Me and my dude have a relationship. Been together close to 19 years, if I got that right. But we never got married, because a bunch of reasons that were not wholly clear to me until now, when the plan is in place. We’re gonna make it official October 13th. This is important for reasons of legal protections and whatnot, and also to get what we deserve, which is recognition for this thing we got. But, this is kind of a bad time.
We have little money and incredibly few family and friends, we aren’t going to reproduce, and we’re not young. Marriage as popularly conceived heavily leans on those things. It’s to have a day of expensive shangri-la decadence? No. It’s a way to celebrate the merging of two families and sets of friends in a great big… there’s a guest list of officiant, wedded, and three other people. It’s a way to make holy or legitimate the birth of your… nope. It’s two wacky kids starting life together as… nope.
If you put this question to the masses, the usual answer is “don’t bother” or “just elope.” But our self-respect won’t let that stand. We deserve a genuine ceremony, not scratching paper with ballpoint pens under fluorescent lights in an office space. The thing is this – as you take away all the things of marriage as currently conceived, either because you can’t afford them or don’t want to do them, what do you replace them with? Eventually, you have nothing left, and have to reinvent marriage from scratch.
One could wonder how we ended up with so few friends and family. I have the stereotypical broken home, my dude just had a single mom from generation of socially maladjusted people who couldn’t stay married or get married in the first place, half of whom are now dead. My dude has health problems that have him socially isolated, I just don’t feel the need for friends outside of my most important few, and I let the others all drift away. I don’t think about this most of the time, but it does have us looking like a pair of quasimodos living on a blasted margin of human society. A wedding of monsters.
It’s kind of darkly funny. I had an internet homie read one of my unpublished novels and she said it struck her as incredibly wrong the main character didn’t have a lot of friends and family, a community around her. It never occurred to me to write that for her, because I don’t think of life as having a lot of people in it. A little failure of my imagination.
ALL THAT’S TO SAY,
I am trying to reinvent the wheel of Marriage between now and October 13th. Any suggestions that don’t involve additional invites or thousands of dollars may be welcomed. The officiant is my brother, the witnesses my father and my dude’s mom, and my home boy Jeremy.
Ideally my bro will leave his daughters at home because they are about 6 and 4 and would almost certainly misbehave – less of a problem with a wedding crowd to disappear into than it would be in our tiny condo living room. But he might not have a choice but to bring them and not his wife, so having her tend them is not a workable solution at the moment. Maybe Jeremy can play croquet with them on the dead grass behind nuestra casa.
Meanwhile, what do we do or say at this thing? How to make it feel like a ceremony instead of an awkward tea party of people who don’t know or necessarily like each other?
I’ve been pondering ritual magic. My dude once had a hallucination as a small child, possibly a seizure, where he saw a small donkey go into his house. He pursued it but could not find it. In studying demonology, I found there’s a demon called gamigin or samigin (plus many variant spellings) that is sometimes depicted as a small donkey. This tells us, if there’s anything in occultism, Sammy Gene is my dude’s patron spirit. Who is mine? I find Acar from the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum interesting. Also our house is full of random arthropods, and Acar helps you control those. Lambes, on the other hand, has male pronouns, appears as a woman, and causes people of all sexes to fall in love with the conjurer. So much higher queer points.
Anyway, Acar and Lambes did not have Ars Goetia-styled sigils so I had to make up my own. Sammy’s is as depicted in ye olde grimoire’s tho, save an update on the name. How do you like me now? Or as some transphobic catholic tweeter once famously said, This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation. Revel in the annihilation of Man as the image of God. DESTROY. Plot designs of death. Disfigure the face of Man and Woman.
But still, one of the invitees -somebody we have to live with- is christian, so overt hostility to god jeezups is not gonna do. I’ll just slip these bad boys under the rug. Feel like I’ve lost track of the purpose of the post. Back to business…
Invitees show up at small condo with tiny living rooms and dining rooms in which to hang out. There is a back yard, which is not fenced off from our closest neighbors, but possibly also a place to be. We have some minor refreshments and chit chat, then
THE INVOCATION
Some kinda preamble to the marriage. Normally middle class people would feed everybody foie gras on platinum spoons or something, I don’t know. I feel like we should try to fill ten to thirty minutes with this, whatever it is.
THE UNION OF QUEER PEEPS
Some kinda marriage. Normally an able-bodied dad walks a daughter down an aisle, I guess a man gets escorted by a home boy? Then a preacher says jesus is cool, asks if we wanna do some slam poetry vows, then asks the do you do you, then it’s I do, rings, mandatory public display of affection, and you are forcibly escorted out of the building. I’m not sure how we’ll do this at all. PDA would be super-awk outside of a chaste smooch. Even standing for the ceremony is kinda dubious in our small space and general comfort. I feel like the run time for this should be ten minutes-ish?
POSTAMBLE
If we were outside, we stay outside for a minute to do some kind of a thing. If we were inside, we go outside, because one of the things my dude is into is getting confetti chucked at us, but he doesn’t wanna clean it out of couch cushions. Normally the woman one of us would chuck flowers at some nerds, then we get rice bukkake’d. I don’t know, this could be pretty short. Oh yeah, and my dude is cool with cutting a cake together, so this could end in a dining room, perhaps.
EVENING ENTERTAINMENTS
I just don’t dig board games, for the most part. I like scrabble but that’s because I’m better than average at it, and people don’t love losing to me, and I don’t wanna give anybody a bad time. Uno feels low stakes and foolish. Penny ante poker? I don’t know.
After that I think we’re good. Any ideas?
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We had a tiny mid-afternoon wedding in my sister’s living room – immediate family only, hired a judge, no religion involved. My sister bought a cake, so once everybody was there, we did the ceremony, ate the cake, and left. Drove around for a while until the car decided we were going to dinner at Ray’s Boathouse. In our minds, the point was not “getting” married, but “being” married. The rest was trivia. So do what feels right, don’t sweat it, and be married. P.S. It’s now 50 years later, so it seems to be working for us.
Our ceremony was short, less than 5 minutes, and part of a larger party. We were not married by any religious ceremony, but “By the Power of Greyskull!”
I think that part of the vows slipped by the few religious people there, but those who heard it did give a chuckle.
The only real advice I can offer is to not sweat about it too much.
I eloped; I have very positive things to say about elopement. The next year we did have a reception, which we called an “anniversary party”, with just a few of our closest relatives. Extended families being what they are, that means like 50 people.
I advocate simplicity. Find a venue for the ceremony, and a restaurant that everyone can go to afterwards. Ask a relative or friend to help organize, since ostensibly it’s an event for them not just for you. Of course, you’re clearly thinking about it more than I would, so maybe you’d want something less simple. I say, go for the level of organization that you enjoy working to achieve.
Before we got married, we joked about picking out music to include. It would alternate between 80s pop and like, Poeme Symphonique for 100 metronomes, lol. Obviously that didn’t happen, but it’s fun to imagine.
My partner and I had two “ceremonies”, our respective families being so different, never the twain shall meet. I endured as I was overruled. We’re still together after 30 years and common ground between respective in-laws remains elusive as ever. Not Hatfield/McCoy stuff — rather, “you folks go your way, we go ours”. Oh well.
Our wedding won’t be of any help, although we were in our forties. I took the bus into town, Mr J came out of work and met me at the Registry Office at the Town Hall (Victorian but British civic pride Victorian, which is impressive) with a couple of mates we knew could keep their mouths shut for witnesses, said the legally required words, signed the register then went and had lunch in a local pub. Mr J went back to work afterwards, and I took the bus home. We did it for the legal next of kin stuff, but Mr J really, really didn’t want his family to know so we didn’t tell most of our friends and family, still haven’t and it was well over twenty years ago.
However my best friend’s wedding may be of some help even though they had it in a hotel. Before the official bit started us and them got all of our dogs out of the kennel they were staying at and went for a bracing walk on Rhyll beach, before returning to the hotel and changing. The couple were both in their forties and had been living together for years, BF wore a suit. The bride came down the ‘aisle’ to the Hawaii Five-0 theme wearing an Indian shalwar kameez (she’s Welsh, it was the nearest thing to a dress she was prepared to wear), there were a couple of readings, one from A A Milne “When We Were Six” and I don’t recall the other, they said their vows which they had written themselves, said the legal bit, then signed the register while Benny Hill’s “Ernie (the Fastest Milkman in the West)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e1xvyTdBZI and we had a sit down meal with speeches including half a speech from me – I shared best man duties with Mr J. The rest of the time we all caught up on how we all were. Point being, while taking into account the sensibilities of the elderly relatives, they did things that had meaning to them, and in some cases to some of the rest of us – bearing in mind the two of them met at raves the Ernie thing was because Mrs BF had asked him to sing her a romantic song one evening, and Ernie was what he’d sung, she doesn’t know why she asked, he sang Ernie because he knew all the lyrics, and Califorinia Dreaming, the other song he knew all of the words to, really wouldn’t have done. Any way it cracked both of them up, and still does nearly twenty years later.
What about a game that’s cooperative, rather than competitive, in nature?
Thanks for the responses everybody; they have been shared with my dude. I’m struck by a few similarities to our own situation, which is good, because most of the information out there on weddings is pretty alienating. Re: coop board games, Still not appealing to me, but it is interesting these things exist now.