On Sunday, Jenni’s wedding happened, to Lee, who it turns out I have met just like everyone kept telling me, what can I say, the brain it plays its tricks on me. There is a sekret kastle in the hills of Wellington and it was there, which was the perfectest place for it if you ask me. And I was delighted by the unpicking and restitching of wedding tradition into new forms for their simple, wonderful ceremony.
It’s wedding season for me. I’m down for something like seven or eight weddings this year – blimey. That’s a lot of matching going on.
Weddings are endlessly fascinating to me. I love finding the way meaning is shaded and assigned in a wedding. A wedding is a public act that is loaded with ritual power, and it’s bloody fascinating to see how the symbols of marriage are reconfigured to suit each couple’s personality, beliefs, spirit, and will. There’s so much depth in the way a true commitment made between two people resounds through their own lives, the lives of family and friends, and indeed throughout society’s structure and experience. Different weddings create different echoes and different marriages.
Of course, every marriage is different, because no two people are ever like any other two people. And that’s the beauty of it. In the end, those teenage musings that marriage was submission to a prestructured life collapse. Each couple’s relationship is unique, and marriage is a consecration of that uniqueness.
(Additional bonus wisdom: if you are wearing a kilt on a very windy hilltop, go inside.)