The Catalyst

By Bri Castellini, Web Editor

Girls, don’t lie. You’ve all imagined what your wedding day will be like. There are white flowers, a billowing white dress, your hair is curly and styled in a bun and your father is keeping pace as you walk down the aisle. Your fiancé is standing stoic in his tuxedo, beaming next to his best friend on the altar. Now pause this image. It’s pretty, isn’t it? It’s traditional. But stop to think for a moment. Our society has progressed much since the Middle Ages where most of the wedding traditions come from, so is marriage outdated?

Let’s look at some of the wedding traditions. First, the best man. Historically, weddings weren’t always consensual. If a man wanted a woman as his wife but her family was against it, he would grab his most trusted friend and kidnap her. His “best man” would help fend off the family so the “happy” couple could be married. He would keep the family at bay until after the honeymoon, which was traditionally meant so that the bride would be pregnant by the time her family found her again. (aomdj.com)

Another tradition is the father giving away the bride at the altar. This one is more obvious in its traditionalism. Historically, women were seen as property. Before marriage, they belonged to their fathers. After marriage, they were the property of their husbands. The pass off of the bride was a passage of ownership. Maybe that isn’t something you think about now, and you just do it for the tradition, but it’s worth keeping in mind. At the very least, it could awake the little feminist in the depths of your subconscious.

Then there is the whole “sanctity” argument. In a 2003 survey by Public Health Reports, by the age of 20, 74% of Americans had premarital sex. The median age to lose one’s virginity, again premarital, is 17. Where is the “holiness” in that? Let’s face it, society’s priorities are changing. No longer is it very taboo to have sex before marriage. And what about living together? People living together without being married have increased from 430,000 in 1960 to 5.4 million in 2005. That’s a million more people than the population of Colorado. But those aren’t the only causes of the regression of “holiness” in marriage. Atheists get married too! Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft and proclaimed atheist, is married. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of “The God Delusion”, is married. Where is the sanctity in that?

And then there are the practical reasons. The average American couple spends $28,732 on weddings. There goes my college education! For a semester, the University of Colorado costs $18,887 for Colorado residents. For clarification, these figures include room and board and material costs, like books. Non-residents have to pay $38,365. How does that wedding sound now? On average, $2,617 dollars goes to accessories, $3,234 goes to the ceremonies, including rehearsal dinners, and a whopping $2,265 goes to flowers. I could go on, but it’s making me a little anxious.

I’ve always thought that marriage was just something you did. I grew up in a lucky family, where my parents met in college, got married at 24, and had me and my brother before turning 30. To me, it seemed like the perfect life. The expected life, the life that I wanted to live. Meet a nice boy in college who likes the same things, get married after graduation, travel for a year or two before having kids, then settle down somewhere nice and quiet. But after researching marriage itself, the costs, and the traditionalism of it all, I don’t really know what I think anymore. Obviously, I wouldn’t be getting married for the ‘sanctity’, so what would I be getting married for? Love? Can’t you love someone without spending a fourth of your college education to tell the world? The world is moving forward, ideas are progressing, and we as high schoolers are in the transition years. Our parents are traditional; marriage was just the next step of their lives before children. But things have changed. Where do we fall?

Readers, what do you think? Leave a comment!