the ‘me, me, me’ wedding

7/28/2019 The Me, Me, Me Wedding

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06.19.13

The Me, Me, Me Wedding

How America is exporting its bridezilla culture.

By Hannah Seligson

When I got married last October, all I heard were variants of This is your day. Its all about you. These messages made me uncomfortable, both because they promotedentering a weird bridal vortex of solipsism and because, as the wedding drew near, it became clear that this was pretty much entirely untrue. In the best possible way, our wedding wasnt about usit was stitched together from what all three sides of our family (two being mine, since my parents are divorced) wanted and valued. It was about honoring thousands of years of Jewish tradition and providingsome nachas, the Yiddish term for parental joy, to our parents, grandparents, and other assorted relatives and guests. The most basic parental dictum we heededwas no shellfish and no meat to meet my parents dietary restrictions, even thoughneither my husband nor I keep kosher or are vegetarians. If I had my druthers,might I have wanted a raw bar and beef short ribs as the entre? Probably. But I decided to cut my losses on that one, and never regretted it.

In many pockets of 21st-century America, the idea of the wedding as something co

mmunal is anathemaa relic from a bygone era or the realm of the devoutly religious. Nuptials today are defined by your Pinterest board, of which there are a multiplying number of wedding-related ones, three-day destination extravaganzas, and$200 spoons from Michael C. Fina. So, many American weddings have evolved intoa fixation with material details, trials of abject devotion by members of the wedding party, and resigned acceptance of bridal crusades for perfection that threaten to crush all in their path. Because, well, you deserve itits your day.

Now we have exported our unique brand of the me, me, me consumer-driven wedding-mania outside our borders. My counterparts in China, those born in the 1980s, arespending extravagantly on their weddings, of which there are 10 million every year. Lavish wedding celebrations in China, which can easily cost more than theirgrandparents made in a lifetimethe average middle-class Chinese wedding costs $12

,000, the amount of disposable income a family in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen has to spend in a yearare becoming increasingly popular. No wonder the weddingindustry in China is growing by 20 percent a year and was valued at $57 billion,according to Ad Age, surpassing the $40 billion U.S. market. Hu Lu, a wedding planner in China, told The Guardian in 2011, Every bride wants to be princess SnowWhite when they get married.

In South Korea, Chinas neighbor to the east, the average cost for a wedding in 2011 rose about 270 percent from 1999, according to Reuters, with total costs outstripping the average annual household income of $42,400. In other rising superpowers, like Brazil, the spending is also running amuck. Clarissa Rezende, founderof Clarissa Rezende: Ideas to Bloom, a high-end event-planning firm in So Paulo,says the average luxury wedding she works on in Brazil now costs between $500,0

00 and $1 million. Many of my clients come to the U.S. to buy their dress. All brides have the dream of being a princess, says Rezende. I wonder where the Chineseand Brazilians got that idea from?

Now, as we export the bridezilla phenomenon abroad, what messagesbeyond just buying more and more expensive thingsare we really sending? (Hint: its more insidiousthan shopping.) Is there any pulling back from the edge of this insanity?

Peggy Olson or Don Draper couldnt have conceived a better marketing slogan than This is your day.


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Its important to remember that it hasnt always been this way. Not so long ago, marriage was the way that we recognized young people as fully adult participants ina larger religious, civic, and familial community, says Kay Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Manning Up: How the Rise of WomenHas Turned Men Into Boys. Today, marriage is a status capstone; it celebrates theglamorous brides bobo achievements, which includes a loving relationship. (Oh yes, and the grooms too.) To be sure, Americans arent the first to focus on materialism or status when it comes to weddings: in India, there has long been the tradition of dowries, but now they just come in the form of an Aston Martin or a new racing pony instead of a flock of goats. But in the U.S. we have taken the wedding materialism and layered on it a sheet of narcissism and self-centeredness, messages that certainly resonate in a country already prone to rugged individualism.Richard Vagg/TLCThe TLC reality show 'Four Weddings' asks brides to rate one another on their big day.Its no accident that the culture of catering to the bride has fueled the burgeoning wedding industry, and vice versa. Peggy Olson or Don Draper couldnt have conceived a better marketing slogan than This is your daythe kind of tagline that so deeply, and reliably, influences consumer behavior. That simple phrase alone drivesthe billion-dollar wedding industry, pushing the cost of the average wedding inthe U.S. in 2012 to $28,427, according to TheKnot.com.

Marketers, both here and overseas, have tapped into the deep, yet somewhat obvio

us, psychology: if you make it about the brideand most of the messaging, as retroas it is, does target the womanand her wildest cinematic dreams of being the perfect princess to her white knight, there is no telling how many thousands of dollars she will spend on a dress and filling mason jars with hand-cut flowers thatwere grown by their florist in their own special plot of land. Tell her, however, A wedding is about the merging of two families and cementing closer ties withyour community, and you can practically hear everyones wallets closing. This is perhaps how we are different from other countries who have historically thrown huge paloozas to celebrate a wedding; the communal and shared values are emphasizedin countries like India, and to a lesser degree, China and Korea. Its the reasonto have a big, blowout weddingnot for you, but for your familywhereas in the U.S.the family and community can often be afterthoughts.

To most Western couples, merging two families sounds like a tribal ritual ratherthan a marriage blueprint.But the slick marketing by the wedding industry explains only part of it. The rise of the me wedding has as much to do with waning religious affiliation. After all, its religious elements that have tempered individualism for centuries. In Judaism, the wedding ceremony talks about being consecrated to me according to the laws of Moses and Israel; in other words, joining a 3,000-year tradition. Jews, ofcourse, arent the only ones. The core of the Indian wedding is that you are marrying the family, not just the person. Its not just about us; its about giving everyrelation something to do, explains Sunny Uppal, 28, who was married in a traditional Indian wedding ceremony in Toronto last month.

Today, to most Western couples the concept of merging two families sounds like a

tribal ritual rather than a marriage blueprint. In-laws, ugh, this generation might say. By focusing on our personal preferences we get more wrapped up in what our future mother-in-law is going to wear or say at the wedding than in the bigger picture of what a wedding symbolizes: how you will coexist and interact with your new family for the rest of your life.

The bride- (and groom-) focused insanity is certainly a byproduct of our increasingly individualistic society. Young people are becoming less tied to religiousinstitutionsPew Research found that today one in four millennials claims no religious affiliation, a record highintroducing a whole new set of values and social m


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ores when it comes to marriage. Nothing signals this more than the wedding officiated by a friend who was ordained as a Universal Life Minister on the Interneta week before, or by couples writing their own vows, another hallmark of the I need to express myself wedding. But in deviating from an organized, shared tradition, the vows people write on their own have become a little odd to listen to, saysNaomi Schaefer Riley, author of Till Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America. Theyll list all the things theyll promise theyll do, like yull promise to listen without judging. These people arent being realistic about marriage.

Whats so wrong with adding your own individual flavor and script? Its your wedding, after all. And who wants to recite words that were written thousands of yearsago and seemingly have little or no relevance today? All fair points, but therecan be a communal spirit that gets lost with homegrown vows, says Riley.

I think religious ceremonies have a sense of context and why people did this in the past, Riley mused to me. It forces you to think about the people who came before you and the people who are no longer with us. It puts the wedding into a context and gives you a sense of perspective that this is not Cinderellas ball.

Is the feeling of Its my day really an excuse to insist on having it your way, a sot of childhood last hurrah?To be sure, not everyone is going to have a religious ceremony, nor should they,but I wondered if theres something young people could learn from more traditiona

l, dare I even say, religious ceremonies? Brooklyn-based writer Ester Bloom wrote about going to the mikvah, a traditional ritual bath taken by brides, before her wedding even though she was by no means Orthodox. But she found that the ideaof a ritual to help me calm down and focus on what I was about to do seemed appealing.

Perhaps the patina of selfishness that is seemingly justified in the moment by the feeling of Its my day is really an excuse to insist on having it your way, a sort of childhood last hurrah. And who wouldnt want a last go-around with unrepentant, puerile me-centrism? But if we believe that marriage is a step toward full adulthoodand that adulthood is a developmental stage defined by becoming less self-centeredshouldnt the messaging surrounding the wedding reflect that? Why are our values about marriage, chief among which is compromise, and the my way or the high

way values of the wedding so in tension? No wonder so many brides talk about post-wedding depression. Its the cold, hard shock of the post-me marriage setting in.

THE GOOD news is that there is an alternative. For us post-religious Americans (and those in China and Brazil who are just getting their first whiff of Westernwedding mania), awareness may come slowly, but it does seem graspable. Thinkingof the wedding from the parents perspective is one way to snap out of our collective me-wedding groupthink. Just ask John Dickerson, an editor at Slate.com, whorecently wrote about how he didnt let his parents invite their friends to his wedding. This isnt about you, we thought, its about us, he wrote. Seventeen years late, he regrets it and penned a mea culpaa call to arms for future brides and groomsto grow up and deal with it and let their parents have their way with the guest list. Dickersons flip on the issue came while thinking about his own sons wedding,

even though the boy is 10 years old. Dickerson hopes his son will do as he saysand not as he did. As Dickerson thought about future generations and what a wedding is really about, a public affirmation of love, he came around to the visionof the wedding that wasnt just about him and his bride. What we didnt understand was that allowing our parents to invite their friends was a celebration of continuity and the communal purpose of matrimony we were trying to create ourselves. Itsalso the generous thing to do.

Thinking from the parents perspective is one way to snap out of our collective me-wedding groupthink.


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My own realization that my wedding wasnt about me came later, but not as late asDickersons; sadly, it was due in part to personal tragedy. For me, I hemmed and hawed about having my dad walk me down the aisle. I wasnt sure if he deserved to do it because of old wounds and scars and feeling torn between my dad and my stepfather, with whom I am very close. There were some ugly and heated conversations. While I might have had legitimate grievances, I lost sight of what I would bedenying my dad, with whom I had a good relationship as an adult: the opportunityto walk his daughter down the aisle. A compromise was eventually reached. He and my mom would walk me halfway down the aisle, and my stepfather and my mom therest of the way to the chuppah. When I looked at him beaming at the wedding, I couldnt imagine not having him at my side. The idea of being so punishing, even ifI might have felt justified in my reasoning, suddenly, in the moment of the wedding, seemed unfathomable. What was I thinking? Certainly not about the future and what that slight might have done to our relationship, about how it would havemade my dads side of the family feel, and the general bad taste it would have left about what was supposed to be such a joyous event and moment in all of our lives. All my dad would have remembered about the wedding was that he was denied the urge that is practically primal among parents: walking your child down the aisle.

A little over a year later, this past January, my dad was killed in a motorcycleaccident, just 21 days shy of his 60th birthday. While the potential for futureloss shouldnt necessarily dictate how to live ones life, there are circumstanceswhen taking the big-picture approach can give clarity to what really counts.

So I say this: let your dad give a toast, even if you know its going to be rambling and off-color; dance with your mom; indulge your spouse, as my husband did for me and agreed to be lifted up in a chair and bounced up and down, even thoughhe found it to be a spectacle. Because, ultimately, its not about you.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/06/19/bridezillas-and-the-rise-of-the-me-me-me-weddings.html

the ‘me, me, me’ wedding

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