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Kamy
Wicoff Susan
Shapiro Barash Susan
Maushart Rachel
Safier Marg
Stark Elizabeth Freeman An academic deconstructs the wedding Eva Unger Bowditch and Aviva Samet on how to survive your mother-in-lawStephanie Rosenbaum Lisa Miya-Jervis Nancy Cott Sheryl
Nissinen -----------
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Summer 2006 | Let's start with the title of your new book. Why did you call it "I do but I don't: Walking Down the Aisle without Losing your Mind"? A big thing I was trying to write about was the ambivalence that a lot of women feel about the process of their engagement. It begins with being in the position of wanting to get married but feeling like you're not allowed to propose yourself, and how that contradicts how you've handled other decisions in your life and relationships. With each issue the wedding brings up there is always this sense of "I do but I don't." There's a desire to participate in this traditional ritual, and discomfort with it. You talk extensively about proposals and touch on the notion that men and women have different reasons for getting engaged. Men and women come at it from different positions from the beginning, when they start dating. From a very young age girls are taught that they're supposed to make themselves attractive to men and -- I think of this in marketing terms -- saleable. Men, then, are in charge of determining women's worth. This dynamic is brought to fruition by the engagement. With engagement a lot of women feel there's enormous pressure to show their worth. Being marriageable, having a man want to marry them is the perfect demonstration of value and this can interfere with a woman's ability to think about whether she even wants to get married. She shouldn't wonder whether someone wants to marry her, but whether or not she wants to get married. Men, in turn, are pressured not to get "caught" or "trapped". Men come at it from this point of view of having to agonize and drag their feet, and this distorts marriage for men. They're supposed to be evaluating, slowing women down (because women are so commitment frenzied). It's kind of an offence/defense, with the woman playing offence and the men defense. To what extent are these Male/Female roles and to what extent are they not gender specific? What about gay marriages? As I was writing the book, one of the ways that I took my self out of the mode of thinking about these things was to say: "If this was a couple composed of two men or two women, what would happen?" This book really comes from a place of memoir. It is my story. I had always been someone who was very aggressive with men, who was very disdainful of playing games and I found that when it came to engagement, I knuckled under. These stereotypes are difficult to resist. There was something so powerful about the notion that you needed to have a guy propose to you, that if you pushed it on him that it wouldn't mean as much. He has the credibility to say that it was time to get married. A woman is naturally suspect because her own desire for commitment can't be trusted -- it is so fueled by these social pressures. If this weren't so driven by these deep-seated stereotypes in our culture where men are in possession of wealth and power and are able to say "yes" or "no" to a woman, and not the other way around, that if we ever got to a point where one partner was into commitment and the other partner wasn't, and 50% of the time it was the man who was desperate to get married and 50% of the time it was the woman, then great. Right now this is so driven by one's role as the woman or the man that it distorts actual opinions. Women who are really nervous about commitment, who might actually be inclined to take that classic male role, don't. Then when they get engaged they freak out. Why did you so closely anatomize your wedding experience in this book? This is a very emotional and sensitive topic. It is very hard to talk about and involves so many mixed feelings. I thought that if I could look at myself and push myself as far as I could that I would learn a lot more than I would just by thinking in broad social strokes. There is of course interesting social analysis in the big picture, but I worried about generalizations. I pushed hard to show how much even somebody who thinks about these things and is a so-called "conscious bride" gets caught up in this. I was interested in how I had lost my head. I was unable to think critically or analytically in the whole process. I completely shut down. So this was an opportunity for me to think through my wedding experience in a way I hadn't been able to at the time. I was a very irritable and grumpy person through most of my engagement. I wasn't myself. I really didn't feel like myself, so my question became: How do you preserve yourself through this process? What does it mean to do that? The whole thing for me was a protracted identity crisis and I wonder if that can be avoided. Kristen Armstrong, Lance Armstrong's ex-wife, wrote in Glamour recently that the greatest conspiracy in modern history is marriage. She describes how she felt erased by her marriage and that the wedding process is identity stripping. What she has to say brings up a few points. Feminism is this historical thing that happened in the 60's and 70's, and if you're a woman in her thirties, there's this notion that your mother took care of all of that -- marriage is free of sexism and issues that stress or constrain women or that are aimed at socializing women in a way that is contrary to how modern women see themselves. Being a bride is very much about being beautiful, about shopping, about preparing yourself to do a certain kind of labor in your partnership that is usually oriented towards being helpful. As much as guys may turn up for the registry "scan gun shootout," there's still this emphasis on women stepping into the role of wife. And I think there is a failure to recognize that that role is still very entrenched in society. There have been changes, but mostly changes that I think have just added to a woman's load. So now you're supposed to do that domestic job and have a professional job as well. Armstrong is doing a great job by just pointing to this as something we contend with. There's this really insidious thing that has happened with feminist rhetoric. It seems to say: "Well if you think that social pressures can tell you how to be a wife -- if you're truly a feminist and an independent woman, then you'll just say 'no' to all of that. Feminism gave you the right to that, so it's your choice." There's this notion that it's a woman's fault if she falls into this nuptial confusion. There's no recognition that we live in a society and that individuals are shaped by it and there's no getting around that. And that there are practical considerations. People do have lives and houses and families and jobs that have to be negotiated. What has been lost is a discussion of the male role. It's important to think about how men's identities get narrowed by the idea of what it means to be a husband. Lots of men are in jobs that they hate, working hours they don't want to work, not getting enough time to spend with their children. Men often lose friendships after they get married because their social life comes to focus on being with their families and their work life is their work life. This is a piece you also have to look at. I came to the book from a woman's position, a sense of outrage. But I realized how rigid the man's role also is and how this creates this weird dynamic with women. The big conclusion that I reached is that men and women in a real modern marriage would ideally try to help each other avoid the rigid stereotypes. Yes, somebody has to cook and yes somebody has to take care of children, but can you open your mind to the possibility that you can share that labor in a way that isn't entirely driven by gender? Do you think that this dynamic is at all influenced by the age people are when they get married? The name change issue is an interesting window on this question. Name changing is tied to identity. Often a woman's desire to keep her name is tied to work. A woman who is older and who has an established career is likely to keep her name. On the other hand, when women marry when they're older they can have a weariness, an exhaustion from working and doing everything themselves and being very eager to set up house. Someone who has worked for 10 years might not care about her career-identity and may think: "I've been working for 10 years in a male-model 80-hour work week nightmare and I can't wait to have a baby and get married and put it behind me." You talk a lot about the changes that happen in a woman's relationship to her parents, particularly her mother, in this whole engagement and wedding process. I make this argument that the daughters of baby boomers are sandwiched between the feminist ideals with which their mothers have raised them and the reality that things have not changed as much as we like to think. In this light, mother/daughter relationships can be very confusing. This was true for me. Mothers who were raised in the 1950s with little sense of being able to have a career or do much more than be a wife and mother, put their feminist hopes into their daughters: "Go out and have a different life. Have a career. Don't squander your ambitions, your talent, your brain on an exclusively domestic, private life." A lot of women in that generation, my mother certainly, when their daughters got into their late 20's or 30's suddenly thought: "Whoa! I didn't mean that you should only work and not get married or have babies. It's much more important than I ever let on and now, to make up for decades of not pressuring you in that department, I'm going to unleash the full weight of having kept my mouth shut on you." There's an intense fear that some message failed to get across that this is an important part of life, and there's a genuine concern for their daughters' happiness, comfort, security, and fulfillment. You talk about the pressure on people to have original weddings. But of course weddings are socially acceptable and done by everyone, so why the need for this personalized originality? This is part of the way that feminism has been sidetracked by issues of individual style, which get expressed through brand names and shopping. It is a brilliant move on the part of people who profit off women. It is genius: the perfect way to celebrate your independent self is to buy anything you want and to really show your personal style. That's a kind of catchphrase of weddings these days. It does a couple of things. It brilliantly speaks to the fears women have about leaving their identities behind when they marry, but doesn't force them to think about it. The wedding industry offers individual style as a solution, which interferes with taking an open-eyed look at what you're doing, which is participating in a tradition that is all about conformity. This conformity isn't necessarily bad. It's a conformity, which is part of our social fabric, which people have been doing for a long time, and it isn't really about expressing your individuality. It is about a moment in your life where you acknowledge that individuality is not entirely what life is about. But the wedding industry isn't blind to that trick either. They're way ahead of most women. They know that it's really important to place emphasis on individuality but only within very tight parameters. So they play on the fear of losing yourself and on the deep desire to be part of something that has rules that everybody knows. This is something that Jessica Mitford certainly talks about in her books about death and birth in America. One of the things I came to see is that there's a reason why society, at these watershed moments, steps in with a program. On the one hand it's because people want it and need it and ask for it and on the other hand it's because it's the ideal time to impose a set of values on people. And make a lot of money off of them Well, I feel like that's a third component that's very much a 20th century phenomenon. Society always steps in when people feel insecure or under pressure and says: "This is how you do it. This is who you are. This is what we expect you to be." I felt I needed that guidance and support and I was willing to take it under any conditions. I was unable to say: "Do I believe this?" This makes social progress hard. It is asking the individual to take on a real revolt alone and that's very difficult. One of the things that my generation struggles with is tearing down old rules without coming up with a new system of traditions and rituals that really describes our experience. You're left feeling like: I can do what everyone has always done, but with personalized touches, or what…? Another approach is to deal with tradition with irony. Some women do things in a traditional way, take the path of least resistance and say that they'll deal with it when they come out the other side. At the very least they lose the opportunity to really look at themselves and their relationships in the context of their cultures and to learn a lot about themselves. At worst they've bought into a kind of role-playing in their relationships that maybe wasn't there before. In the larger sense of relationships, what about friendships, which you talk about in the context of showers and bachelorette parties? In the modern wedding they're a fascinating pair. The modern shower is a holdover from centuries of tradition that a bride is a woman setting up house who needs to be educated and equipped to do that. And the bachelorette is one of the only traditions around that is extremely new and seems to recognize the sexual revolution. It's an example of wedding schizophrenia. Bachelorette parties really force women to confront this virgin/whore duality. Brides have to play the embarrassed teenager giggling over penis lollypops and being humiliated by their friends and hazed by them -- almost as if they really were about to lose their virginity. And at the same time they're supposed to be raunchy and get drunk and dance. The whole thing is really confused. You mention how weddings create this opportunity for women to test each other and complicate their friendships. Well, women still haven't been freed from the difficulty of directing their anger about issues that have to do with the bigger picture at each other. There is enormous pressure on women to get married, and all of these events involve women comparing themselves to each other. There's a feeling of triumph and success for those who have achieved a marriage and weirdness and embarrassment if those who haven’t, and this generates envy. Women keep getting stuck putting things on each other --just as mothers have it with the "Mommy Wars" -- where rather than encouraging productive thought about what causes such enormous envy and competitiveness, it is easier to compare and fight. Society treats weddings as the crowning moments of women's lives. There's a lot of inequality between that woman and the women playing her supporting cast. Of course this causes tension. A groom doesn't have that sort of relationship with his friends. He doesn't say: "This is the most important day of my life and I'm going to tell you what shoes to wear." There's a sense that a man's life is bigger than the wedding, which is not the way people see things for women. A lot of being a bride hearkens back to adolescence. So much ties you into your adolescent self: the enormous emphasis on appearance, on being the most beautiful, the sense of stepping up against other women. The atmosphere is that the bride is being treated like someone who is not yet a full adult but who is about to be transformed into one. This puts women in a bad place in terms of cutting them off from their hard-won mature selves. What do you hope people who read your book will take away from your experience? The way we marry matters and if you don't examine yourself you could lose something.The attitude that feminism has freed us from having to worry our pretty little heads over how we do it, and freed all traditions from negative implications is flat out false. I hope that woman can think about this it in a way that makes getting married easier and more wonderful. There's an enormous amount of anxiety and stress that goes with being a modern bride. My attitude throughout my engagement was: "I feel all of this but if I think about anything negative at all, I will be making it worse. Far worse." I was totally wrong. In fact, I made it worse by refusing to think about things. I hope that people can see that if they pull away from the wedding industry and all of these pressures and try to think about themselves, their relationships, what they want and what a meaningful wedding would be for inaugurating their partnership, that they would actually be able to enjoy this time a lot more. If it's hard, it is hard in a good way. What I wanted to do with my book is do something hard that I would get a lot out of. So I hope that for somebody reading it, if there are parts that are hard maybe they get you somewhere. ----------- Buy "I do but I don't" ----------- Elise Mac Adam writes the Indieetiquette column. |
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