I am not a person that dreams of a perfect wedding day. In fact, with every wedding I attend, I become more and more sure that I do not want any part of a traditional wedding. First of all, I'm not religious--at all. Neither is my boyfriend. Why should we have to have a priest tell us we can be together? I don't want a sermon, even though we both have religious families. Religion is simply not a part of our lives, so why should it be a part of our marriage?
Now, I'm all about family get-togethers. But, when you have tons of people that you hardly recognize coming to your wedding, you have a problem. Most of those people are probably just there for the food/alcohol anyway, and will you ever see them again? There is no point in having hundreds of people come to see you get married when most of them probably don't even care about you.
The thing that bothers me the most about weddings is the tradition of the father giving away the bride. This tradition comes from the time when only men would discuss who got to marry who; a man would ask the father for permission to marry the daughter, and the father would deny or grant permission. This was essentially a trade (anyone remember the dowery?) between men--women were not involved in the business of marriage. Though women today usually have the power to choose their own mates (in the US anyway), we still have this tradition of the father giving away the bride. I do not want to be a part of this trade; I am a woman who can make her own decisions about who to marry and how to have a wedding. I will not be "walked" down the aisle while I am perfectly capable of walking myself--of my own free will.
Right now, I'm not even sure I want to have a wedding. Maybe I just want to go to the court house and get the necessary documents. The point is that it's my choice; I don't have to be controlled by my father.
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