I am getting married very soon, and that milestone is giving me plenty of opportunities to reflect on what it means to love and belong within that very special bond. These reflections would make a great essay – but it is not this one! Because as I plan this milestone, I learned that getting married is about much more than the celebrated relationship. The whole event includes family and friends, and even – somehow – the whole community of married couple. It also includes all the traditions, norms and etiquette, all the expectations of what a wedding and a bride ought to be. Let me tell you: everyone has very strong opinions about how best to perform the deed!
First of all, I don’t know if it is the shallowness of our times, but all the unsolicited advices I am receiving are squarely about what I should, ought or cannot do on my‘Big Day’– the wedding -, as opposed to the very real commitment of partnership ‘till death do us part’ I am signing up for – the marriage. At this point, I am very open and willing to talk about the unconditionally of love and loyalty to my future husband, and how the ‘Good Life’ is not so easy when our growth – as individuals – is the foundation of our happiness as a couple. We are having these deep conversations together; about commitment, intimacy, fears, the inevitability of change… Still, I wished we lived in a time when our relatives and acquaintances would venture to share their best practices to ‘Love Well’ instead of projecting their wedding day fantasies onto me.
Most days, there is no reason to conflict over one’s dress colour. Everyone is too busy leading his or her own lives to care about how we lead ours. But the wedding day is – somehow – fair game: a time where conventions have a fighting chance against radical individuality. The whole wedding ‘industry’ claims that you can do anything on ‘Your’ day. Yet the template of the religious or spiritual ceremony, followed by a cocktail and sit down formal dinner, is so engrained that any deviance from that is (almost) sacrilege. I did not expect to have to defend (so bloody hard) my desire to host a simple bbq and campfire. {Which in the end, I am not getting – because surrendering is sometimes easier than continuing to fight the strong headwinds of traditions and expectations…}
Personally, I value my authentic life much more than I respect traditions (or extravagances for that matter). I strive to make all my decisions consciously; which is much easier said than done, but it is nonetheless how I cultivate the ‘Good Life’. As a result, I am very sensitive to instances where one ‘ought to’ something simply because it has always been so. [This argument does not fly in my book.] If one ‘ought to’ something as a symbol of cultural belonging, of family affiliation, of etiquette amongst friends, or of compromise, I believe one should rationally (ie: consciously) decide to participate or not. And similarly, one should get the chance to consent before being imposed any obligations by one’s well meaning but over-bearing relatives.
The details of the situations causing my current outburst are really not important. But going through these experiences reminded me that social participation, while for the most part voluntary, often involves embedded social obligations. Tick for tack – you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Aristotle talks about those utilitarian relationships, where we engage in bartered services based on trust and mutual respect. There is nothing wrong with those relationships, unless one party expects more than the agreed upon (often non-verbally) transaction. Aristotle also describes pleasure relationships, where people would get together based on a common interest and share the joy of engaging in that interest, but not necessarily in any other aspect of their lives. Again, nothing wrong with that – as long as shared pleasure is all that is expected !!!
With our wedding, we – somehow – escalated a few relationships from these categories to another, more special, of ‘primary friendship’ (this is also Aristotle’s classification). These are supposed to be your life-long friends, people who know your character and love you for it anyway. Usually, you would count them on your hand, because the emotional intimacy and time required in maintaining the relationships prevents one from having 100’s of them. These relationships are not necessarily unconditional (ie: one doesn’t have to keep enabling an addicted friend for example) but are non-transactional either. They are (meant to be) relationships for their own sake.
These days, we are so used to exchange our labour and goods in the marketplace that just to ‘be’ with one another has become a more foreign and somewhat uncomfortable concept. And that is the crux of the issue: when we first announce our upcoming nuptials, we invited our friends and family to mark this occasion with us. In the initial plan, we didn’t even envisage to have the actual civil ceremony in their presence. The wedding was just an excuse – very good indeed – to gather together, especially since lots of our family and friends live far away. But it grew and grew, and it took on a life of its own: mostly because we called it a wedding, and hence it picked up all the cultural baggage associated with that tradition. Somehow, I didn’t see that coming!
I assumed that my friends and family – la crème de la crème folks in our lives – already know that I am an unconventional free-thinker. Hence I assumed that they wouldn’t expect a traditional ‘anything’ from me. But some are still very emotionally attached to etiquette and customs. Hence I realized that they are more attached to their social norms than accepting of my authenticity, as flawed as I might be sometimes. That was a realization that I didn’t expect either!
We will still have the wedding, and more importantly – the marriage-, that we desire. As we do with the rest of our live, we will consciously focus on what matters most to us, and hence we will build our vision of paradise and our own definition of perfect.
I sometimes struggle with the impression that this sounds like a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude. It is not intended as such – I am no bridezilla !!! It is a radical authenticity, one in which ‘truth to one self’ simply must triumph. This authenticity is actually primordial to me, because only that ‘truth-ness’ allows for everything subsequent to be built on a solid foundation. And I prefer to build my life slow, steady and strong, then to risk having it crumble under the weight of illusions built with good intentions. On that, I will not compromise.
[And if you do not understand that about me, then I am not sure that you could ever know me…]
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I let this rant decant for a few weeks before posting it. Since then, Mark nudged me to place myself within a broader context, one of millennia of cultural evolution. Not too long ago, I would not have decided anything about my wedding day: the whole deed was orchestrated by religion. A little before that, I could not even have chosen my spouse, since securing relationships between families was more important than a luxury such as love. And more importantly, the wedding and subsequent marriage would not have been about ‘me’ – the individual – but about my role in the reproduction of society: a male and female producing offsprings who’s paternity is known for the purpose of social and financial inheritance.
In that vein, I am quite lucky to be free to choose the husband I wish, and to have lived with him through both years of plenty and hardships, and to know in my heart that I still want to be his bride. I know my future husband to be imperfect, for he is human, but I love him anyway, for he is not an illusion to me. He is not who I envision him to be, he is not what I think a husband ought to be, he is merely himself. And I am very lucky to be marrying him, for he makes me smile and laugh, and feel safe and treasured.
I look forward to my wedding day, to share my joy with all our family and friends. Yes, we are having a meal that is fancier than a family bbq, but in the end, I am still getting what I want : HIM to call mine !
In retrospect, this situation highlights an eternal (if such a thing exists!) tension between social cohesion and individual freedom. I am currently reading “The History of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell, where he mentions in the introduction that “social cohesion and individual liberty, like religion and science, are in a state of conflict or uneasy compromise…” basically always. Both tensions are clearly subjects we would wish to investigate in this website, if only for the purpose of living consciously.
We live in a particular time and place where our individual freedoms are at a high water mark, thanks to the 70+ years of neo-liberal experiment and the ease of our technology-assisted lives. I also acknowledge that my personal freedoms -as a somewhat well-off and highly educated Millenial Canadian- are actually much higher than the vast majority of my contemporaries. [I might not be in the wealthiest 1%, but I would argue that I am certainly in the freest 1%].
It is easy to forget how much our freedom, and the habit of being free, permeates what we expect out of life. Like a navel-gazing infant, I wailed about the intrusions of social conventions on my radical individuality – on my wedding day no less! However, in the grand scheme of things, my right to lead an authentic life is the aberration; it is the historical anomaly. The depth and breath of what I can do, as a unique individual, far exceeds the wildest dreams of people living even only a few generations ago. And furthermore, there are 7.6 billions other individuals on this planet that aspire to be as free as I am.
To paraphrase Peter, morality is to accept that each of us has the right to express ourselves as individuals. I radically express myself, and I – unabashedly – expect others to ‘deal with it’; meaning that if they have a problem with that, they must say so. In other words, I expect others to radically express themselves too. And somehow, I expect their radical individuality to be different than social conventions.
However, there are people for whom the reproduction of traditions IS what they want as individuals. Maybe they have not thought though all the range of options of what they might want, or they have pondered long and hard the philosophical questions and decided that the norms are what is best (in their humble opinion). Based on Peter’s definition of morality, I ought to respect their right to express that they desire social conventions more than their individuality. Somehow, I find it very hard to relate with individuals who decide to ‘delegate’ or ‘align’ their individual choices to conform to social norms.
Allow me now an hypothesis: as a radically authentic individual, I benefit from my right to express myself (since this is how I wish to lead my life). By tick-for-tack, but ultimately for the sake of self-preservation, I extend the right to individuality to all others. But for the traditionalists, this logic does not apply: they themselves wish to conform (and for the social norms to remain what they are). Hence, there is no embedded incentive to accept others’ radical individuality.
So how can we resolve this tension? Bertrand Russell mentions that, in the realm of ethical disagreement, there is no ‘scientific methods’ to fall back on. “Ethical disagreement can only be decided by emotional appeals, or by force – in the ultimate resort, by war.” (p.116) This observation is aligned with what we are witnessing in America today, and what brought most civil wars in history.
As we progress toward defining, discussing and testing new ways to live -authentically yet together- (as the social individuals that we are), let’s be aware that “ethical disputes resolve themselves into contests of power”. We will ultimately have to face them, and find ways to resolve them; and these conflicts will not be as trivial as those related to my wedding day !
