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Marriage: Even the Gluten-Free People Had a Good Time
There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.
(Homer)
Kinship studies, which are the exploration of family relationships, used to be the mainstay of anthropology. In the past, it was common for anthropologists to tour the countryside compiling charts of family members and noting the vernacular terms for the relations that we call mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins, etc. Kinship systems throughout the world have evolved into one more-or-less standard model of what we have come to recognise as our own family structure. Therefore, anthropology has lost much of its interest in kinship studies. With a few polygamous exceptions, family structures look much the same everywhere. This is the case even if we add in gay marriage. For gay families, we just adjust the gender of the roles of mother and father or have father–father or mother–mother marriages that are passé by anthropological standards. Historically, many native American Indian families commonly featured more than one mother or father. Would you want more than one of any family member if given a choice?
But anthropology hasn’t given up all interest in kinship studies because what differs from culture to culture is our various attitudes to the relationships within families. While the Irish family is similar to other Western family structures, it varies in terms of the behaviour between its members. For example, attitudes to marriage are peculiar to different cultures. Like funerals, Irish weddings provide an opportunity for social interaction. In Ireland, we don’t marry for the possibility of a pleasing divorce settlement; we marry for ‘a day out’.
It is obvious in Ireland that people don’t get married for love. A loving couple wouldn’t put each other through an Irish wedding. Why do people get married? Anthropology has not been able to provide a complete answer. However, many people do marry. If you want to be Irish, you should find yourself someone to marry and have an Irish wedding.
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In the north-west of the country, marriage is referred to as a woman acquiring an extra pair of legs. Typically, someone will say, ‘I see Marie is after getting herself an extra pair of legs last week,’ which will be followed by a ribald guffaw. This is quite a sophisticated expression because it covers more than the standard missionary position. However, this traditional reference is outdated because nowadays it is common for most couples to live together for years before marrying. Lengthy engagements are fashionable.
Irish marriage, though not marking a significant change in a couple’s relationship, is a socially formal occasion to be taken very seriously. Contemporary Irish marriages are distinguished by the difficulty we have in trying to take a casual or informal approach to the ceremony. Even eccentric couples that have their reception in McDonald’s must do so with deadly seriousness.
Irish weddings are like funerals with the addition of guest lists and stress, and more opportunity to plan. Like funerals, weddings often begin suddenly, not, in this case, with a death, but with the announcement of an engagement. A number of the same principles apply. You have to determine where you are within the social pecking order and what your relationship to the main protagonists permits in terms of acceptable behaviour, presents and dress. An informant in Sligo told me: ‘Funerals have weddings bate every time because there is no invitation and no present needed.’
Engagement Rules
Before a couple can announce their engagement, they should live together for so long that no one can remember a time when they were not a couple. Preferably, they should have two children with one graduated from college. Then one day, out of the blue, they should announce that they are engaged. They should plan to marry on a date yet to be determined, but not less than five years and not more than ten years from the date of this announcement, until which time the couple are to be regarded as being engaged and should be addressed as such. They should change each other’s names to my fiancé(e) and continuously inform strangers what the other is doing and thinking at any moment in time, in case anyone might suspect that they are not actually engaged. A ring may be produced for the occasion or may be planned to be produced at a future date. An important reason for the announcement of the engagement is to test the acting skills of friends and relations who are obliged to feign delight, surprise and enthusiastic anticipation of the great day, or risk incurring the wrath of the engaged couple.
The long engagement allows the bride and groom to plan the day. It also allows the potential guests to either save up money or compose credible excuses as to why they can’t attend. The contemporary long engagement, culminating in the meticulously planned contemporary wedding, has replaced the short engagement, ending in the very enjoyable and poorly planned shotgun wedding. This is an example of the unpredictable consequences of social reform – in this case the introduction of contraception. Historically, the unavailability of contraception, combined with the lack of self-restraint that characterises any banned behaviour, together with a social context where extramarital childbirth was believed to be miraculous, produced the short engagement that had an average span of three weeks. In the past, it was not unusual to receive the invitation on the day of the wedding. There is a lot to be said for reintroducing a ban on premarital sex: it gets rid of the long engagement.
In some cases, the engagement is an end in itself. One informant told me that she was ‘really, really happy’ because she had become engaged to ‘the most amazing guy’. She was throwing a big engagement party the following Saturday night in the local pub. When I asked her when she was going to get married, she sighed and, summoning the patience she usually reserved for very stupid people, told me pityingly that she ‘didn’t ever want to get married’.
The Rules of Wedding Planning
The most important thing in planning your Irish wedding is that you should do whatever you can to make sure that your special day is unique. In that way, you can be reasonably confident that it will be exactly the same as everyone else’s. This is an occult law of wedding planning: the extent to which you try to be different is inversely related to how similar the occasion will be to all other weddings. To reverse this trend, you could set out to be the same as everyone else and see what happens. Unfortunately for the guests, those planning the wedding never take this approach. In extreme cases a wedding planner can be hired, but the norm is to allow the bride, or more precisely her mother, to plan everything. Informal weddings should be formal. If you plan something simple, simple it may be, but it will still take years to organise.
The Guest List Rules
Once you have actually decided to get married, you must now make the more difficult decision of who will attend the wedding. There are strict conventions involved in the compiling of the guest list. This task is so challenging that many couples break up at this point, and retire to discrete parts of the house to live out separate lives.
The opening moves are easily settled. You should both agree that the wedding will be small, with just immediate family and your closest friends in attendance. That’s it. Easy! According to your original calculations, this comes to a total of eleven people. You may high-five each other. Because you are both highly superstitious, after a decent interval of a few minutes, the bride-to-be should say that she couldn’t have an uneven number of guests. After a good-humoured row, it may be decided that a spinster aunt be invited on her own with strict written instructions not to bring anyone with her. You agree to a contract-like form of words to be used on her invitation. On the basis of kinship alone, to counterbalance that aunt, even if she is coming on her own, two married aunts from the other side have to be invited with their husbands. This brings the proposed guest list to a manageable sixteen.
This total should be communicated to both sets of parents. A period of three weeks of complete silence – from said parents – should follow. The total ban on all communication, initiated by the father o
f the bride-to-be, is maintained in order to convey the depth of sulking that is actually going on. Unfortunately, this silence will be broken and there are rules for how this should be done. The mother of the bride-to-be should ring the groom-to-be after the three-week interval to announce that her husband will not be attending the wedding because ‘There will be no point, really, because he won’t know anyone there. Why should he pay for an event where he won’t know anyone?’ In other countries, teenagers sulk. In Ireland, it is fathers.
The groom-to-be, who up to this point should have maintained the naive belief that there was actually going to be only sixteen guests at his wedding, should foolishly ask which essential potential guests may have been inadvertently omitted from their original guest list. The mother of the bride-to-be should read a prepared list of family and friends over the phone. She should promise to forward a hard copy of this list in the post.
When it is delivered, the bride-to-be should have a near fatal fit. This list comes as a shock because her husband-to-be, too frightened, would not have told his wife-to-be of the phone call from his mother-in-law–to-be. By now, the bride-to-be’s mother should send another copy of the list to the other set of parents under the provocative heading Our Guest List. This can be responded to with a counter-list of the other side’s essential guests. The six should eventually agree to meet to go through the new expanded list together. Each name on the list can be identified with the help of ancient family photographs, quickly sketched family trees, copies of birth and death certificates, records of imprisonment, and stories of how ‘Joe saved your father’s life when a milk churn fell on him when he was a lad. Both he and his wife Betty and their two unfortunate daughters – the less said about them the better – have to be invited.’ Each of the six participants should have a veto in the form of threatening not to attend the wedding in the event that a particular guest is or is not included. The veto can be used only twice by each of the fathers-in-law-to-be, three times by each of the mothers-in-law-to-be and only once by the bride-to-be. It is not appropriate for the groom-to-be to exercise his veto. Eventually, after several days in conclave, all parties can agree that only one hundred and eighteen family members will be asked, from each side.
Once the psychologically critical two-hundred mark has been passed, the couple can cave in and invite forty-six of their own friends and only twenty of their closest workmates each. The final tally, excluding the nine priests that will be officiating, who will surely stop off for the dinner, should come to three hundred and twenty-two to be invited, of whom three hundred and twenty-nine should actually turn up on the day.
Once you have drawn up the interim list, you can then send out the invitations. There is a new DIY ethos in wedding planning in Ireland. The bride-to-be should make her own invitations or ask the groom-to-be’s sister’s boyfriend’s cousin, who has recently started her own invitation and greeting-card design cottage industry – following a course in the National College of Art and Design – to make them for her. Alternatively, you should go early to Daintree on Camden Street, Dublin, early on a Saturday morning to avoid the hoards of couples that gather there to buy fancy paper to make their own invitations. I recommend recycled chip-bag brown paper scrolls with green Cyrillic font verse, tied up with pre-loved baling twine.
For our own wedding, my wife-to-be was in such despair about the prospect of seeing the husband of one of my relations that she requested the invitee leave him at home and bring someone with whom she could pretend she was having a discreet affair. She turned up with both.
The Rules of Worrying
All Irish brides-to-be have one thing in common: stress. One of the main causes of marriage-related stress is worrying what the new in-laws will think. Marriage would be a lot less stressful if we were allowed to marry someone in our own immediate family because at least they know what we are like, and what our parents are like, in public. However, marrying a family member is proscribed by the law of consanguinity, which is a ban on incest.9 Therefore, we are legally forced into the stresses associated with putting our families on public display.
The best place for an anthropologist to find prospective brides for interview is in hotel lobbies where they go to book their wedding package, which is gold, silver or bronze, depending on how much choice they want to give their guests in terms of the dinner menu. I sat in hotel lobbies of the more popular wedding hotels waiting for the brides-to-be to turn up at reception. You can tell who they are because when they arrive they look significantly more miserable than any of the normal guests. They are usually accompanied by an even more worried looking older couple, who are each tightly holding an arm of the bride-to-be in case she tries to make a run for it. These turn out to be her parents. They whisper in embarrassment to the receptionist, like patients in an STD clinic, that they are there to see the manager about the wedding packages. Before the manager turned up to enquire about their preferred metallic entertainment, I pounced. Once the initial awkwardness had passed, they were happy to share their worries. Very stressed Irish people like to talk, usually non-stop. Okay, I admit that, in many instances, they may have thought that anthropology had something to do with psychiatry. I didn’t clarify the distinction, in the interest of research. Anyway, they seemed to need the psychiatric help.
To date, no one has compiled the complete encyclopaedia of bridal worries. So here are just some of the worries that should keep the bride-to-be awake at night. If she is not awake, she is obviously not in love.
Her first worry is that perhaps she is making the second biggest mistake of her life because not marrying Shawn, her ex-fiancé, was actually the biggest!
Her next big worry is what she is going to wear. Should the dress be a Vera Wang copy or an Oscar de la Renta rip-off? At least she knows for certain that it has to be white. Her four children, not to mention her parents and Shawn, would be horrified if she went for anything other than white. What about a wrap? Does she need a wrap or will she be okay with freezing arms?
Once the bride-to-be has secured her own dress for thirty-seven thousand euro, her next worry will be how she can get the bridesmaids to pay for their own dresses, while still dictating what they should wear. The traditional practice is to suggest that, because she doesn’t have the time to shop with them, they buy their own dresses and she will pay them back – at some stage. Just two weeks into the engagement, her two best friends, who are not the two who are going to be her bridesmaids, should have fallen out with her because she had to ask ‘those other two’ because she was a bridesmaid at their weddings. Neither bridesmaid should be talking to the other after the hen night. One of them is having a not-very-secret affair with the best man. The other has a tattoo of a snake emerging from her left armpit and a tattooed list of her exes on her right arm so it has to be long-sleeved dresses for everyone. By the time it is all over, no one will be on speaking terms until the next wedding when all details of the previous one will be forgotten.
The contemporary Irish wedding can take place in a church, registry office or under a tree but, wherever it happens, it is not a proper wedding if it doesn’t have a theme. The problem with themes is that they have all been done already: Star Trek, Star Wars, butterflies, angels, hearts, vintage, shabby-chic and classic cinema. You can get away with having no theme as long as you stress on your invitations that the actual theme is No-Theme.
Worrying about the food should bring the bride-to-be on to worrying about what font she should print the menu in. She should decide on the Roast Haunch of Wicklow Venison with Chantenay Carrots for the meat eaters, but how is she going to cater for her friends with wheat intolerance and those with lactose intolerance with the same menu?
Another cause for worry is if the guests will know the difference between Prosecco and Champagne because the bronze package only comes with Prosecco and without the canapés.
If her budget is getting tight, she should hire just half a string quartet for the drinks reception and call it a duet. She can get th
e other half of the quartet to supply background noise during the dinner to drown out the sound of open-mouthed venison chewing.
Other musical anxieties include fretting about whether she should hire Irish dancers for between-course entertainment. What kind of band is she going to get? Can she afford the disco? She can because she just remembers that her friend’s boyfriend is really cool and is doing a course in music at Trinners.10 He has loads of equipment and he will do the disco for eighty euro. But then she should remember that he doesn’t know any disco music because he is too cool. How can her parents dance to Insane Poetry?
The bride-to-be should also worry about how she can avoid inviting children. She should decide she can’t avoid it because she doesn’t have the nerve to tell her sister-in-law to stay at home with her three attention-seeking brats. But the children are too short to sit at the table with everyone else. They have less conversation than Aunt Louise so they will have to go in a separate corner. But should she go for a toadstool sub-theme for them? Which guests will she make sit on the toadstools with them? Should the children have miniature versions of the adult meals or just chicken nuggets? They would enjoy the nuggets but it’s not about what they want. It’s about what she wants. And what about what’s-his-name, Aunt Mary’s child, Jason, and all his allergies?
How to Be Irish Page 7