Why we're getting fake-married: On planning a feminist wedding

As I said to The Boy the other night, "Oops." It wasn't that our plans for a wedding were secret, as such, but only our families and my best friend knew. And then I go and blurt it out to the whole internet, in an aside on a post about my 2015 goals. Oops indeed.

Round here, we refer to it variously as 'our fake wedding' or 'the love party' (which sounds somewhat, ahem, questionable in English but better in Dutch). There are a few reasons why we'll be doing the wedding without the legal bit. The Boy, when I met him, was adamant that he never wanted to get married. Turned off by the pomp and ridiculous expense of weddings, troubled by the fact that weddings are a perpetuation of patriarchal power structures, indifferent to declaring a commitment in front of God or the state, they were something he wanted no part of. From my perspective, I'd long been vocally opposed to the many elements of traditional weddings that are decidedly dodgy from a feminist perspective.

However, once we'd been together for a while we realised that it was actually important to us to have something to mark our love and commitment. Call it a yearning for a pretty dress and a big party or call it abandoning our principles, we'd started to suspect that this whole wedding lark might be something we wanted to be part of.

Bugger.

And so the question arose: how would we go about getting wed without subscribing to the archaic patriarchal traditions that we were both so opposed to?

First off, the idea that T would be the only one who gets to decide when the wedding planning began by getting down on one knee is frankly laughable, as anyone who knows us will realise. Instead we talked it over, for about a year in total, building up to the decision that yes, we wanted to have something: a fake wedding, a love party, a commitment ceremony, call it what you will. And slowly, over the past few months, we've been telling our family that, no, we're not engaged but, yes, we'll be having a wedding.

Going the fake route means that we can be completely in control; with no legalities to worry about, we can have it wherever and whenever we want. So there's no ring. There'll be no giving me away (hah!), no first dance. Speeches, yes, but from the women as well as the men, and not formal in any sense. There'll be lots of vegan cake, and good music to dance to. There'll be vows of commitment, with all of the people we love there to hear them. It will, in short, be all the best bits of a wedding with all of the crappy anti-feminist shit taken out.

Because let's face it, most wedding traditions are fucked up from a modern perspective. The part I find most troubling is the way in which they completely erase womens' agency. From the proposal right up to the wedding speeches, in a traditional wedding a woman's role is to look pretty and stay silent. She is treated as a possession, something to be passed from father to husband, and the name she's had since birth is whisked away in the blink of an eye. And you know what the mad thing is? These traditions are so ingrained within our culture that lots of kick ass, intelligent women (and indeed, kick ass, intelligent men) will often go along with them, without giving it a second thought.

Now, let me clearly state that I am in no way judging anyone else's choices about their own weddings: I completely understand why people want to go the traditional route on their wedding day. My criticism is of the traditions themselves. I'm excited to be able to design our own ceremony and party, one that can follow any structure we wish and be completely free of those pernicious traditions. As for the rest of the details, like date and place? Well, that's all to be decided. But one thing's for sure: as much as I'm looking forward to our kick ass, feminist fake-wedding, I'm looking forward to the rest of our life together far much more.