Manifestos

May 2013

As someone in an intercultural marriage, I spend a lot of time thinking about how our culture shapes us. It’s often through the foil of my partner that I’m able to see my own culture through clearer eyes—its predictability, its surprises, its insanity, and its joys. Our cultures are never as simple as stereotypes: my WASP family is infinitely more boisterous and loud than David’s Jewish one. But there are ways that our cultures are often inescapable (even as we try to modify them). It comes out in how I worded my feminist wedding invitations, and in the moment where I fed our kid his first solid food out of family baby Wedgwood. (Yes, that is china specifically for babies. I have two sets.) Here, Lucy explores the for-better-or-for-worse influence of culture on our relationships. How does your culture come out in unexpected ways in the context of your own marriage? —Meg

by Lucy Bennett, 2013 Business Intern

Thousands of Northerners and foreigners have migrated to it… but Southerners they will not become. For this is still a place where you must have either been born or have “people” there, to feel it is your native ground. Natives will tell you this… It is a loyalty to a place where habits are strong and memories are long. If those memories could speak, they would tell stories of a region powerfully shaped by its history and determined to pass it on to future generations. –Tim Jacobson, Heritage of the South

I remember the first time I hid my accent. It was in the seventh grade, as I was headed to class in the trailers that sat behind the school. My backpack was nearly my size at the time, so when two girls stepped onto the path in front of me I stopped so short the weight of it almost sent me flying to the pavement.

“Can you say yellow?”

Well, obviously. Most seventh graders understand how to say yellow. But they wanted to hear me say it. The person who they apparently knew from hearing in the halls could produce that telltale vowel slur. I concentrated very hard on emphasizing my consonants. A fit of laughter was my reward.

“And girl! Say girl!”

I said girl as flat as I knew how, but still they laughed. I pushed past, left them to their laughter, but the moment stuck with me. Now, when folks meet me for the first time, they’re disappointed. “I thought you would have more of an accent,” they sigh. I can understand the disappointment. It’s expected, as a part of what people believe it means to be Southern. Which is not at all what it means.

Being Southern does not equal the personality type associated with the gun-toting redneck, the Southern belle, the Honey Boo-Boo. If there’s anything that the academic world can tell us about being Southern, it’s that no one can agree about how to define Southern identity. It is a mashup of disparate cultures, a paradox held together by the inseparable burden of history—slavery, civil war, segregation, and even more violence that cannot be categorized. Thinking about it makes your brain want to wander off in two different directions most of the time.

It’s believed that because I identify as Southern, it’s easy to know the rules and traditions that I have been raised on and come to live by: I must value manners and my elders above all else. I cannot, under any circumstances, give away something that has been passed down to me, because my grandparents’ china is sentimentally worth more than all the gold in Fort Knox. The same goes for giving away family recipes, unless they’re being added to the local church cookbook for a charity drive. Don’t even think of dressing down for church, no matter how casual the members are. Cotillion and Junior League are required activities. The drink of choice is always sweet tea, and a love of pork jowl and collard greens is never optional.

Though a person’s public identifiers don’t equal what the whole of their life looks like, it’s certainly shaped my relationship. Bryan came to Georgia by way of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida. While he’s been here since grade school, he’s not from here. Our regional differences, like so many others, change how we navigate the traditions within our life together. Sometimes it’s silly things, like how much sugar is appropriate for one gallon of sweet tea or whether or not making pomanders can be described as a fun family activity for the holidays. Other issues require more serious discussion: whether I should change my last name and whether I should change my middle name to my maiden name (a Southern custom that’s also rarely thought of or brought up in the name change debate). In these discussions, our family backgrounds and traditions must serve as the context that we base our decisions on; as much as being Southern can act as a way of life, it is not a rulebook that I can follow any more than feminism is.

By seeing people’s backgrounds as the context of their lives, and not necessarily their rulebook, we can begin understanding more about how they choose to shape their future. Stereotypes might give us the shorthand account of a person’s identity, but it doesn’t always predict their choices.

Photo from Lucy’s wedding by Angelina of Asterisk Photography

Posted in: Manifestos, Tradition | 127 Comments »

May 2013

A Private Wedding

by Meg Keene, APW Executive Editor

A Wedding Invitation Is Not A Media Pass

I knew something was changing when a few years ago, I got this question: A reader’s uncle had videotaped her vows on his iPhone, and the day after the wedding had uploaded them to his Facebook page and tagged her in the post. His message was that her vows were so lovely that he felt compelled to share them. Her message was that she felt like her privacy had been violated. She wondered if it would be tremendously rude to ask him to take the video down. “Of course it’s not rude,” I replied. “What was rude was to record one of the most personal moments of someone’s life, and to share it as if it belonged to you.”

Fast forward to 2013, and that exchange already feels dated. Mark Zuckerberg thinks that the amount that we share online and through social media will double every year. I don’t think that’s exactly true, since already we’re all shutting down feeds we can’t keep up with (for me, that’s Facebook—sorry Mark). But it’s true that the way people share has changed drastically in the last few years. It’s not just the ubiquity of social networking sites, it’s the way smart phones have put effortless power in our hands. If we can easily take a video, or snap a picture, we can just as thoughtlessly share those photos or videos. We’ve forgotten the person who records the moment (and makes it pretty) is not the person the moment belongs to. We’ve forgotten that privacy has value.

You Don’t Need A Reason

The other week, I was reading an advice column about a woman who didn’t want her children’s pictures shared on social media. Since I’m in a substantially similar position (I share my kid’s pictures in very limited and reasonably private ways), I related. But the advice columnist’s response threw me. They told the woman to tell people, “I know I’m paranoid, but I’d rather you didn’t share my kids picture online.” And thanks for playing, but no. I don’t ask people to not share pictures of my kid because I’m afraid of predators; I just think that he should get to choose how he lives on the internet. I don’t want to make that choice for him, and I definitely don’t want some random person making the call. I disagree with the advice columnist because I don’t think asking people not to share your private life online requires an excuse. I just think it requires a please and thank you.

If you’re asking people to not share your wedding pictures on social media, you might feel like you need a reason, or feel compelled to make an excuse. You might think, “I’m not comfortable having my pictures shared, but it’s not like I’m famous, so what right do I have to ask for that?” But the reason is simply that weddings are private. You invited your uncle, not your uncle and all of his Facebook friends. You’re collecting a community of people to witness a very personal commitment. By doing that, you have the right to request and expect privacy. Figuring out how to do that well is the key.

How Do You Want Your Wedding Shared?

As with all things wedding, this is a conversation best had with your partner first, and then clearly articulated to vendors as well as friends and family. Let’s walk through questions to ask yourself and others. Continue reading A Private Wedding

Posted in: Life, Manifestos, Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 208 Comments »

Apr 2013

Love In The Age Of The 24-Hour News Cycle

Last week was rough. It was rough for different people in different ways. There were members of the APW community way to close to the horror in Boston on Monday. There were lots of you locked down in Boston on Friday. There were those of you close to, or with loved ones in and near West, Texas. There were people, like me, who had lived through different kinds of terror and were finding their PTSD triggers all being hit at once. Then there were the many glued to the news, afraid and/or sad. As I’ve gotten older, and built my own family, I’ve found that bad news hits me in a different way. The fear of losing a child or a partner can quickly wrap it’s icy cold fingers around my heart. News cycles like last week shake me up in a whole new way. Today’s post by Rachel Wilkerson explores the fear that pops up after national tragedies, and the everyday fear that keeps us up at night worrying about our loved ones.

—Meg

If you’d asked me three years ago to list the things I am afraid of, this would have been my list:

1. Sharks.

2. Having someone break into my apartment to rape and kill me.

That was it. I don’t know if it’s really all that rational or not, but it’s a pretty short list, and I never felt like it was affecting my quality of life.

Now? Now I need a damn outline.

I. Fears about kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder

A. I’m the victim and a stranger is the perpetrator.

B. I’m the victim and MY HUSBAND IS THE PERPETRATOR.

C. I’m the victim and nobody cares because I’m not a pretty white woman.

D. Someone I care about is the victim.

II. Fears about my future children

A. They will be bullied.

B. They will bully someone else.

C. They will be kidnapped, assaulted, raped, and murdered.

D. They will kidnap, assault, rape, or murder someone.

E. Wait, am I even going to be able to have children?!?!

III. Fears about diseases

A. I will get a disease.

i. Every time I have a stomachache or a headache, I’m clearly dying.

ii. I’m worried that this chicken isn’t cooked all the way through and also, even though I wore latex gloves when I was touching that chicken and washed my hands (and nails too, duh), I’m still afraid to touch anything in the kitchen for the rest of the night.

iii. I’m really stressed that I’m not getting to the gym enough to lower my stress, which will keep me from dying from being stressed because STRESS KILLS.

B. Someone I love will get a disease.

i. The people I love clearly do not eat enough vegetables to keep them from dying young.

ii. YOU FORGOT TO WEAR SUNSCREEN GOLFING?! ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ME A WIDOW AT THIRTY?!?!

C. Don’t forget about that recent flesh-eating bacteria case.

IV. Fears that the Mayans were right, we just had the date wrong

A. Natural disasters.

B. The War on Women.

C. Economic collapse.

D. The Hunger Games really happens.

For a long time, I managed to avoid most of these irrational fears by simply not watching the evening news. But then I moved in with Eric. Suddenly I had this additional person who I was now terrified of losing, and said person typically has the TV on. His go-to shows include Law & Order: SVU, Dan Rather Reports, and the endless stream of war, aliens, and apocalypse programming on H2. It got into my head, big time. It basically turned me into my mother, who, on any given night can be found in the kitchen close to midnight, eating milk and cookies as a serious-sounding voiceover says, “…Linda had always told her friends and family that she feared one day Frank would kill her.” Continue reading Love In The Age Of The 24-Hour News Cycle

Posted in: Manifestos, The Hard Stuff, Uncategorized | 54 Comments »

Apr 2013

Reclaiming Wife: Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover (And Start Over Again)

Posts from APW moms are among my favorite (there is some wisdom there, y’all). But today’s post is extra special because it comes from my mom. My mother (who goes by Jennifer when it’s not me) often jokes that she doesn’t know where I learned about relationships, but that she thinks some of it might have to do with learning from her mistakes. But the reality is, what she calls mistakes actually look a lot like successes to me. Because if my mom has taught me anything about marriage and divorce, it’s that self-care is one of the most important things you can do for yourself and your relationship. And sometimes self-care looks like getting out of a relationship that isn’t making you happy and never will. As I get older, I’ve witnessed many friends stay in unhappy marriages out of fear. Fear of failure, fear of being alone, you name it. And it kills me. So for today, I asked her to write a post about leaving a marriage when it’s just not working. Because sometimes all it takes is knowing you can do something to give you the courage to go ahead and do it. And now I’ll give the floor to my mom, with some of the smartest words I’ve ever seen grace these pages. Not that I’m biased.

—Maddie

Starting over from scratch. No one sees this coming when they’re marching down the aisle—whether the aisle is church stone, beach sand, or hardwood in a local VFW club—till death do us part is embedded deep in our hearts on that wedding march, and in our partner who’s waiting at the end, face beaming at the thought of you growing old together and retiring to a porch swing, sipping fresh lemonade.

Fast forward to the day you’re sitting on a beach in Mexico on a “girl’s trip” realizing how short life is, and that death-do-us part is a really, really long time when you’re married to a guy who prefers watching ESPN over viewing any part of you…even when you’re rocking lingerie. Or a guy who isn’t who you thought he was when you said yes.

This was me at thirty-one years old. Life had recently taught me I controlled nothing. I learned I could attempt to protect everything in my life—my family, friends, relationships, and my heart—but bad things happen despite efforts to prevent them. That trip to Mexico was an escape. Everything about me was broken. I had just lost my nine-year-old daughter to brain cancer, and during the time she was sick, had gradually discovered that my husband didn’t have the emotional capacity to help my dying heart survive the process of losing her. He wasn’t cruel or apathetic. He just didn’t get it. The day before I left for Mexico, my friend and neighbor Ray died of a heart attack alone in a hotel on a business trip. I was devastated by his death, as much for losing him as for losing any belief that life would be there waiting for me to live again if I ever healed. I learned the hard way that life is too short. I knew then there were things I needed to think about. Big things.

So there I sat at thirty-one years old—five kids, a cat, two dogs, and a husband I needed to decide on. Sitting there on that white, sandy beach at 6:45am, while my intentionally childfree girlfriends slept till noon, I thought about things. A lot. On that beach—day four of thinking—I finally decided. It was over. I was indeed—done. I could not come up with one reason to stay with my husband that had anything to do with my own happiness or comfort, just those around me. My husband was a great guy, I thought no one would understand my choice. My kids would be crushed. My family might be disappointed in me. My financial stability would be suddenly unstable. People would talk.

On that beach, none of it mattered. I would always take care of my kids. My family would get over it. I could make my own money. And who gives a sh*t what people say. The final decision came down to a crude, possible future reality—some day I may not have teeth or control of my bladder. I may get sick. Really sick. Would I feel loved and cared for no matter what? I didn’t think I would. Would he cry with me and for me if I did get really sick? I didn’t think he would. I thought a lot about this in particular. I shouldn’t have had to. This was not how I was going to live the rest of my life. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover (And Start Over Again)

Posted in: Manifestos, Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 60 Comments »

Apr 2013

My Life Is Good*

My life is good.*

*good but some days my job makes me crazy.

*good but I’m so tired because Eric and I had an argument last night that went on for a few hours.

*good but really stressed about money.

*good but I acknowledge it’s because of my privilege.

*good but let me tell you some bad things because I don’t want to be accused of bragging.

*good but not that good. My life isn’t perfect.

When I saw APW’s theme for April, The Good, my first reaction was to shudder. Not because I don’t know what’s good about my life, but because…well…you want me to talk about that? On the internet? Are you nuts?

A New Niceness?

Despite the ubiquity of the Like button, the dominant culture of most major blogs and websites is overwhelmingly negative. They (we?) find a way to hate pretty much anything. In fact, finding people who hate the same things you do is often what makes the internet so amazing. The hot app at SXSW this year? Hater, an app that is all about the thumbs down button. While the founder claims it’s just a place to vent and to be authentic about the things you don’t like, I’m not sure why he thinks we need a separate app for that. It’s happening on every major social network already.

Recently, Nathan Heller wrote an article in New York Magazine claiming that the web has gotten nicer. “For those of us who learned to love the web best as a hostile, predatory, somewhat haunted place, this kindness is startling—but not as startling as it might once have been,” he writes. “These days, life online has become friendly, well mannered, oversweet. Everyone is on his or her very best behavior—and if they’re not, they tend to be quickly iced out of the conversation. The sweet camaraderie that flourished during Sandy isn’t just for terror and crisis anymore; it has become the way the internet lives now.”

To which the women on the internet replied with a collective snort.

“Yo dude, what websites have you been surfing?” one commenter wrote. “I want in on some of them. All the ones I’ve been in are flourishing with rape threats, death threats, people who genuinely think I deserve brimstone and hell fire—well, I’d run out of characters if I enumerated all of them but you get the point. Unless, maybe you haven’t got a vagina. Then yeah perhaps the internet has gotten nicer. For you.”

Katie J.M. Baker echoed these sentiments on Jezebel. “A new niceness? More like the same old bullshit. The virtual world isn’t really separate from the ‘real’ one, in which, to reference just one depressing statistic, one in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. We can’t ask ‘when did the internet get so nice?’ without also asking to whom, exactly, the internet is nice—and why?”

#Hathahaters

Contrary to what Heller writes, in the past few years, a wide swath of the social media world has gone from criticizing the terrible shit that needs to be challenged to hating…everything. Apparently, we ran out of bad things to hate (I guess? I’m pretty sure there’s still some racism out there that we didn’t catch), so we started hating the good things, and the earnest, hopeful, without-a-trace-of-irony moments that people once felt safe sharing on social media. Those people being hated are often women, and those moments are often emotional ones. Women who just met a career goal. Women who just got engaged, or who are planning their weddings. Women who are pregnant, or whose IVF finally worked, or whose adoption finally went through. Women talking about hobbies that make them feel confident, happy, and fulfilled.

This commentary on women’s bodies, choices, careers, and families started with celebrity culture, and it certainly hasn’t ended there. Anne Hathaway and Lena Dunham are two of the most recent examples of celebrities to get an over-the-top amount of hate sent their way. Here are two women who are experiencing huge moments in their lives (Dunham is writing and starring in her own award-winning show on HBO, Hathaway took home Oscar gold and just got married) and the public refuses to be happy for them, or simply leave them alone. If you ask one of the rabid, anti-fans why they hate these women so much, they grasp for reasons. Eventually, they say they are “annoying,” and then use a few throwaway comments that made it into the public discourse to support the idea that these women are terrible people who don’t deserve their success.

Attacks on female celebrities are so pervasive, we didn’t even notice when the internet made the jump to hating less-famous and more recently well-known women: bloggers. Most women writing on the internet for any semblance of an audience have found themselves subjected to harsh criticism and deeply personal attacks from total strangers. Those of us who experience it don’t talk about it much, because to be honest about how hurtful it is only makes people pile on. It’s a classic playground situation; someone pushes your buttons until you cry, and then makes fun of you for crying. Continue reading My Life Is Good*

Posted in: Gender & Feminism, Manifestos | 183 Comments »

Apr 2013

The Case Against Inspiration Boards

Some of my very first posts on APW were inspiration boards. They’re less of an all-consuming THING in the blog-o-sphere than they were in 2008, but back then they were half the fun of wedding blogs. So I made one. Obviously. (And funnily enough, while our colors, such that they were, ended up being different, this pretty much was the decorative feel of our wedding, seventeen months later.) But it was a year later that I actually nailed it with an inspiration board. Because this is what our wedding felt like, and this is how I remember it. The truth is, the way wedding blogs present weddings is a mirage. Your wedding will never feel like a wedding blog makes a wedding look. And there is no one better than Maddie, who attends (at least) one of your weddings every week in the summer, to tell you why.

—Meg

When I was planning my wedding, I had a little file folder on my desktop titled “ideas.” It was full of inspiration photos like the one below, where I’d pull together all of my visual concepts into one neat little collage and see how it all looked together. Did brown and turquoise really go? Would orange look too gaudy next to it? What if I used old netting as a tablecloth on the patio tables with Moroccan glass lanterns? Would that be on theme, without being obvious?

I planned my wedding during a time when color palettes were all the rage (are they still a thing?), and even went so far as to ask a wedding blog to come up with an inspiration board just for me. (Please take a minute and go read my submission so that we can all do a collective eye-roll at your young, impressionable managing editor. WHAT AM I EVEN TALKING ABOUT?! Ahem, okay back to business.) At first these exercises were just to help me collect my thoughts. What would our bridesmaids wear? What would the tables look like? But then, something shifted, and I started believing that I’d actually experience the wedding like the inspiration board. That I’d look back and remember my wedding like this:

This led me to do crazy things like seriously consider making napkin rings out of shower curtains and starfish for 250 people. Because then people would really understand that they were at a hip beach wedding (um…is being on the beach not enough?).

The wedding industry preys on the fact that for most of us, our weddings will be the first time we have a chance to throw a big event for lots of people. So it feeds us information that promotes its agenda. (Sell stuff! Make you think that the stuff they are selling is essential to your happiness!) But we all know this. It’s why most of us are here. But what I don’t think we talk about enough is the method by which we are fed this information. Over time, I’ve grown very frustrated with the way that weddings are presented on the internet. Because they are curated to make you believe that the part represents the whole. And it’s bad news.

Take this wedding I shot last year, for example. The couple (APW readers, yay!) got married in the woods of northern California, with a lakeside Quaker ceremony, delicious food provided by family and friends, and then they had a rockin’ dance party and bonfire that lasted well after my second shooter and I had retired to the bunk beds in our cabin. If I submitted this wedding to a blog, it would probably end up looking something like this:

It would get slapped onto Pinterest with the tag “Colorful Canoe Wedding” and you’d walk away wondering where you could collect mismatched jars to use for wildflowers at your outdoor wedding. And while that would be fine (hey, maybe you’ve been looking for a way to arrange wildflowers and this gave you a great idea), it would also be missing the point.

Because those photos up there? They represent maybe five percent of what this wedding was about. (And the canoe part? Planned only a few hours before it happened.)

When I was planning my own wedding, I put so much stock into how ten or fifteen imaginary photos in my head would look together. If they’d be cohesive enough. Because that’s how I thought it was done. That’s what I thought was expected. It wasn’t even about the wedding being blogworthy. It was about the wedding being have-worthy. It was about our guests not even wanting to be there if it didn’t look the way it’s supposed to. But then I started shooting weddings. And shooting them a lot. And you know what I learned? Weddings look and feel much more like this photo, which never ever ever makes it to the blogs, ever:

Do you see those details? So tiny. This isn’t to say that details are insignificant, or that they aren’t noticed at weddings. It’s just that, when the photos you see every day are so big and the details so front-and-center, it can make you start to believe that they are the central visual focus of the celebration. When in reality, they are such a small part of something bigger, something better.

The reality of weddings looks a lot more like this: Continue reading The Case Against Inspiration Boards

Posted in: Manifestos, Planning | 87 Comments »