to each other too. Blahhh.

Back when I was on fire for Jesus, I actually hated this kind of stuff, because it presents God as a means to an end. People would ALWAYS talk about these memes in the context of "you are sad that you are single now, but here is what you should work on in order to get God to bring your future husband to you." I always felt like they were saying I need to pretend I only care about God and don't care about getting a boyfriend, in order to fool God into giving me one.

All this advice about "don't focus on finding the right person, focus on being the right person" or "God wants to work on you more first before you meet your future spouse" implies that people who are married have already achieved perfect-Christian status. Like marriage is some kind of reward God gives you when you become a good enough Christian. Ugh. Gross. (And a lot of single people have written about how church often treats single people really badly.)

People don't get married by becoming perfect Christians. The only thing you need in order to get married is a person who wants to marry you (in some places there are restrictions on gender too) and money for a wedding. That's it. It has nothing to do with being "godly." Yes, you can make a case that it's not a good idea to just find someone who's willing to marry you- instead you should spend enough time to get to know them and make sure you're compatible- but some people do get married "too young" or "for the wrong reasons" and God doesn't stop it.

Also I've heard pastors talk about how a husband and wife love each other totally and always serve each other. I remember one Christian speaker who talked about how sometimes in the night, when she wanted a glass of water, she would ask her husband to get up and get one for her, and he has to do it because he is required to love his wife sacrificially. (She added that she probably shouldn't do that to him too much, it's kind of taking advantage of him.) Basically that's what I thought it would be like being married- but Hendrix and I aren't like that at all. Yes, we do a lot of little nice things for each other, but we don't do EVERYTHING, ALL the time. He would probably say "why can't you get your own water?"

(On a related note, I can tell you that right now our sink is full of dishes that have been accumulating for several days, and neither of us has decided to be "self-sacrificing" and "serve" by washing them. Probably when there are no more clean cups, one of us will wash them.)

We're basically the same people we were before we got married. We love each other and do a lot of nice, loving things for each other, but it's not like I'm spending all my spare time asking myself "how can I love and serve him more?" He's fine, he can take care of himself.

(Yeah maybe "good Christians" could argue that the reason Hendrix and I aren't "perfect Christians" even though we're married is we didn't follow the "rules" and do it "God's way." Hendrix isn't even a Christian. So, you can believe that explanation if you want.)

So we don't fully know each other, and we're not in some kind of "sacrificial love" utopia. Now someone might say "well you've only been married for a month, of course you're not there yet, you have no idea what marriage is really like." And yes, that's probably true. But my point is, purity culture didn't teach that this is something that you gradually get to after years and years of being together. They said knowing each other can be accomplished by just having sex one time- they didn't say it in those words exactly, but that's the rationale behind "if you had sex with some ex when you were a teenager, it threatens the entire future of your marriage." (Which is EXPLICITLY TAUGHT by purity culture.) And they taught that marriage is the reward after you become a good enough Christian- which means that at the start of your marriage, you'll already be at that perfect-Christian level.

But it's not like that, and OF COURSE it's not like that. A wedding isn't some kind of magical thing that completely changes who you are. It's a big deal, yes, but not like how they described it in church. 

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Related:
If A Wife Is Required To Have Sex, That's Not "Intimacy"

On Perfect Weddings

Bride wearing a stormtrooper helmet. Image source.

Did I mention I got married?!!! It was awesome. The whole day was so incredibly amazing and happy, and I felt like it was perfect.

It wasn't perfect though, not in a literal sense. I felt like it was perfect- and what I mean by that is, I was so completely happy about everything that I barely even noticed the things that didn't go "perfectly." I didn't have a feeling like "this is pretty good, but it could have been better if this and that had gone differently."

There was only one issue which was serious enough to be a potential crisis: My dress was SO TIGHT. I put it on before the ceremony and it looked AMAZING and I'm thinking, I can't really breathe normally in this dress. After a few minutes I felt light-headed and I'm wondering if I'm going to keel over during the ceremony. My sisters, my mom, and I did some problem-solving and figured out that if we don't zip up the back all the way, it's a lot more comfortable and I would be able to breathe. So that's what we did: I got married in a dress that had the back zipper gaping open. During the ceremony I had a white slip on under it so the hole wasn't noticeable, but then for the reception I took off the slip and my skin was showing. Several days later I'm looking at photos of me dancing and I'm like "oh it was noticeable" and my family is like "lolololol YES of course, it was a giant hole in the back of your dress, yes it was 'noticeable.'"

But the point is, we solved that problem and everything went fine and I didn't feel bad about it at all. Several of the guests reassured me that "it just looks like a keyhole back, some wedding dresses have an open back, people probably just thought it was a keyhole back," which, first of all I had never heard of a "keyhole back" so, okay whatever, and second, it kind of felt like they were trying too hard to reassure me that it wasn't a bad thing. As if they were worried I would be really distressed about it and they needed to help me feel better. (Note: I just googled what a "keyhole back" is. Uh no it didn't look like that. It looked like I forgot to zip the back of my dress.)

So we only had one thing that was a potential crisis. But for the purposes of this blog post about "perfect weddings," I'll list a bunch of other things that happened that weren't "perfect": My veil fell off several times during the ceremony, and one of the bridesmaids kept trying to stick it back on until she just gave up after the third or fourth time (and I thought it was HILARIOUS). There was an edit I made to one of the lines in the vows, a few days before the wedding, that didn't make it into the final version that was read at the ceremony. After the part in the ceremony where the parents stand up, the officiant didn't tell them to sit down, so they just stood there awkwardly for the first bit of the ceremony. Hendrix tried to put his ring on my finger at first, and I had to whisper "that's yours" at him in Chinese. We made some changes to the design of the cake, a few weeks before the wedding, but the cake that showed up was our original design instead. The DJ said our groomsman's name wrong when introducing the toasts. The song "Toxic" was not played at the reception- like how can you have a wedding where you don't dance to "Toxic"? (I gave the DJ a giant list of songs and he wasn't able to get through all of them. Not his fault.)

It feels weird to list all these "imperfect" things though, because they didn't really matter. It wasn't "perfect," but that doesn't mean it was in any way inferior or less enjoyable than a hypothetical wedding where these details had gone "right." Your mileage may vary- everybody's wedding is different, and everybody has different feelings about the importance of each part. And it's totally fine to be unhappy about something that didn't go according to plan. My point is that a wedding isn't going to be "perfect" in a literal sense, and that shouldn't be the goal anyway.

And another thing: Your wedding guests aren't the set of people you love the most in the world. Of course you want to invite all the people you love the most, but then practical things come into play, like deciding which relatives to invite, and if you invite one cousin then you have to invite all of them, and this person lives too far away so they won't realistically be able to come and we don't want them to feel like they're obligated to send a gift, etc etc etc. And then after you send out the invitations, the people who say yes aren't the people who love you the most; they're the people who are able to get themselves to that particular location on that particular date. People who live close to your wedding location, or have the time and money to travel. People who weren't busy with something else that day. Poor Hendrix, he invited a lot of people from China who weren't able to come. We didn't have a "bride's side" and "groom's side" because the groom's side would have been pathetically sparse. As for me, there were some people I wanted to see there who weren't able to come, and some friends that I haven't seen in 5 years who were able to come and I was so happy about that.

There's this ideal that a wedding is a big party with all the people you love the most, but it's really not. Some of them won't be able to come, just for their own personal reasons, and that's okay. And then there could be other people you weren't expecting, but end up making your wedding so fun with their presence. Like my cousin's boyfriend, whom we will call Kyle. He was so much fun on the dance floor, and he took a ton of great photos and gave them to me afterward. Back when we made the guest list, we weren't thinking about him at all; he was just there as a +1 for my cousin. But now I have these fun memories with him and that's great.

We're never going to get that exact group of people all together again. And that's okay. Just enjoy the moment while we can.

So was it "the happiest day of my life"? I don't know, I was too busy getting married to think about "so what about the day we got a puppy, back when I was 13, is this happier than that or not?" Why would you need to compare one happy day to another? Why does it matter which day is "the happiest day of your life"? Your wedding doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be the best in every aspect. There will be other happy days in the future. There will be other fun parties. There will be more memories to be made, and more opportunities to see those loved ones who weren't able to come to the wedding. There will be more chances to dance to "Toxic." (Full disclosure: I do this alone in my apartment on a weekly basis.) It's not like it's your only chance to throw a big fun party. There's not really anything that's exactly the same as a wedding, but that's okay.

Kiss the Groom

A bride and groom kissing. Image source.

When I was thinking about what I wanted the our wedding ceremony to be like, I decided I did NOT want to include the line "you may now kiss the bride." It portrays the groom as the one who is actively doing something, and the bride as a passive object waiting for it to happen to her. Aren't the bride and groom BOTH making the choice to get married? Don't they BOTH enjoy kissing? Why is this line specifically addressed toward the groom? (Patriarchy, that's why.)

I even remember one wedding I was at, where the officiant said, "David, you may kiss your bride." Yes, he actually said the groom's name right there. As if to make it clear that this was about the groom, and the bride would just passively let it happen to her.

And thinking about it now, it feels gross, but at the time I thought that's just the way it is. The pastor says "you may now kiss the bride" because that's what you say at weddings. I wasn't a feminist yet; I didn't think about the history and the reasons behind wedding traditions. I didn't recognize it as the product of a sexist and patriarchal system. I didn't know that weddings don't have to be that way.

If you had that line at your wedding, I'm not judging you. I'm not concerned about individual people's choices; the real problem is the culture that tells us this is normal. Ever since I was a little girl, I knew that at weddings, they say "you may kiss the bride", and I never heard anyone ask "hey why don't they ever say 'you may kiss the groom'?" Nobody ever questioned it- and that's a problem.

Our officiant was fantastic, and she actually asked us about this during the planning even though I hadn't even mentioned it to her yet. She was like, "So do you want me to say 'you may kiss the bride' or 'you may kiss each other' or what?" We decided on "you may kiss each other."

Such a small thing, just one line out of the entire wedding day, but I'm really glad we kissed "each other."

Related: We're Not Doing the Garter Thing

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Note: In this post I'm specifically talking about weddings with a bride and groom, but don't forget that same-sex weddings exist too! Also some people don't enjoy kissing and that's fine too. You're not required to kiss just because you're married.

Giving Candy to All My Coworkers Because I'm Getting Married

A week before I went back to the US for the wedding, I spent some quality time putting a bunch of candy into little boxes.

See in China there's a tradition: When you get married, you buy adorable little boxes and put maybe 4 to 6 pieces of candy in each one, and bring them to work and give one to each of your coworkers. (And if you have a baby, you bring in little boxes of candy for everyone at work for that too.) You know, as a way to celebrate.

They sell these boxes specifically for wedding candy, in sets of 50 on taobao (which is like Amazon but for China). I've gathered a bunch of pictures of different types to show you:

Red metal heart-shaped container. Image source.

Little red paper bags of various sizes, with 囍 [xǐ], the "double happiness" character for weddings. Image source.

This one even includes data on how many of various types of candy you can fit in.

Round red boxes. Image source.

Intricate red wooden box. Image source.

A bunch of triangle-shaped pink boxes (with ribbons and flowers) arranged all together as if they are slices of one big pie. Image source.

Red boxes which have the word "Love" or a drawing of a bride and groom on the sides. Image source.

Round pink metal tins with ribbons and flowers. Image source.

Same pink metal tins as above, but they are open so you can see how much candy fits in (there are 2 sizes available). 

In China, red is the color for weddings, so most of the boxes are red, but it's easy to find other colors too. Also, in my experience they usually have less candy than these photos show. Usually there's 1 of those round Ferrero Rocher chocolates or maybe 2 little Dove chocolates, and several pieces of non-chocolate candy.

So. Yep. Did that. Gave candy to everyone at work, and they all told me "恭喜 [gōng xǐ]" which means "congratulations." It was pretty cool. ^_^

JUST MARRIED!!!!!!!

We did it!

I Know We'll Have a Good Marriage, BECAUSE We're Not Pure

A man and woman kissing. Image source.

Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu guyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyys the wedding is just a few weeks away! Oh my goodness I am so ready to be married to Hendrix. (I'm not ready to have a wedding, there are still a ton of details to figure out. Oh my.) Really really excited about being married to him.

It's overwhelming to think how different this all feels than what I expected when I was in purity culture.

Back when I was in purity culture, the one thing I was always trying to figure out was this: How are you supposed to actually get to know a person well enough to decide if it's a good idea to marry them, if every bit of romantic or emotional closeness- even the very simple act of going on a first date- erodes part of your purity you can never restore and makes you less worthy of a good marriage?

How do you go from single and pure, completely inexperienced and therefore a perfect, undamaged potential partner, to actually married to a real live person? Doesn't it seem like in between there must be some period of time where you're dating someone without being 100% confident you're going to marry them, and that's taking a HUGE risk with your priceless purity... how is this supposed to work?

Some purity-culture proponents address this problem by having the parents control the "courting" process. The boy has to ask the girl's dad for permission to date her, and the dad judges if he's worthy or not. And then when they go on dates, they're never alone, they always have a "chaperone." The Duggar family does it like this (and it's CREEPY AS HELL). Basically, in this form of purity culture, the couple isn't actually making the decision to get married- it's the parents making the decision. And therefore there's no need for the couple to risk their purity by really getting to know each other.

But that wasn't the version of purity culture I believed in. Instead, I believed God would tell me which guy I should marry. I believed the decision would be made based on prayer and extensive analysis of a guy's characteristics- rather than by, you know, dating and getting to know him in a relationship setting. Yes, I believed I would have to date "my future husband" for 2 years, just to be sure, but the real decision-making would be happening before even agreeing to the first date.

I believed that, while it would be ideal to never ever date anyone unless he's "my future husband", in reality there's no way to actually be sure about that, and dating is a big risk no matter what. Even if God tells me I should date a certain guy, that's still not a guarantee he's the one I'll marry- it doesn't mean I'm allowed to quit "guarding my heart" and actually love said guy.

It would be a difficult balancing act between purity and information. I need to be as pure and inexperienced as possible in order to have a good marriage. But I need to get enough information about the guy in order to know marrying him is a good idea. Basically, my purity would be the currency used to buy information. And I need to make sure I spend as little as possible on guys I don't end up marrying. Every single action I take with a hypothetical boyfriend must first be carefully weighed to decide if the purity cost is worth the amount of information I would gain.

So whenever I had a crush on a good Christian boy, I would go to my room, kneel on the floor, and pray and pray and pray about it. I would try to find little signs that perhaps God was indicating that this guy was "my future husband." Maybe there was a certain song I kept hearing in my head over and over, and the lyrics reminded me of this guy- was God trying to tell me "yes" by putting that song in my head? I would analyze things that the guy said, try to judge whether he was mature enough, try to determine if he had the correct beliefs and worldview.

One of my friends, let's call her Claire, was asked out by a good Christian guy. She spent weeks praying about it, and finally decided no. Because, she said, she doesn't feel like she can submit to his leadership, because occasionally he seems to make decisions she sees as a bit irresponsible- and if she were his wife, she'd have to just go along with that. And because she's never been on a date before and her first date is a really really big deal and she's not willing to give it to a guy that she's not sure about. That was the kind of purity culture I was in. I saw Claire as a role model in purity. (I, on the other hand, had kissed a boy in the past so I was not pure like Claire was.) She and I talked a lot about how dating was supposed to work. How to always put God first and not lose our purity.

This is all so incredibly different from my decision to marry Hendrix. See, we're not "pure." I don't "guard my heart"- and I haven't "guarded my heart" for a LONG time. Our whole relationship has always been about loving each other, supporting each other, having fun with each other- not about carefully trying to stay as far apart as possible while discreetly gathering intel on whether or not he would be a good husband.

(If you're wondering, NONE of this is a euphemism for sex. [Though for the record, I'm not the least bit ashamed to say that YES, we do have sex.] I'm talking about how purity culture says it's "emotionally impure" to be in love. I'm talking about how the purity-culture version of Perfect Number would have stopped herself after laughing and laughing at some cute little thing Hendrix did, and she would have felt a stab of panic- "oh, I let my guard down, I let myself laugh and just enjoy this moment, he is working his way into my heart and this is DANGEROUS.")

I used to think I couldn't date a guy unless I was pretty sure I was going to marry him- and I worried about how to make a decision like that with so little information. I could investigate what his personality is like and try to imagine whether he and I would be compatible. It would be a lot of guesswork and hypotheticals. It would be a lot of prayer and searching everywhere for little signs that God was saying "yes" or "no." And... that's all. In purity land, breaking up is The Worst Thing Ever, so you pretty much have to decide to marry someone without even dating them at all. Just hypotheticals. Just prayer. (And even after you decide to date them, you still can't fully love- you have to "guard your heart" until you get engaged.)

And it's astonishing how my relationship with Hendrix isn't like that at all. This decision isn't about hypotheticals; it's about years of actual real-world experience being a couple. We haven't been cautious. We haven't held back. We haven't been "pure." We aren't jumpy and scared of being "too attached" and "emotionally impure" and so we've been free to just love each other. Free to just be a couple and support each other through the good and bad that life throws at us. And because of that experience, I have the information I need to make this decision. (And not just information, but a lot of fun and happiness along the way.) I know it's a good decision.

They always said that purity was the #1 most important factor in ensuring a successful marriage. But I've discovered it's not like that at all. It's our experience- the opposite of purity- which tells me we will have a good marriage.

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Makes me want to say "I do"~

"I Do" Colbie Caillat

So I Gave My Fiance the "Letters To My Future Husband"

A notebook with the words "Letters to my Future Husband" on the cover. Image source.

Writing "letters to your future husband" is A Thing in purity culture. Girls are taught that God has destined them to get married, to a man, exactly once over the course of their lifetime, and that God doesn't want them to date anyone else besides this one predestined man. And so their loneliness and romantic desire, which is not allowed to find fulfillment in dating, gets redirected into "writing letters to your future husband."

I wrote a few. Three. Back when I was in college, in my on-fire-for-God days. Each one was probably prompted by an instance of overwhelming, unbearable loneliness, or perhaps a HUGE CRUSH that I couldn't do ANYTHING with because I believed it would be a sin to make even the slightest move in the direction of possibly starting a relationship without explicit permission from God. I wanted so bad, so so so so bad, to be in a romantic relationship, but I was following the purity rules, which said ideally I am only allowed 1 relationship in my entire life. So the only outlet for that desire was praying for "my future husband" or writing letters to "my future husband".

Anyway, last time I was at my parents' house I found the letters, and I brought them back to Shanghai and gave them to Hendrix, my fiance. And we read them together.

I gave them to him because that's what their purpose was, ostensibly. But... they weren't really for him. They were for the perfect Christian purity-culture-following husband that God destined to be with me- an imaginary person who has never existed and who will never exist. Because I've changed so much since then, and I don't believe that stuff anymore, and Hendrix isn't even a Christian.

Letters, from a person who doesn't exist anymore, to a person who never existed. And I went ahead and gave them to Hendrix because that's what past-Perfect-Number would have wanted. But the content of those letters has no relation to the man I'm actually marrying, here in reality.

And OH GEEZ it's embarrassing, what's in those letters. Oh so much cringe. Here, take a look at this actual real thing I wrote in 2009:

I love Jesus Christ more than anything in the world. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And of course you do too. That's pretty cool, and if you're like I want you to be, then reading "I love Jesus Christ more than anything in the world" made you kinda happy. Because that's the #1 characteristic you want in a wife.

Ohhhhhhh cringe so much cringe.

I mean, you have to be several layers deep in purity culture and evangelicalism to even understand a lot of the stuff in these. One theme throughout the three letters is how I'm working so hard to fight against my romantic desires. In order for that to make sense, the reader would have to share my belief that God doesn't want me to have any romantic relationships in my entire lifetime except the one with "my future husband" and that it would be a sin to even daydream about a crush or imagine how amazing and pleasurable it would be to touch an attractive guy. Seriously, the phrase "guy-related idolatry" appears in here. That is an actual thing I wrote back then, assuming that it would be obvious to "my future husband" what that phrase meant. (It means it would be sinful and extremly disloyal to God if I do anything other than squash down my romantic desires as much as possible.) Though I didn't use these exact words, the letters basically say, "I am working so hard to be emotionally pure by fighting against my feelings of attraction, and I'm doing it primarily for God, but also for you."

Another theme throughout the letters is obsession with God. I wrote about how God is the most important thing to me, how I love God way more than I love "my future husband", how we're totally going to serve God together and chase God together and pray together, and our relationship will be defined by wild, desperate, whole-hearted devotion to God.

Yeah....................... so .................... yeah. Hendrix read them, and I know there's stuff he didn't understand, because it's written in a very advanced form of evangelicalese. And since then, I've asked him several times, "So what did you think about the 'letters to my future husband'? I want to write a blog post about it," and he always tells me he doesn't really have anything to say. Just "yeah I knew you used to believe that" and that's all. The letters didn't make a strong impression on him; they're not meaningful to him at all. And why would they be? They were written for someone else entirely.

But when purity-culture advocates talk about "writing letters to your future husband", they talk about how sweet and romantic it will be when you finally give them to him. How it'll be a deeply meaningful expression of your love, to show him that all these years you've been waiting for him and thinking about him, you loved him before you even met.

That only makes sense if people don't change. And yeah, in purity culture, you're not supposed to change. They teach little kids "here's how the world works, here's what kind of spouse you should look for, here are the rules to stay pure and the consequences if you don't follow them" (and this happens before kids are even old enough to know what sex is or why anyone would choose to do it). And since those are all the "correct answers" that everyone is supposed to follow, there's no reason to expect that one's beliefs should change. In purity culture, change and personal growth are bad. In purity culture, even if you're just a little girl, you can be certain about what kind of man God wants you to marry, because ideally you won't change much between now and than.

And now I'm astonished that anyone would think that back in 2009 I had anything meaningful to say to Hendrix- but that's what purity culture teaches. And ... I don't know, maybe for some people it's kind of cute and funny to read something they wrote long ago, but this isn't like that for me. Because back then I was 100% serious. I worked so hard fighting against my romantic desires, and I thought it mattered.

The "letters for my future husband" were never for Hendrix, but I'm going to write him a new letter. It will be based on our actual real-life relationship, not what evangelical ideology claims my "future husband" should be like. I'll write about how I know he loves me because he helped me get out of purity culture and because he sometimes downloads little games for his phone so that "we can play it together" and that's just ADORABLE. And he'll open it the morning of the wedding day.

I'm so glad I'm with Hendrix instead of "my future husband." I'm so glad I'm not marrying a guy who appreciates all the hard work I did staying "pure" or believes that I hurt him by dating other guys before I even met him. I'm so glad I'm not marrying someone who would read my "letters to my future husband" and think they were deep, profound, and meaningful expressions of love.

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Please enjoy this song:
"Countdown" Beyonce

My Chinese Marriage License

A pair of 结婚证 [jiéhūn zhèng]- marriage licenses. Image source.

So we did it~ we got our marriage licenses. Woo very exciting, but I'm not counting us as really married yet, because we haven't had the wedding yet. We just chose to do the legal part of getting married in China instead of the US, because of visas and paperwork and legal things.

I'm not going to go around telling our American wedding guests that we're already legally married, because they might think it means our wedding isn't a "real" wedding. Come on. The US goverment, with its laws about visas and green cards, does not have the power to make our wedding any less "real." Even though we're already legally married, I decided for me it doesn't count as married married until the wedding.

In China, actually, getting legally married is always a totally separate event from the wedding itself. Typically a couple will get their marriage license a few months before the wedding. For this reason, "wedding" isn't really the exactly right translation of "婚礼 [hūnlǐ]". Every dictionary will tell you that "wedding" is "婚礼 [hūnlǐ]" and "婚礼 [hūnlǐ]" is "wedding", but, not really. If we're coming from the context of American culture, we understand the word "wedding" to mean "a big celebration where people become legally married" and there really is no such thing in China. You become legally married, and you have the big celebration (婚礼 [hūnlǐ]), but not on the same day. But that doesn't make it any less of a "real" wedding, and it doesn't make our wedding any less real.

[Related: Getting Engaged Isn’t Exactly a Thing in China]

Here's what we had to do to get our marriage license:

First of all, we had to get a photo taken. It was pretty much the same style as a passport photo, except with two people, and the background is red. (Because red is the color for celebrating weddings.) Hendrix and I actually went to a photography studio that has fancy clothes and does photo editing so it comes out really nice.

Here's what Chinese marriage licenses look like inside. Image source.

Also, I had to go down to the US embassy in Shanghai and get a document that says I'm not already married. And wow, you guys, going to the US embassy, as a US citizen, you feel like a VIP. There's like tons and tons of Chinese people waiting in line, probably applying for visas, but you get to cut the line and go past everyone, to this special room. Also, fun fact: If you are white and show up at the US embassy and then talk to the security guards in Chinese, they will think you are weird.

So anyway, I got the "Single Status Certificate." It was really easy- the US embassy gave me the form, and I filled in my name, fiance's name, etc, checked off the box that says I've never been married before (there was also a box you could check if you were married and then divorced/widowed) and then some official at the US embassy signed it. I had to raise my right hand and swear that all the information was true, I guess because they're not actually going to check. So anyway I got that.

Then we had to go back to Hendrix's hometown to get the marriage licenses. See, China has something called the "hukou system." A 户口[hùkǒu] is a very official document that says the address where your residency officially is. Whatever city you're officially a resident of, you have to get the marriage license there. (Or rather, at least one of the partners has to be a resident of that city.) A lot of things like buying a home, where you can send your kids to school, etc, are related to the 户口[hùkǒu] that you have. And you can change your 户口[hùkǒu], but apparently it's a huge pain, and it's hard to get one for Shanghai because EVERYBODY wants a Shanghai 户口[hùkǒu]. So the point is, we couldn't get the marriage license in Shanghai; we had to go to Hendrix's hometown, because that's what his 户口[hùkǒu] says.

So anyway, we went back to his hometown, and we weren't 100% sure if the government official would be in the marriage license office that day, or if they would suddenly tell us we needed some other paperwork, so we added an extra day to our trip, just in case.

But everything went well. ^_^ We filled out a form and showed the guy all our documents- passport, hukou, singleness form- and he typed it up and printed forms we had to sign. Signing that form felt incredibly anticlimactic (I mean, I've signed lots of things in my life, you guys, it didn't feel special...) but that's the moment we became legally married. The government guy printed the marriage licenses for us and we had to glue the photos in. In China, a couple gets 2 marriage licenses- one for each person. Also, you can't get married to a same-sex partner- Taiwan is super close though, so hooray~

Later that day, I was talking with Hendrix about how we each had to glue the photo into our own marriage license. We used a gluestick that had liquid glue inside. I said, "Wow I don't think I've used a gluestick since I was like 10 years old!" and Hendrix said, "oh, good, because I was thinking you use a gluestick like a 10-year-old kid but I didn't want to say anything." See, in the US a gluestick is generally used for arts and crafts projects, and most of us only do those kinds of projects as children, but in China it's seen as an office supply item, and when you submit receipts or whatever, you have to use a gluestick to stick them all onto one sheet of paper. See also: my confusion when I went to the post office and bought stamps and stared dumbfounded at the little jar of glue on the counter, like apparently I'm supposed to glue the stamps on myself? What if I put too much and my postcard gets stuck to 6 other pieces of mail? And then the post office employee just did it for me because I obviously had no clue. ANYWAY the point is I definitely put way too much glue on my marriage license.

The fee for the marriage license was 9 kuai, which is about 1 or 2 US dollars.

Hendrix and I spent the rest of the day scrambling around to find a place that would give us a notarized English translation of the marriage licenses (just because we'll probably need that in the US in the future) and periodically looking at each other and exclaiming "we are MARRIED!" Then we went out to dinner with his family.

After we got legally married, I started referring to him as "老公 [lǎo gōng]" (which every dictionary will tell you means "husband") when I'm speaking Chinese. Before, I referred to him as "未婚夫 [wèi hūn fū]" (which every dictionary will tell you means "fiance", but it seems to me that Chinese people don't really use this word much, because, as I said, getting engaged isn't exactly a thing in China.) In English I still use the term "fiance." After the wedding I'll say he's my husband.

Hendrix, on the other hand, has been telling people I am his "老婆 [lǎo pó]" (which every dictionary will tell you means "wife") since we got engaged, or maybe even before. Seems like in China, people are less strict about using exactly the corrent term?

Update: OKAY I just asked Hendrix why he was calling me "老婆 [lǎo pó]" before we got legally married. He says "老婆 [lǎo pó]" and "老公 [lǎo gōng]" are informal/slang terms for "wife" and "husband." In something more official, like a news article or important paperwork, the words "妻子 [qīzi]" (wife), "丈夫 [zhàngfū]" (husband), and  "爱人 [ài rén]" (spouse) would be used. But if you're just chatting with your coworkers at lunch, you would definitely use "老婆 [lǎo pó]" and "老公 [lǎo gōng]". So, he claims, since "老婆 [lǎo pó]" and "老公 [lǎo gōng]" are for informal conversation, it doesn't really matter if you're literally legally married, you can still use those words.

The point is, translation is hard.

To sum up: Hendrix and I got our marriage licenses. This is very exciting, but I'm not exactly sure how to feel about it, because in China this works so much differently than in the US. When we got legally married, there were no vows or intense emotional moments of love, it was just writing down our names and passport numbers and signing it. And for me, at least for the American/English-speaking part of my life, I'm not counting us as really married until the wedding. I hope nobody thinks our wedding isn't a "real" wedding.

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Please enjoy this adorable Chinese song, "Marry Me Today":