WOMEN AND TIME AND WEDDINGS

This morning I spent my sunrise meditation time mulling over the lives of the women in our family, and how things have changed from one generation to the next, which led me to thinking about how different the weddings have been for each generation. 

My husband's parents had only known each other for about six weeks when they decided to get married.

 

My parents met in high school and were married by the time they were nineteen. Mom was a War Bride. I think they were married in the small chapel at our church in Dallas, not the big sanctuary --  she wearing a smart navy suit, and Dad in his uniform, each with one best friend in attendance. They probably went back to my grandparents' house for cake afterwards. Dad managed to find space in a boarding house for her, near where he was stationed, and he would sometimes sneak off base at night to see her. A couple of months later he was shipped overseas, not to come home for three or four years.

My situation was sort of the reverse of theirs. I met john as soon as I got to college, but I was a very naive seventeen year old, while he was a twenty one year old "man of the world." We dated steadily from that point on, without ever actually "going steady." He graduated and moved to Houston in the middle of my sophomore year, then got sent to work in the Far East (Asia, not New England) the summer before my senior year. He proposed over the phone that fall, and about two weeks after graduating, I married a guy I hadn't laid eyes on in thirteen months!

We had a traditional wedding there at the same church my family had been going to for generations. My two sisters were my attendants, my niece and nephew the flower girl and ring bearer. Mom made all the attendants' dresses, though we splurged and bought mine. The reception was cake and punch served there at the church. The very next morning I packed up my one huge suitcase and headed off to live in Indonesia with my new hubby. Our honeymoon was the trip over. The crystal and silver we had received as wedding gifts got left at my parents' house, though a small crate containing a toaster oven, an electric frying pan, a few corning ware plates and casseroles, and some plastic glasses, had been shipped on ahead. We spent our first six months or so of marriage in a one room bungalow on the beach, and the things in that crate, once it finally arrived, made up my entire kitchen!

Now that both my kids are engaged, well, it's a whole new world, isn't it? By the time they get married, they will both have been living with their partners for several years already, with well-furnished kitchens and well-established careers. So what do you give a couple who already has everything from a pasta maker to an espresso machine? And what have honeymoons evolved into, now that they are no longer the first chance for the young newlyweds to spend any real time alone together? I'm not making judgements, mind you. I certainly don't believe that any one generation had it all figured out, or was any more "right" than the others. I just think these things are interesting to ponder, don't you?