I crossed the threshold of engagement with some trepidation. With engagement came the onslaught of questions about the wedding: when it would be, what it would entail, whether I’d started a Pinterest board. They were friendly questions directed at me from well-meaning friends and colleagues who saw an opportunity for female bonding, but I couldn’t help feeling trivialized by the conversation. I have never liked being the center of attention. I wanted things to go back to normal: to talk about our work, and the books I’m reading, and the awesome iPhone app I’d found—not to be apotheosized as the bride. I envied my fiancé, whose “Hey, I’m engaged” was invariably met with a simple congratulations, no further elaboration necessary.
My fury built at being typecast as a bride—a role that apparently came with assumptions about what’s on my mind and tasks that I was suddenly responsible for. We were both excited to get married, but social expectations are not alike for the bride and the groom. This inequality loomed over my thoughts of our future together. When we were dating, not pre-engaged, not engaged, we were two halves of a beautiful partnership, supporting each other in our interests and personal growth. Gender had little bearing beyond physical attraction. Somewhere along the way, cultural narratives about being female or male had crept into our personal anxieties, shaped our decisions, and subtly changed how we saw ourselves in the context of our relationship. I refused to wear an engagement ring unless he did, too, but my new role felt nonetheless palpable: somehow, as the female counterpart, I was expected to care more about the wedding, know more about weddings, and plan the damn thing. I was afraid this was only the tip of the iceberg: no doubt when we become parents, everyone, including my feminist husband, would default to me as some all-knowing mother.
In my Chinese heritage, weddings are traditionally planned and paid for by the parents of the groom, as a welcome and thank you to the bride’s parents for raising a daughter to join their family. Though this can be seen as a transaction where the bride is a commodity exchanged for expensive gifts, I liked how the bride’s value lies beyond the many jewels and gifts showered upon her and her family. To win his bride, the groom has to overcome witty and embarrassing obstacles set by her bridesmaids. I knew the cliché of a man proving his worth to “win” a woman is also problematic—in line with the prevailing notion that men must attain success before proposing marriage, thereby making women a reward for their hard work. Nevertheless, I appreciated how the groom plays an active part on wedding day, compared to a traditional western wedding where a groom passively waits at the altar for his bride to be delivered on her father’s arms. I felt uneasy about the girls-against-guys binary of the door games, but enjoyed how the wedding party has a visible and creative role, the wedding involves a community, and it was not seen as an exclusively feminine project.
Planning the bride-centric American wedding felt lonely in comparison: I had to have a dream wedding, had to execute it myself, and would be blamed for all the mistakes. I had planned formal events and professional conferences before, that wasn’t the problem. The fact is that designing and managing an event is work, and while I was confident that I would do a great job, I resented how I had been handed the job simply because I was female.
In pursuit of egalitarian wedding planning, we split up the chores, called dibs on the details we each cared about most, and ostensibly managed communications with our own families. But we couldn’t escape how everyone continued to bypass the groom’s authority in favor of the bride’s. I don’t like to disappoint, so I worried that any breaches of etiquette, any disorganization, would reflect badly on me. Through some twisted logic, I even managed to convince myself that because I wanted to be engaged so bad, it was my responsibility to see the wedding through. Though I tried to limit the hours I spent working on the wedding, I still spent significantly more time worrying about it than my partner. I also found myself nagging whenever something needed to be done and wasn’t. I hate nagging. I wanted us to talk about anything that wasn’t wedding planning. I seethed at how wedding planning was stressing me out during what should be a period of celebration, and feared that at the end I would step right into the trope of the nagging wife.
A month before the wedding, my partner was away on a trip and out of Wi-Fi range, and his family had some crucial, time-sensitive questions. I wished we could discuss our answers together, with him looking over my shoulder as I drafted the emails. Instead, I had to field the questions myself. I spent the afternoon emailing back and forth with his mom, getting little else done while my phone chirped every fifteen minutes. And I discovered that… it was okay. All of my answers that I was afraid were poorly phrased, that I worried was going to upset someone, that might not be the best decision we could’ve made… I’d wanted to share the work because it’s less intimidating to deal with this together, but I was reminded that I am a capable adult on my own, too.
I had wanted wedding planning to be a politically correct “our” wedding and not “my” wedding. I’d forgotten that before the political felt personal, before gender roles shaped our interpretation of our actions, we loved each other. It was natural to yearn for mutual support, to want to share this planning journey together. We didn’t get to do everything together, and the work won’t always be evenly split, and that’s okay.
I received many compliments on our small destination wedding. The praise, like the planning questions, was aimed solely at me. I tried to reply that I hadn’t done this myself, that everyone who’d helped, including the groom, deserved compliments too. My protests drifted over the merry babel of the room, barely comprehended. As I stood there in white tulle with painted cheeks and flowers in my hair, my guests could not help but see me as the bride, and maybe there wasn’t anything inherently wrong in being a bride. I could wear the role gracefully, smile and say thank you. The wedding is an accomplishment and I could own it. Best of all, at the end of the evening I could take off my dress and return to myself.
