Revising weddings

For Jia Tolentino, marriages “holds about as much interest for me as a bag of playground rocks (some! Not much, though).”

So she can’t understand why “18 women, 18 brides. 18 capable, wonderful, educated, privileged, professional, socially aware female humans” would go “enthusiastically plunging” into marriage.

Especially with all its accouterments of patriarchy, the “associated totems” that “have historically represented the diminishment and commodification of a gender that needs more of either as much as we need a swift punch in the face. I understand easily why a man would want a wife; it’s harder to for me to grasp why a woman would want to be one . . . .

“The language and semiotics of marriage are terrible: were still proposed to, our cervical fealty insured by a ring, our fathers give us away to our fuck buddies, we erase and replace our own names. The preferred aesthetic for ‘bride’ is still very close to that of ‘princess,’ a role so passive and empty that there’s not even anything there to subvert.”

The wedding invitations that keep coming in “condense so many of my fears: the persistence of institutions, the necessity of compromise, the fetishization of women and objects and women as objects, the way men grow up believing they’re so important, the slight possibility that for some of us, for me, they are.”

She’s mostly right that weddings are anomalous, and right too to be befuddled at our culture’s “reluctance to let those signposts go.” She doesn’t look very deep, though, not deep enough to wonder if perhaps those outmoded signposts might actually point to something permanent, maybe even something good.