Weddings

Weddings are highly ritualized rites of passage that have traditionally functioned to transform a single man and woman into a husband and wife. Although the restriction of weddings to heterosexual couples is relaxing in some parts of the world, the debate around this topic is highly controversial. A wedding signifies to witnesses and to society in general that the couple has made a commitment both to each other and to the institution of marriage. Because few modern cultures retain rites of passage that signal the transition from adolescence to adulthood, the wedding often serves to signify this change in stature as well. Because of their great expense and the time required to execute them, weddings are often the most sumptuous activities consumers will experience in their lifetimes.

Weddings can either be civil (i.e., performed by an officiant permitted by law to conduct a ceremony) or religious (performed by a sanctioned religious officiant). Increasingly, weddings may incorporate traditions and scripts associated with multiple faiths, notes Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. Weddings occur in many forms throughout the world. They can be as simple as a ceremony where a man and a woman essentially marry themselves by repeating preestablished or new vows. At the opposite extreme, some wedding celebrations feature thousands of guests involved in activities over many days. For example, it is not uncommon in African and south Asian countries for entire villages or towns to be invited to a wedding.

The ceremony is often merely a small part of the ritual complex that may comprise the wedding. Common subrituals include the proposal, the engagement party, gift showers that fete the bride (and increasingly, the groom, as gifts have become less gendered and more elaborate), bachelor and bachelorette parties, bridesmaid luncheons, the reception, and the honeymoon. In addition, shopping for the wedding is a ritual itself; Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck estimate that those planning the type of lavish wedding favored in North America may rely on as many as thirty retailers to do so. For most brides in contemporary cultures, the proposal entails the gift of an engagement ring—typically a diamond—from her fiancé, although it is increasingly common for the bride to help select and pay for the ring. The engagement period is a socially vulnerable time because the bride and groom occupy what Victor Turner calls a “liminal condition,” or one where the couple is neither unattached nor married and where their roles and identities are therefore unstable. In most of the Western world, longer engagements have become the norm. In the 1950s, when Bride's magazine first offered “engagement checklists,” the magazine typically allocated three months for planning. By the early twenty-first century, the average engagement lasted thirteen months, note Otnes and Pleck.

In countries spurred by the Industrial Revolution, weddings have consistently grown more elaborate among the middle and upper classes. The preferred variant in Western developed nations is the lavish, or “white” wedding, so named because it typically features the bride in a formal white gown and the ceremony in a church setting. Other key artifacts of the lavish wedding include attendants, flowers, church decorations, increasingly elaborate receptions (e.g., sit-down dinners with dance floors and bands or disc jockeys), an artistic wedding cake, fancy modes of transportation such as limousines, and gifts. The explosion in popularity of the white wedding was triggered by media depictions of the marriage of Britain's Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in 1840. Before that time, women married in their best dresses or in a nonwhite gown (e.g., in black dresses in Sweden). But with national-circulation magazines and faster modes of communication in place, pictures [Page 1525]of Victoria's gown and ceremony were easily accessible to middle- and upper-class consumers. Media depictions of society weddings in the early twentieth century as well as ad campaigns by De Beers and other retailers in the 1930s and 1940s continued to fuel the growth of the wedding until the 1970s, when feminism and countercultural movements diminished the popularity of these events.

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