Who Is Your Wedding Actually For?
Challenging the ego-driven planning trend by shifting the focus to connection, gratitude, and a meaningful experience for your community.
Psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Esther Perel, who is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on modern relationships, states in this interview that community is one of the most integral foundations of healthy relationships. “A couple lives in an ecosystem,” she says. “A couple is never just a relationship of two. It’s also who is there to support you. I think the loss of community is really a major piece of what makes it challenging to be [in a healthy relationship]. Your partner cannot give you what a whole village or community should provide. Community is huge. You need other people who think about you, who care about you, who pay attention to you, who compliment you.”
I can’t stop thinking about this article I read a few years ago in the Atlantic. It’s about how couples in modern marriages lean more heavily on each other and as such have less social connection to the world around them. The author, Mandy Len Catron writes, “Love is the marrow of life, and yet, so often people attempt to funnel it into the narrow channels prescribed by marriage and the nuclear family.” It’s an interesting article that explores the roles of marriage and community in our lives and ultimately concludes that we might benefit from expanding our sense of what love looks like and to turn toward the people around us as often as we turn toward our romantic partner.
The identity economy has put an enormous focus on the self, but belonging to a community is essential to our biological and evolutionary needs as humans. We simply can’t thrive outside of a community. My mentor Alberto Barreiro once wrote, “it looks like capitalism forgot to take into account one simple fact, humans are social animals, we need to work in collaboration with each other in order to ensure the survival of our tribe, our group or our complex society. What is beneficial for the group is also beneficial for us as individuals.” Over time, marriage has become more and more private in a sense. Less about the joining of two tribes and more about a personal union between two individuals. But ironically it has also isolated us more from our communities. Married people have a historical tendency to spend more time with each other at the expense of time with their broader circles. This has two significant consequences: it puts undue pressure on the marriage as it expects one person to fulfill a multitude of needs better met by a variety of people, and it isolates the married unit from the benefits of belonging in a larger community. Our communities have both expanded to be more global, and shrunk to be more exclusive, a couple retreating into their marriage at the exclusion of everyone outside of it.
And this exile begins with the wedding. As Catron writes, “This idea of self-sufficiency is also reflected in weddings themselves, which tend to emphasize the individuals getting married rather than the larger community they belong to.” Modern wedding advice is largely ego-centric, assuring couples that this day is all about you, don’t worry about what anyone else thinks. But should it be this way?
By creating an inclusive experience for our most beloved family and friends and ensuring they are an essential part of this milestone, we have an opportunity to not only deepen our connection to one another as a couple entering into a lifelong commitment, but to truly honor and thank our broader community by deepening the social connection to them as well. So as we continue to move through life as a couple, we still have this impenetrable foundation of loved ones to uplift and nurture us, and continue to enrich our lives.
In her article about wedding sprawl, or the ways that modern weddings have expanded to include countless additional celebrations, Annie Midori Atherton writes, "in some ways, it acknowledges that a rich life is made up of many more relationships than just a romantic one. Some of these supplementary events are explicitly a way to spend more time celebrating with friends and family. But at the same time, the additions are still in service of a ceremony that cements one lifelong partnership."
By their nature, weddings can’t exist without at least some of our community in attendance, otherwise you might as well elope. There is a gravity in speaking vows in front of people who might actually one day hold us accountable to those words, and could also potentially support us when we struggle to uphold them. So how do we expand from focusing inward, to truly embracing the people we choose to invite?
For one thing, we need to stop treating guests as just passive observers, and fully involve them as active participants. This is a simple shift, but a powerful one. In my experience design practice I always start with deep curiosity about the needs of the people in that community in that moment in time. I ask these questions:
What need does this wedding fulfill for us?
What need does it fulfill for our community?
What could only happen with this specific group of people that we couldn’t do on our own?
At the deepest level, why are we having a wedding (as opposed to just getting hitched at city hall)?
Who is this event really for?
In ego-centric wedding planning a lot of thought goes into impressing people, but not into engaging them. When weddings are centered only on the couple, they are simply performative, the guests the mere audience. The harsh reality is that, without autonomy, active engagement, and a true sense of belonging—all of which are sorely lacking from many weddings—no one really gives a shit about your wedding. If you want them to care, you have to make it meaningful for them too. Let them know what they mean to you and why their presence is integral. Give them something to actually do. An essential role to play. Not just observe the pageantry, and indulge in the free food and drinks, but actually participate in some way. Without something at stake for your guests, your wedding will quickly be forgotten as just another obligatory event they were forced to attend but that failed to really resonate. And you will have failed to solidify your unified role within the beautiful expanding community you are bringing together.