Episode 180 - Weddings Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to Overthink

[00:00:20] Ellie: The podcast that weds philosophy with everyday life.

[00:00:24] David: I am David Pena-Guzman

[00:00:26] Ellie: And I'm Ellie Anderson

[00:00:28] David: As always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and a lot more, subscribe to us on Substack. Ellie, I feel like weddings are everywhere lately. It's really shaping up to be the year of the wedding. Um, I'm thinking about how weddings have been super central to a lot of TV shows and movies.

I'm here thinking about the drama, , something very bad is going to happen. , The final season of Euphoria has a wedding at the center of it, and some people have tied this to the fact that Gen Z is now at the age of getting married. And also, in June, summer 2026 got a kickoff with Dua Lipa and Callum Turner's gorgeous wedding in Sicily

[00:01:14] Ellie: Oh, that brought me so much joy to see, like, the bookshelves in the background of their welcome party 'cause they met reading the same book. I think it was clear from our collective reaction to that wedding that we need a little respite from the darkness, especially during this time of economic downturn.

And the sociologist Laurie Essig, whose book Love, Inc. I'm gonna be bringing in at various points in this episode, she makes a really interesting point that we both love and hate white weddings. We live in a strange cultural moment that is both post-romantic and hyper-romantic, and I think the, this being the year of the wedding is a great example of that

[00:01:54] David: Well, and you're, uh, doing your own bit to add to the year of the wedding because dun, dun, dun, you are getting married later this year.

[00:02:02] Ellie: Yeah, it's true. I actually told you we had to do an episode on weddings as a result before we wrap up Overthink, because this, this is our third to last episode. I'm not crying, you're crying. Oh, wait, is it our second to last episode?

[00:02:15] David: I don't, I, ooh,

[00:02:17] Ellie: should really know 180, I know. Um, but either way,

it's third to last

[00:02:21] David: we're celebrating weddings right before we get divorced.

[00:02:27] Ellie: Well, in fact, I was gonna mention this later in the episode, but might as well just quickly mention it now. I think we should have divorce rights. In the same way that we have weddings, I think we should also have divorce ceremonies, but this indeed is an episode about weddings rather than divorces

[00:02:40] David: God, R-I-T-E. I thought you meant rights as in, like, legal rights after divorce.

[00:02:45] Ellie: I mean, that too. That too.

[00:02:48] David: So but I wa- I wanna hear a little bit about your wedding. How is that going? What's the planning? What's the aesthetic going to be?

[00:02:56] Ellie: Well, you will be there, you will be there with bells and whistles on. You know, I've always been the kind of person who is totally happy to recognize that weddings are gonna be a little bit of a time capsule, so I haven't been overly worried about my wedding reading 2026. You know, like, I'm fine if my dress ends up looking dated, or if, like, the, you know, I'm sure, like, the invitations and all of that will end up being dated.

And, you know, that is what it is. I like looking at my mom's wedding photos from the '80s. I am getting married in California. Trevor and I are both California born and raised, and so I think, you know, like, all our loved ones live here. This is a natural place to, to get married.

without disclosing too m- details in advance of it happening, 'cause there are some weirdos who listen to this podcast, you know, that unfortunately is the case. I will say we're not getting married in LA. it will be, like, a little bit more of a lovely countryside location, and in fact, it's the place we're having our reception is where my parents had their rehearsal dinner.

[00:03:52] David: What? I didn't know that. I mean, you've shown me the pictures. I won't divulge, uh, beyond that, but it does look beautiful, and I'm very excited to be there. And, you know, weddings always bring a sense of calm and peace, but everything leading up to them is nothing short of chaos. And so I'm curious whether you've experienced the chaos of the planning of the wedding, the making decisions about the wedding,

[00:04:16] Ellie: Yeah. Well, you know, in fact, Elizabeth Freeman has this book called The Wedding Complex, which is something else that I read in advance of this episode, and that I'm gonna be returning to over the course of this episode.

She talks about how in literary theory, the wedding is often described in terms of narrative closure. You know, there's a kind of happily ever after at the end of a story. Think about how many fairy tales, Shakespearean comedies, and films end in a wedding. But Freeman points out that things are very different when the wedding is the plot rather than just the end point of the plot.

When weddings are the plot of the story, the drama is... Oh, actually, and the TV show, um, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, these are both great examples of this. When weddings are the plot, narrative and social chaos are the order of the day. So I guess it remains to be seen whether that will be the case for me, 'cause I have some time left.

But one of the decisions that Trevor and I made very early on was to hire a planner.

And so that's, helped, I would say, with a lot of the logistics. 'Cause we are doing, like, we're doing a whole weekend thing. We'll talk about this, , more in detail later in the episode. But I think the idea that, like, a whole weekend wedding is extravagant and absurd is an unfair characterization. I'm like, I want people to get down and party.

This is the biggest party I will ever host, and so let's do it. Let's have fun. We're having a roast ceremony the night before, which is a Mangalorean tradition from Trevor's side, where basically we get, like, a bunch of coconut milk and oil poured o- over our heads, and sometimes it gets a little rowdy.

So we're doing that. Also, one of my rules was that with the exception of the actual wedding dress, which I presume I will unfortunately only have a chance to wear once, because I did want something, like, kind of, you know, fun and fashion-y. Yeah. Um, I was like, I don't want any other components to be things I can only wear once.

So I'm not wearing white for, like, the welcome party. Um, I'm wearing one of my favorite bright colors. My after party dress is also not white, and I'm just like, I'm actually kind of more excited about those components of the outfits than I-

[00:06:20] David: you know my views about wedding dresses. I think it's a travesty that people spend all this money on a dress that they only wear once. So I told you, from now on, I expect you to show up to any online or professional events that we do together wedding, wearing your wedding dress.

[00:06:35] Ellie: I know. I got got. I went wedding dress shopping with my mom, my aunt, and my cousin.

[00:06:40] David: Did you get the fever?

[00:06:41] Ellie: yeah, I ended up getting the dress that, that my mom instantly started sobbing when she saw me wear, you know, I have like profound ambivalence about spending a lot of my hard-earned money on a wedding dress I mean, it's so crazy. Some people are spending like 15K on a dress. I'm definitely not spending that. But still, I'm just like, okay. Is it worth it to look hot on my

[00:06:59] David: man.

[00:06:59] Ellie: day?"

[00:07:00] David: Today we are talking about weddings

[00:07:03] Ellie: To what extent are weddings bound to institutions of patriarchal marriage?

[00:07:08] David: How do wedding ceremonies both separate and bond the couple to their community?

[00:07:14] Ellie: And are big weddings a waste of money? Weddings are ceremonies that inaugurate a marriage, usually between two spouses. But they are conceptually distinct from the marriage itself, at least that's what Freeman, the author of that book The Wedding Complex I mentioned a couple minutes ago, argues. Freeman notes that the expressive, theatrical, and symbolic aspects of the wedding are not equivalent to the institution of marriage.

And she writes about how she first came to realize this by seeing how delightful and attractive weddings can be even for those who are critical of the institution of marriage. She was an activist for same-sex partnership benefits in the early 1990s, and as part of that she was involved in things like mass marry-ins for same-sex partners.

And she found that many queer people, although critical of marriage, still wanted weddings. And this wasn't just like a false consciousness. It was a lot richer than that. She thinks that it was partly a response to the fact that Western culture lacks public modes of expression for emotional ties that fall outside structured kin groups.

And so pulling in what would like traditionally not be taken as kin groups through these mass marry-ins to, you know, this ceremony that traditionally is about structured kin groups had something subversive to it

[00:08:33] David: Yeah, keeping in mind the separation of marriage and wedding is really important because you can get married without a wedding, and I've been to weddings that do not entail a legal marriage. Like a marriage of, , radical fairies in the woods, of Tennessee.

[00:08:47] Ellie: I'm still not sure that we're gonna actually make it legal. We probably will for tax purposes, but yeah, we haven't really gotten that far. We're, that's not, that's not our purpose in, in getting married.

[00:08:56] David: Uh, no, no, no, that's right.

[00:08:57] Ellie: Sorry, I just said it's not - I just, I, sorry, I just did the conflation. I said it's not our purpose in getting married is not our purpose in getting married. I meant getting married is not our purpose in having a wedding. Okay, I conflated the two. Anyway, sorry, David, continue.

[00:09:09] David: Uh, no, but like, so you're talking about how the desire for a wedding is not reducible to false consciousness or to wanting to participate in the problematic institution of marriage, you know, for many reasons. And I really feel that myself, because if you remember back in 2021 on our show, I

went

public with this declaration

that I would never get married.

And then, like, fast-forward a year, I got married and had a wedding in Paris.

[00:09:35] Ellie: Dude, this was so wild. Like, we literally had a whole marriage episode in 2021. I was like, "Oh, I'm critical of many features of marriage, but I'll probably get married one day." David was like, " I will never get married." And then, like, I saw one of our student assistants, um, our former student assistants, like a year later, and she was like, " Wait, did I see that David got married?"

And I was like, "Oh, why yes. Yes, indeed he did."

[00:09:58] David: So yes, I got married and wedded. I have to say, it was a lovely wedding. It was very small. Uh, you know, you mentioned your, uh, wedding planning work, the logistics, all of that. For me, it was a very different experience, 'cause my wedding was only 30 people. It was, , non-traditional. There was, , no exchange of rings.

There were no vows. But still it had some elements that, you know, just scream wedding. Like, my partner, Rabih, wore a beautiful gender-bending, white, I, I guess you would call it, like, an outfit. It was not quite a

dress and It was not pants. Yeah, but It was

not a full skirt

[00:10:33] Ellie: pants combo.

[00:10:35] David: yeah, yeah, yeah. But it, like,

[00:10:36] Ellie: Yeah, I say this from photos because you planned your wedding too last minute for me to be able to arrive. You were like, "Oh, I'm getting married in three weeks in Paris." And I was like, "Girl, I'm sorry. I, I can't, I can't come."

Which was very, very sad.

[00:10:48] David: I haven't told you, but I'm not gonna make it to your wedding in revenge.

No, I'm kidding.

[00:10:52] Ellie: getting married not that far from you, so yeah.

[00:10:55] David: Well, yeah, so, um, this is interesting because we decided to get married largely for practical reasons, right? Like, so it had to do with immigration, it had to do with us trying to figure out how to solve or undo this knot at the heart of our relationship, which is how do we live together in the same place.

And so in order to do that, we came to the conclusion that we had to get legally married. And so once we made that decision, we initially planned to do a marriage without a wedding. No celebration, just the two of us at the mayor's office in Paris. And then once the word got out to our immediate family and our very close friends, very slowly we got the pressure from extended circles of, " Well, maybe you should at least do drinks after the marriage.

Maybe you should have a small dinner for the witnesses. Maybe the dinner could be expanded to include, you know, your immediate circle." And then before we knew it, we were in the range of 30 to 40 people, and suddenly we have to have a wedding, and we ended up renting this kind of fancy, very beautiful rooftop in Paris in the Galeries Lafayette, this kind of like shopping center, which sounds weird to say that you get married in a shopping center, but this is like a, a really nice Haussmannian building in the center of Paris in the Ninth, uh, District.

And so in the end, it worked out perfectly, but it was a minimalistic wedding by the standards of modern-day weddings. And I'm very happy about having had the wedding, even though initially the, the plan was just marriage without the celebration, because it gave us a ton of memories, it brought together social circles in our lives that otherwise would have never overlapped, and it also was a public declaration of our affection for one another.

And I do think that the mere act of declaring, especially in a celebratory and affirmative and festive context, can have a transformative effect on the relationship about which the declaration is being made.

[00:12:57] Ellie: Yes. I'm so glad you're saying this because so many academics don't have weddings, either because they don't get married to begin with or because they just want, like, a small courthouse wedding. I'm like, y- tho- those are some of my favorite parties. Like, I wanna have that amazing party. I actually love the ceremony.

I think the ceremony, when done right, can be w- the most profound part of a wedding. in general, I just want more ceremonies. I kind of alluded to this earlier. I want the divorce ceremony. I want the getting a new job ceremony. I want the you decided to be single for the rest of your life ceremony. I want the you added a new person to your relationship and now you're in a triad.

I, I want the pet parties. You got a new pet? Okay. You know, I'm not particularly an animal person, but I would love to come to your pet party.

[00:13:41] David: You need to buy a $14,000 dress for the pet party. The economic ante just goes up and up and up with all these parties.

[00:13:50] Ellie: well, and but I think that would also remedy some of the asymmetry that leads people to be annoyed about weddings, which is like, oh, I'm buying a ticket to your bachelorette party, to your wedding, buying you a gift, a shower gift, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, I think if we had more ceremonies, then the stakes would be lower for each of these indi- individually.

But I think this reminds me of Freeman's point, which is that the wedding serves a function that gets overlooked by critics of marriage, especially those who call for its abolition. Weddings, she says, at the very least at once symbolize and multiply social ties, work in and with time, allow someone to be the star of the show, suggest the possibility of bodily and social transformations, and offer an elaborate series of visual icons to play with.

So that's a lot of functions that weddings are serving, many of which are special in a society where we don't get a lot of opportunities for those things

[00:14:43] David: Yeah, but I think it's important to also consider

the objection that somebody might make here, which is that even though weddings have all of these functions, they perform those functions largely because of their proximity to marriage, to legal marriage, uh, as recognized by the state. And so, how would we respond then to the argument that even if weddings can perform all these social functions, mixed in with those functions is also the legitimation and the continuation of what we might consider to be a problematic legal institution,

'cause, you know, most people, let's be honest, if they're gonna have a wedding, it's because they're getting married, unless they're like those radical fairies I mentioned. Yeah,

legally married, unless they're the radical fairies in the woods.

[00:15:23] Ellie: It will totally, and I mean, I think that was very obvious from the fact that I slipped between saying wedding to getting married. I think that maybe even happened, like, one or two other times in our conversation. So I don't think it's as easy as saying weddings are unproblematic and marriage is problematic.

And I think this is something I've thought a lot about in deciding whether to have a wedding of my own and whether to get married. Um, but I have to say, in reading about the history, not only of weddings, but also of marriage, I've become pretty comfortable with my decision. For instance, in her wonderful book, Marriage: A History, Stephanie Coontz debunks two common patriarchal ideas of marriage.

The first is that marriage is an institution that protects women, and second is that marriage is an institution that oppresses women. And so this idea that marriage, you know, is essentially patriarchal because it's either protecting and/or oppressing women, those are technically two different narratives, but I could see them working in tandem, she says is just way too simple.

Although marriage has very often served these functions, those are not endemic to marriage itself. The history of marriage is much more complex, in short. And the most enduring function of marriage that she sees throughout its history is to establish kinship and community ties. That is, marriage speaks to the needs of the larger group.

And I think, you know, that's a big reason why I've made my choices too. Like, it's partly for family, friends. It's for a broader community, and that's not to be like, oh, see. We've decided marriage isn't problematic. Leave it at that. But I think that book just helped me realize it's really not that simple

[00:17:02] David: Well, and that coheres with what I said earlier about, , making a public declaration of love, which has an audience beyond the couple, and also about the bringing together of various, members of the community that belong to, to our lives but that wouldn't overlap, and that's the social/communitarian orientation , of these celebrations of a marriage.

And we'll come back to the question of whether a marriage is primarily about, like, the couple or the community. But for now, I wanna focus on the ceremonial dimension of a marriage, which is what we call the wedding, and I wanna talk about that a little bit more because there is not a lot of philosophical work on weddings, not surprisingly.

in fact, I couldn't really find a single article or book in our discipline devoted to the topic specifically. I

[00:17:48] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:17:49] David: and looking and looking,

[00:17:50] Ellie: Oh, all the stuff I'm bringing in is from sociology, anthropology, history. Uh, yeah,

[00:17:55] David: a, a lot of communication studies with, , the symbolism as well. Yeah, so that was really revealing that philosophy has had so little to say about weddings, but I did find one article from the philosopher Jonathan Wolff, , and the article is about ceremonies, and he has some interesting things to say about ceremonies that he believes apply, , to weddings.

So Wolff is trying to understand what it is that a ceremony is. What are we doing socially when we gather together collectively in order to mark a momentous event in life? And he argues that ceremonies have all these, , defining features, right? Like, they're communal. There are formalities associated with them.

They are departures from the ordinary, But the two criteria that I wanna focus on for a hot second are what he calls, first and foremost, the social dimension of ceremonies. So he says ceremonies involve a lot of what Habermas calls social drama, meaning that when you go to a ceremony, you don't show up as your typical average everyday self.

Rather, you show up in your role as a particular persona, like supportive friend, citizen, educator, uh, right? Like, so you have to put on a certain image, and that can come in the form of specific makeup, , specific clothes, following specific rules of engagement. And so in attending a ceremony, we're not just attending an event, but we're actually stepping up to a theatrical plate where there are certain social roles to be fulfilled.

So that's the first one, the social drama. The second one is what Wolff himself calls fuss which I thought was a great philosophical category through which to interpret ceremonies, and what he means by that is not just, like, the chaos of organizing ceremonies, although that's part of it, but rather the fact that ceremonies usually are there to achieve a specific goal, right?

So we said weddings are there to facilitate the goal of marriage. But technically, Wolff says, you could achieve the end goal without all the ornamentation and all the planning and all the fuss that usually goes into a wedding, but what makes a wedding a wedding and a ceremony a ceremony is precisely that extravagance, that going beyond, that almost, like, yearning for opulence.

And that's essential to his understanding of ceremonies, and I think that's a really good way to think about weddings, that they are places for social drama and a hell of a lot of fuss.

[00:20:39] Ellie: I love this so much. I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on the basis of it, but one of them is that, like, the super gendered character of a bridezilla, is very often just a woman who's been raised thinking that getting married is very important for her sense of self, and who is taking on an immense number of logistics, leaning in, we might say, to the fuss.

And so I think, like, Jonathan Wolfe's reclaiming of fuss allows us to maybe have a little bit more sympathy for the women who are characterized as bridezillas. I'd be curious to, like, re-watch, you know, Say Yes to the Dress or something with this in mind. And I think the fact that we tend to dismiss fuss is such a gendered part of weddings.

And so for instance, I've been getting served a lot of bridal content in the past year. It's what happens when you, like, search a wedding dress on

[00:21:31] David: that, that's what happens when the algorithm identifies you as a bridezilla-to-be.

[00:21:37] Ellie: Yeah, right? And there's, like, the opposite of that, which, uh, you see a lot of content on on the internet if you have my algorithm, which is the anti-bride. And it's like w- who is the anti-bride? The anti-bride is literally just a bride, but a cool bride.

And so I was thinking about this a little bit in terms of some of the stuff we talked about in our recent coolness episode as well, like this stance of sort of ironic distance that one has to have. Because it is about playing into the fuss just in virtue of having a wedding, and also that social drama, but seeming like you're above the social drama, and seeming like you're above the fuss.

Because, you know, your cake looks a little bit different, your dress is not necessarily from a bridal boutique, but is, like, you know, some, like, Frankenstein, vintage

creation.

[00:22:22] David: Well, , I think that's a really interesting point about the fuss, because Wolf makes the argument that fuss is there for all ceremonies, even the most, like, hyper-masculine. So if you think about it, like a military ceremony, uh, or like a presidential swearing in, , those have a lot of fuss, but I think you're right to point to the gender dynamic, especially when it comes to, like, every day ceremonies that average people perform.

And I read one article in preparation for this episode that made a really interesting argument, which is that ceremonies like weddings give us a rare opportunity which is the opportunity to act like celebrities for a day. And think about that, right? If you choose to lean in, and not be the anti-bride or the anti-groom, you can be demanding, you can be picky, you can be choosy, you can be kind of mean to other people, and all the attention is meant to be on you. And so it kind of taps into that, but I do agree that that gets played out in gendered specific ways, and you see that.

I mean, I've seen a few episodes of that, Bridezilla show. I think women are punished for leaning into something that we nonetheless expect them to do and

[00:23:34] Ellie: Totally

[00:23:34] David: to do, but without showing that they're actually enjoying.

[00:23:37] Ellie: Yeah. Well, and as one example of the fact that brides are expected to do, this work, I mean, we could talk about the ways that girls are socialized to want weddings with men from a young age through a wide variety of factors.

But one of the things that, like, really struck me, I knew when I was, uh, when I decided to have a wedding to a man, no less, that,

[00:24:00] David: The shock.

[00:24:02] Ellie: that there would be some gendered expectations that we'd have to cut against and some which we might, you know, kind of lean into.

But one of the things that really struck Trevor and me was that our wedding planner has, like, a portal that she uses. I don't- It's not just for her. It's, like, a general portal. And it has all of these tasks, like, at least 100, maybe even hundreds of tasks that have to be completed before the wedding. And there were only a handful that were default assigned to the groom.

All of the rest of the tasks were assigned to the bride and/or to the wedding planner. And the ones that were assigned to the groom were buy a tux and get a haircut. Get a haircut. I'm like, oh, I've got my whole bridal beauty plan in place.

Like, there's so many things I'm doing. I'm getting special, like, balayage hair done. I'm doing my microneedling four times a year

you know, I don't have to, but, yeah, kind of. We were just like, Trevor and I were dying over the fact that get a haircut was on there.

[00:25:04] David: I think they forgot take a bath. Um, but like

the standard is so low. I, I wonder what, what, I wonder how that, portal works when it's two people of the same sex, especially two men. you know, I just joked about how Rabih and I, two men getting married, maybe we leaned into that stereotype by having a very minimalistic wedding.

We did get a

haircut, and we did buy our outfit.

[00:25:27] Ellie: And I will say, we ended up reassigning a bunch of the tasks, so, it's not as though those are actually the only things that Trevor ended up doing.

[00:25:34] David: Well, I'm glad that Trevor is bucking those gender norms when it comes to the wedding.

[00:25:39] Ellie: I would say maybe you and Rabih are a little bit bucking gender norms as well, given the intersection of, sort of norms of femininity and masculinity with gay men.

Because one thing that came up quite a bit in my research is the alliance of women and gay men in the wedding industry, because so many gay men are designers and planners. Just not you guys, you know?

[00:25:59] David: Yeah. Oh yeah, no, we've walked away from that alliance a long time ago. We were, we were kicked off by the women, actually.

[00:26:04] Ellie: Yeah. Well, and if feminine socialization, I, I mentioned the socialization of girls, but I think we could broadly say feminine socialization has a lot to do with kind of envisioning your wedding, then I think we can say that, like, a lot of gay boys are conscripted into that as well, even if just imaginatively.

And I think really it's hard to overstate how important weddings are, though, one survey found that six out of 10 single women have their weddings already planned, and most start thinking about their dream weddings in elementary school.

That is definitely the case for me. There's some journal I have somewhere from middle school that literally goes through all of the details of the wedding that I wanna have, you know, and whatever. I thought I was gonna get married at 27. I'm so glad I didn't.

[00:26:51] David: I'm glad you didn't too. But I think this speaks a lot to the way marriage is set up as the goal for women, specifically. So even if we want to disentangle, let's say, the wedding ceremony from the marriage that follows or that it's meant to lead to, the desirability of marriage for women historically is not actually separable from the idealization and the fantasy around having this ideal wedding that you already observed with young girls that, you know, start thinking about what this special day is going to look like from a very young age

[00:27:27] Ellie: Yeah, this is true, and it intersects also with being into spectacle and aesthetics. You know, that being a celebrity for a day because you're the bride. And Chris Ingraham calls this the wedding industrial complex which I think

is great. Yeah.

[00:27:42] David: Ellie, there is a lot out there on this wedding industrial complex, but I want us to focus on the ritual side of weddings here, the actual signs, the symbols, the iconography that appear in weddings. And I found some really interesting research on this that might help us think about weddings in a new way

[00:28:05] Ellie: Yeah, and we'll say I think the symbols, signs and symbols we're gonna focus on are mainly, European and American weddings in a roughly Christian tradition, there's so much we could talk about, as always on Overthink. We'll be kind of focusing on, on that dimension of things.

but before we get into the details, I'll say that an overarching point that I found fascinating is that weddings, generally speaking, were originally social, not religious or legal. It's easy to see weddings, I think, as tools of the state or tools of religious higher-ups, but that is just not the case.

And I think this was also, like, a really liberating realization for me is like, oh, weddings aren't just some, like, messed up tool of the state, right? In fact, it wasn't until the 16th century on the European continent and 1753 in England that governments and churches could enforce a rule requiring specific legal and public formalities to validate a marriage.

And then on the religion side, it wasn't until well over a millennium after Christianity was established that Christianity started caring about marriage. In fact, the early Christians were anti-marriage because Jesus advocated the breaking of worldly ties, also famously unmarried

[00:29:19] David: And a lot of the traditions that those of us who grew up in predominantly Christian contexts associate with our marriage rites, think about the dresses and the, and all of that, they really predate Christianity and were originally of a pagan origin.

The scholar Brooke Leaney wrote an article entitled Something Borrowed, which is about what Christianity borrowed from early Roman traditions and also what it rejected, especially as Christians started, caring more about weddings and marriage once they realized that, like, "Hey, this is here to stay, and so we need to take a stance in order to align it with our faith."

And she points out that the exchange of rings, the expression of mutual consent through the verbalization of vows, the wearing of the veil, , the iconic kind of climactic kiss, all of these traditions were already rooted in Roman rites, and so they are not things that the Christians originated.

They are just things that they borrowed. But even though the Christians borrowed a bunch of things, they also intentionally rejected a number of traditions that were central to Roman weddings because they thought that those did not and could not be aligned with, the rising Christian faith. So for example, it was very common for Roman weddings to involve a number of blood sacrifices, of animals, And so the Christians were like, "Mm, this is looking a little demonic . Maybe we don't incorporate that into our weddings." They also were really worried about hairdos of all things. it is an important part of the fuss, David. Don't say, "Of all things" with that disdainful tone

the Roman brides were

bride- the original bridezillas.

[00:31:12] Ellie: gay man.

[00:31:15] David: Well, so I, I found this really interesting because it was expected for Roman brides to do their hair in a very specific way. Like, they would take a sword and part it down the middle in a ritualistic fashion, and then they would divide it into three curls on each side, and it had all this meaning.

And, uh, the

Christians...

[00:31:33] Ellie: really chopped.

[00:31:37] David: Yeah, they all came out looking like they just had their perm done.

But so the Christians thought that all this concern with aesthetics, with look, with image, was an expression of vanity, and so it was incompatible with Christian virtue. So you can get wedded down the road as a Christian, but you can't not have a fancy haircut.

That's the rule. one final detail that I wanna add here to understand just this new position that the church is taking in relation to weddings and why, they also explicitly reject the wearing of a crown of flowers. Roman brides on the day of their wedding, they would go out and pick flowers, and then they would make a crown out of it, and they would wear it.

I think that's really beautiful, honestly.

[00:32:21] Ellie: Yeah, So the Christians were really worried about the wearing of the crown of flowers because they worried that it mimicked the crown of thorns of Jesus Christ, and that only martyrs and people of proven true religious merit should ever wear a crown. And so that was like a, a really, really contentious issue actually during the early Christian period.

[00:32:42] David: And a lot of what we know about Christian, , weddings comes from the Christian theologian, , Tertullian, who was a philosopher-theologian and wrote extensively about Christian, metaphysics and ethics. But apparently this crown issue was such a big deal that Tertullian wrote an entire book about the polemic of wearing a crown on your wedding day.

Um, the book was

[00:33:07] Ellie: What?

[00:33:07] David: De Corona, and he just rails against brides

[00:33:11] Ellie: Okay.

[00:33:12] David: a crown.

[00:33:12] Ellie: Wow. Wow. The original gay wedding designer, in fact. This is not this, but that trends. Okay, so anyway, I find it really interesting that so many of the rituals we associate with weddings today originated with the Romans, especially those that we, you know, associate with Christian or Christian adjacent weddings.

One thing that Freeman points out in The Wedding Complex is that although the verbal exchange of vows predates Christianity, Christianity really ended up making this aspect of weddings a focal point. With the rise of, Christian, you know, adoption of marriage norms, we mentioned they were originally kinda anti-marriage, then come around, the I do then became the very apex of the Christian wedding, this expression of verbal consent

[00:34:00] David: Uh, yeah, and it's also interesting that the "I do" of the wedding is not just a verbal expression. It's not just, like, a sound we make. It's what, uh, the philosopher J.L. Austin calls a performative. It's an utterance that literally brings about a new state of affairs, ' Yeah, under the right conditions. Check out our performativity episode for more on that. I wanna pivot now to talk about rituals that aren't necessarily Christian, but are very capitalist, so like more recent ones. And these are the rituals associated with the white wedding. The white wedding became standard in the US during the mid to late 19th century when marriage was legally connected to race, nationality, monogamy, and physical health.

[00:34:44] Ellie: And so those, are social and political dynamics that even if we say marriage is not merely a tool of the state, like yeah, there's a lot going on there in who has access to the white wedding. And one of the books that I read traced the origin of the white wedding to the US in the 1830s. But certainly what I was seeing more is that the white wedding was really popularized in the 1840s with two viral weddings, both of which Laurie Essig discusses in the book Love, Inc.

The first is Queen Victoria's wedding to Prince Albert, which involved her wearing a fancy white dress and diamond ring. And white dresses had emerged in England for brides as early as the mid-1600s, but a lot of couples after that point had continued simply to wear their best clothes, which often were not white.

So like regardless of color, you just put on your Sunday best. Victoria's white dress really codified white as the bridal color. And the second wedding, which you're less likely to have heard of than Queen Victoria's, but nonetheless was like super important during this time period, is the celebrity wedding of General Tom Thumb, whose actual name is Charles Stratton, to Lavinia Warren two decades later.

Stratton, whose stage name was General Tom Thumb, was a performer with dwarfism who had been adopted as a child by PT Barnum and then traveled all over with Barnum's circus. And his wedding to Lavinia Warren was such a big deal that everyone was vying for tickets to it. PT Barnum sold tickets to the reception.

Abraham Lincoln even invited the couple to spend their honeymoon at the White House.

Yeah, and then after their wedding, Americans began staging Tom Thumb's wedding pageants, where they would use children to play the bride and groom.

[00:36:33] David: Oh, yikes.

It went from, like, really cool that

[00:36:35] Ellie: Yeah

[00:36:36] David: to the White House to, like, uh, this is really

[00:36:38] Ellie: No, I know. You're like, "Oh, yay. On the one hand, you know, the, uh, one of the most important weddings in establishing the white wedding tradition is that between two Americans with dwarfism.

On the other hand, like, () oh, okay, we got PT Barnum.

[00:36:52] David: Questions of spectacle and yeah, ableism

[00:36:57] Ellie: Totally. On a slightly lighter note, I'm gonna jump ahead now to the 1980s, because another big shift in the wedding industry happened around then. The '80s and the '90s were big decades for rom-coms that centered weddings, as well as just, like, wedding movies, My Best Friend's Wedding, for instance.

And also around this time of the '80s and '90s, couples started having wedding videography for the first time, rather than just still photos. It's during this time that the cake-smashing ritual, where you not only cut the cake with your, your partner, but you smash it into their faces, came to the fore, and it actually came first from romantic comedies, but then it became popular in real life, 'cause people were like, "Ooh, I want a video of me smashing the cake into my partner's face.

Like, it's so cute and rom-com coded."

[00:37:45] David: Oh my God, when, , real life mimics art. Um, but I, I think this does highlight the extent to which weddings have become spectacle in recent decades. And I don't just mean here spectacle in the sense that they are big events or big ceremonies, but that they are maybe, and have been for a while, planned and organized with the explicit intent of making them look good as spectacle, where it's not just that you plan it and then you display it, but you plan it in order to be displayed.

Um, and that display, of course, it could mean that you plan it to make them videotapeable, , in the language of the '80s and '90s, or that you plan them in such a way that they are Instagrammable using more contemporary, terminology there. But th- th- there is a real way in which the wedding planning is very clearly not for the couple who is getting married or wed, it is for others to look at and to be amazed at the beauty of this institution

[00:38:42] Ellie: Totally. Influencer culture has really changed this. in fact, even some of the actual wedding rituals, you know, the, the more Instagrammable ones are, you know, likely to become more popular. I'll say, you know, I've even been feeling this quite a bit myself.

We're not having a big wedding cake because they're expensive as heck, but we're having a small cutting cake. What's the purpose of having a small cutting cake? So you have cute photos of yourself cutting a small cake.

But I think, you know, the fact that those are even considerations that come up for us when we're wedding planning, and the fact that so many people find themselves so obsessed with how their wedding's gonna look after, the fact that they can't even focus on the actual day speaks to the spectacular element of the weddings.

So we've come to the point where we get to discuss a question we flagged earlier. This is a question I've really been excited to talk about, and that is maybe less a question and more of a tension to unpack, which is the tension between how the wedding separates a couple from their other relationships, literally putting them on a pedestal to be viewed by others.

It symbolizes their bond, the bond between the two of them and only the two of them. But at the same time, it is a profoundly social event. And so that tension gives weddings a kind of paradoxical status, at least in the present day, given, you know, the structure of the weddings that, we tend to have in the US.

In her book on courtship, Ellen Rothman suggests that this tension emerges in the 19th century, where wedding ceremonies waffled between being an emblem and extension of communal being and being a figure for and means of withdrawal from the larger society. And part of this also has to do with a move towards a more contractual view of marriage, where marriage is understood as a private arrangement based on the will of the parties involved

[00:40:32] David: Yeah, so I like this tension a lot. Is a marriage and a wedding primarily about the couple or about the community? I have to say that I tend to lean towards seeing weddings as primarily communal because of their ceremonial nature, and, uh, the reason is because ceremonies are, by their very definition, public events that are geared toward a large audience, right?

So they, they are spectacles, but aside from that, they really foreground the individual for a public, right? So even if we think about a ceremony like a birthday party, where it's about one person, it's about the place of that individual in a larger community. Now you're one year older, there are certain expectations that change, so on and so forth.

And, uh, you know, it, it's, it's certainly the case that the person or the couple are important, but it's about that new socially legible role that they are called upon to perform before the eyes of the community. So I think a wedding without that communal dimension wouldn't really be much of a wedding,

you know, like, if two people get married in a forest and it doesn't make a Okay, Okay, David. Okay. So yeah, I think this is also really important to keep in mind when it comes to the cost of weddings. Because I agree with you, I think weddings are primarily communal. That doesn't mean that they're not communally staging a, spectacle of the private bond of the couple, but I do think their main function is a communal one.

[00:42:00] Ellie: One thing I hear a lot from anti-brides is like, "Oh my God, weddings are so overpriced, so expensive," et cetera, et cetera. Yes, that is true. The wedding industrial complex is real, and it is absurd. And at the same time, I think sometimes people conflate, like, the wedding markup with the actual cost of putting on a giant party for people, and I think the latter thing is something worth celebrating and not necessarily extravagant or silly or let alone selfish, right?

And so I'm thinking about it this way. So I have a big family. We were gonna do a family reunion this year. Instead of doing a family reunion, they're coming to my wedding. I think also some of this is influenced by the fact that not only is Trevor half Indian, but also my sister's husband is Indian, and they had a big Indian wedding.

I go to a number of them, uh, you know, various cousins, and often an event that's not only multi-day, but also that involves like when we had wedding celebrations for my sister in India, it would be literally 500 people. The entire town would be invited. And so I think thinking about weddings as not just a lump sum of money that is paid for by the couple and/or their families, but rather in terms of, like, how much it costs per head for each of those people to have a really good time.

I mean, we're, we're looking at, like, a 275-person wedding, so when I'm thinking about the cost of

that wedding ... Yeah, no, I know. I, I really I really ... I w- I will not lie. I'm still, I'm still needing to pool some of my resources together. I've, I've been saving up a lot for this. But yeah, no, we're, like I say, we're kinda going for it.

Like, okay, well, you know, I'm dividing the cost of that wedding by those 275 people and thinking about, like, hopefully the fun that they'll have, the memories they'll have. All the weddings that I've gone to where I have been fed delicious food and gotten to hang out with friends. I just think it's worth distinguishing the evils of the capitalist wedding industrial complex from the fact that weddings are big communal celebrations that do, in the world we live in, cost money, although you can be judicious about where you spend your money

[00:44:05] David: Yeah. Although, I mean, in that case, we should have big parties without all the things that make those parties into, like, weddings in the, in, in the commercial

sense, right?

Which,

[00:44:15] Ellie: want.

[00:44:16] David: uh, but it's not what you're doing, and it's not what I did either, right? So, like, we are participating in the wedding industrial complex,

[00:44:23] Ellie: But I think this is...

[00:44:24] David: didn't, I didn't need to buy new clothes for my

[00:44:26] Ellie: know. I

think I'm tempted to say this is, like, the first time I feel I can actually afford that. Like, you know, I got tenure and stuff like that. But get back to me in five years and, you know, I'll

[00:44:34] David: Yeah. When you're still paying the

debt. No, but I, I agree that if we think about weddings in terms of what would a party like this for this number of people be worth, that changes the discussion, but of course, uh, the, the wedding markup that you mentioned is, is really hard to justify, and that's where we get into this capitalism versus, what's actually just a celebration of community and being together.

But, to return to the tension that you introduced, a few minutes ago, Ellie, maybe we can think more about what aspects of a wedding tell us that the wedding is about the creation of a space of intimacy for the couple, it's about solidifying a couple, and what aspects of the wedding are more geared toward the broader community.

So which aspects of a wedding would you say lean toward the primacy of the

[00:45:24] Ellie: Yeah. the first look where the groom sees the bride, and then also definitely the vows. you know, which often kind of provide a window onto the privacy of the couple even though they're being witnessed by others, and which tend to mean a lot for the couple itself

[00:45:38] David: Yeah, no, I think that's a really good example, and I think that that is achieved more when the vows are intimate and sort of really personalized, like tailored to the other person, rather than more generic vows that people say at weddings. I think that's a really compelling example, uh, the vows. but I do think that it can go either way depending on how the vows are performed.

So when the vows are generic, I think it's the community, right? Because you're performing that social function or that social role or the persona of the person to be married. But when they are tailored and personalized and, like, you know, targeted to the particular individual, there it does seem like you are creating a space of intimacy and, uh, envisioning the union or the, companionship of two individuals, there it's about the individuals rather than the social function. Another example that I think can go either way, that it can be about the community or about the couple, is the veil. So today, the veil, at least in these, uh, largely Christian contexts that we're focusing on, the veil is white, and the symbolism is that it protects the bride from other men, right?

It blocks vision so that she can't see other men with sexual desire, and other men can't see

her. Uh, so it, yeah, So

like

[00:46:57] Ellie: Oh my God.

[00:46:59] David: I, I know, it's like sensory deprivation, uh,

but spiritualized.

[00:47:03] Ellie: kinky.

[00:47:04] David: Yeah, yeah, and so it's, it's a way of guarding purity, like in, in this religious context. And so in that sense I think the veil is public.

It's about the community. It's to say to the community, like, "This woman is not on the market anymore." in Ancient Rome, the veil, first of all, it was red, not white.

And the idea in Rome was that the veil represented a fire that protected the couple, not just the woman, from social judgment and social criticism. So the bride would wear this red veil to say, " You may not judge us, and you may not judge the way in which we choose to live our lives from this moment forward."

And so there I think the difference is that when the veil symbolizes protecting the couple from others as it did in Rome, it creates that personal space for the couple. But the more contemporary symbolism of the veil, which is that it protects the woman from sexual corruption and guarantees her sexual purity, it's more about the

[00:48:06] Ellie: I wouldn't say that's a more contemporary version of the veil. I think the contemporary,

[00:48:10] David: Christian, Yeah

Yeah

[00:48:12] Ellie: contemporary i- imagery of the veil is just like, cute.

[00:48:16] Ellie: There's so many questions we could also raise about the extent to which symbolic history, matters for the current signifiers, and the signifiers that we choose to keep, and the ones that we feel, you know, are just kind of too much for us. Like, I think I haven't decided yet whether I'm wearing a veil, but I probably will, but I don't think I'll put it over my head.

I think I'll just do it as, like, a little fashion accessory. So another aspect of the wedding ritual that I think is important here, although it technically happens right after, is the honeymoon. So you have the wedding night, and then especially you have the honeymoon. And the honeymoon, I read in my research, changed in the late 1800s, um, from a time when, like, the family would go off together to being a time for the couple to go off on their own in private, rather than traveling with their family.

And that was part of a shift from arranged marriage to companionate marriage in Europe and the US. And this is one of the most popular aspects of weddings, in fact. I read that nearly 100% of straight couples go on honeymoons. That's something that Laurie Essig writes about in Love, Inc. And I think the appeal of the honeymoon not only is travel, which people tend to love to do, but also the idea of a getaway, of decompressing, of reminiscing on your wedding.

A lot of people talk about that. And/or of just, like, having an exciting new experience together.

[00:49:37] David: but I think also the, the honeymoon symbolically represents, at least, in this more recent history, like, a literal departure from

family dynamic, right? Where you

go off, you go away, so it's a new journey, it's a new adventure. But I also wonder to what extent the creation of the space of the couple, that which is proper to you and I, requires privacy and holding things off from view, which is what the honeymoon does, right?

Because the whole thing is that on the honeymoon, that's when you have, like, the consummation of the marriage traditionally, and that requires privacy and, like, the closing of the door to the public.

[00:50:14] Ellie: ja

[00:50:15] David: and so I think it is fair to say that there is a lot in the symbolism and the iconography and the history of weddings that tell us that weddings produce a new social ontology, like, a new ontological entity that is the couple, that is different from just the individuals and is different from the community.

But clearly there are many other aspects of weddings that are not about the couple, they are about that larger community. And I think for understanding that, we do have to go beyond the specific symbolism of, of the wedding. And I'm here thinking about the function of weddings more generally in, like, a sociological and anthropological sense.

Because weddings are a tradition. You know, it has, in our case, it has this, uh, Roman and Christian baggage, and each time we get wed, every time we have a wedding, we are keeping that tradition alive, right? We are conserving that tradition and ensuring that it goes on into the future. And in that sense, I would say weddings are inherently conservative, not in a, political sense of conservative versus liberal, but just, like, in a broad sense of they conserve a social institution and preserve a social form, The form of the union of two people is then legally recognized by the state. And I think the function of that conservatism is that at least in some cases, it can function as a social glue. So it's not just that it glues the couple together, it's actually that it glues the whole community together as a social form

[00:51:51] Ellie: totally. I mean, tell, tell that to the anti-bride 'cause she's still she's still participating in the conservative tradition. And I'm very aware of the fact that as somebody who in some ways is in a very, non-standard, maybe we would even say subversive couple form, getting married like is super normie.

and yeah, that's, and that's what you're getting at here through the use of the term conservative. I, I think that is sad but true.

So I think...

[00:52:17] David: and it also includes gay

[00:52:18] Ellie: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, totally. And I mean this was like part of the debate within queer theory once same-sex marriage was legalized as well. Like should we be adopting these traditions?

so I wanna just quickly bring in here a piece of anthropological research that I revisited, having not read it since undergrad for this episode, which is a chapter from Arnold van Gennep's classic 1908 book, The Rites of Passage, because he makes an interesting point in his chapter on betrothal and marriage where he says marriage is an essentially social act.

It is the incorporation of a stranger into a group. You know, I think in the contemporary situation you have the incorporation of two strangers into two different groups. I think beyond that, I'm also thinking about contemporary weddings as ways of strangers meeting one another. Like David, you're gonna meet at my wedding like family members from Minnesota, friends from high school, people that you haven't met.

I find that just like a really compelling aspect of marriage. And this is also one reason that marriage, according to van Gennep, is the most important transition from one social category to another. And he has a whole account of the different groups that are involved in weddings. It's not just the couples and their families, but it's also the local group, different associations, I mean, we can't deny that the two sex groups, like a kind of binary distinction between men and women, this is something that he touches on explicitly, are a big part of the wedding tradition as well.

You have your bridesmaids and your groomsmen. That's probably the most obvious example, but there's like a lot of gender binary work that happens in, uh, wedding rituals

[00:54:00] David: I think this point is super important, and the article from Jonathan Wolff that I mentioned earlier on ceremonies makes a good point about this role that community or communities in the plural, play in the, in the actual event of a wedding. And he notes that when we go to a wedding , we are reminded that we belong to multiple communities at once, and that therefore our political, social, and ethical commitments are always split or sort of divided across many levels.

And those levels can include things like the family, the town, the profession, you know, you just mentioned that, but also, he's, he's really focusing on the nation state. And he says that most of the time we think of ourselves through the lens of the nation state, like I'm American, I'm Mexican, I'm British, whatever.

But when you go to a wedding, you are reminded that you have commitments to people outside of the nation state, and that's really important, he says, especially at a time when reactive nationalisms are on the rise across the globe, like Brexit, like Trumpism in the US. And so for instance, if my cousin marries somebody from China, that Chinese person immediately becomes part of my family.

And so now, my nationalist self-understanding has to be nuanced in a particular way. And so they bring to the foreground what he calls our sub-nationalist identifications, that we identify () with a lot of

people. and I wanna think about this very briefly through a particular movie about weddings, 'cause, you know, we've been talking, um, a- about weddings and about also movies and TV.

But I asked a colleague of mine if she could recommend a really good movie about weddings that could help us think about the topic for this episode. And she said, "Well, if you haven't seen Monsoon Wedding, you absolutely have to watch it." It's a movie by, uh, Mira Nair, um, a director who also did Mississippi Masala,

and I hadn't seen it

[00:56:05] Ellie: mom.

[00:56:06] David: Exactly.

Exactly. So, like, a really interesting connection. So then I, uh, realized that I've seen this movie, uh, a long time ago, and I found a review in The New York Times by Lisa Schwarzbaum, who writes about the fact that when she saw this movie, and the movie is about this large Indian wedding and all the chaos that happens in the wedding, and then eventually the tensions are resolved.

Yeah, we talked about the chaos earlier. But in The New York Times review, uh, Schwarzbaum says that she went to the premiere of that wedding movie on the morning of September 11th, when that movie was premiering in Toronto, Canada. So she is an American visiting Canada to see this film at a festival, and that's when the towers fell.

And this review, which was just published last year in 2025, she is reminiscing and sort of thinking back to that moment, and she makes exactly that same argument about nationalism that Wolf makes in connection to ceremonies and that you alluded to a few seconds ago. And she says, "When you are at a wedding or when you watch a movie about a wedding, you can very easily identify with the emotions that motivate people, reasons that led them to want to get married, the tension during the day of the wedding, the sense of expectation and relief that, that frames the whole experience."

And she says that's because weddings in general, whether in real life or in movies, they require relatively little cultural translation. So it's not that you understand weddings from other cultures automatically, but that you can identify the emotions, and you can relate to the emotions, and you can acknowledge the significance of that moment for those people, and you can identify in a way that breaks down, nationalist, um, ideologies.

And I like that because Schwartzbaum is reflecting on this as a New Yorker seeing a movie in 2001 by the mother of a nine-year-old who will then grow up to be a defender of pluralism in New

[00:58:15] Ellie: So amazing. Well, weddings might be conservative in a loose sense, but we can see here they are by no means nationalist. They actually can resist nationalism, whether by encouraging connections to other cultures or by showing us the universality, eh, of the human experience