Ok, so I'm a single gal and though I've been in several relationships, I've never made them last unless the guy was NOT trying to find someone to marry. However, being a girl, I do sometimes like to think about what it might be like to be married. My mother and father were married and that didn't seem to work out quite so well. However, I've found that many second marriages tend to work better... Perhaps it is because folks are older when they find their second wives or second husbands, and being older and wiser, tend to marry for common interests other than having children and raising them.
With that in mind, I was looking at some wedding things for a friend of mine who is getting married (I bite my tongue around her on my less-than-optimistic views) and I never thought about all the things people need when they're getting married. Really, there are several ways to go about it.
You can have a very simple wedding, justice of the peace, marriage certificate and a couple of witnesses... It's about the same style as Vegas, but not as flashy, and usually no Elvis Impersonator. Or you can go all out and rent some Catholic church for the day with a 7 tier cake, a dress that costs about 4 times as much as my current car, wedding tiaras for the bride, bridesmaids and flower girl, satin pillows, flower arrangements that match the dresses of the bridesmaids and... on and on! The one day in a woman's life when she really gets to be a princess.
Now, the idea of a wedding like this initially is for a ceremonial tying of one family to another through marriage. It is a good way for everyone to witness who the new addition to their family is going to be and the "Does Anyone Object" statement allows them to cast judgment and refuse to approve the marriage. Nowadays, I don't think anyone pays attention when someone "objects" to the marriage, but it CAN ruin the whole theme of the wedding, and some might call it an ill omen.
American traditions come from a large variety of backgrounds and have become cemented into our societal way of thinking over the years as we advance as a civilization. The United States of America is still a relatively young country, which just happened to have been founded with a large variety of people on land that helps us be quite self-sustaining. Anyway, this gets away from my original theme, but it all points down to the idea that our traditions came from such a vast variety of backgrounds, came together, mixed up, and then got doled out in a blended form. I think we are blurring the lines between different cultures in America more and more every generation. I think it will be an interesting place 5 generations down the line.
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