Here comes the bride! (Where's the groom?)

UPDATE: An interesting letter to the editor in the Boston Globe (10/11/07) might be of interest to readers of this post and especially to those who made and followed the responses in the combox below.

Did you see this article on the front page of today’s Boston Globe?

Asking for her hand - after asking permission
Before Bob Hunt dropped to bended knee on the famed Cliff Walk in Newport, R.I., and asked his high school sweetheart to marry him, he’d taken her father to dinner at a Chili’s restaurant and sought his permission. Reviving a tradition that seemingly went the way of the flapper and Prohibition, young men like Hunt these days are talking to their intendeds’ parents before popping the question. While there are no numbers to track the trend, call a bridal store or wedding venue or otherwise inquire among the betrothed and the newlywed and their parents and it is easy to find examples.

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What these young men embrace as a gesture of courtesy and respect has roots in an era when women had few rights and little opportunity. ‘‘It was a fairly common practice based on the notion of making alliances between families and passing the daughter who was legally the property of the father onto the husband,’’ says Temple University historian Beth Bailey. ‘‘What we’re seeing right now is an odd combination of young people with progressive sentiments and a real desire for conventional gender roles and arrangements’’

Hunt, a 25-year-old salesman from Attleboro, has long known that Stefanie Brennock, whose parents are divorced, expected that anyone who wanted to marry her would talk to them first. ‘‘It’s just the parents handing over the daughter to a new guy and taking care of me,’’ says Brennock, 24, an assistant manager at a bridal store.

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Matthew Fierman, 29, was less formal. Before he proposed to his wife, he telephoned her parents. First he told his future mother-in-law. Then he asked his future father-in-law for his blessing. ‘‘It’s just a sign of respect,’’ says Fierman, a teacher from Brighton. ‘‘Dad got the chance to give the official thumbs-up.’’

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Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage said she believes uneasiness contributes to what she calls ‘‘cherry picking’’ of traditions. ‘‘It has none of the old meaning… Since 1967 it’s a rapid revolution where love really trumps everything else. There’s this sense that this is a little dangerous,’’ Coontz says. ‘‘Maybe I want to add a few traditional elements to my modern marriage just to protect us from it being a complete free-for-all.’’

Barbara Gottfried, of Boston University’s women’s studies department, declares herself ‘‘shocked’’ by the trend. ‘‘The fact that the parents are asked prior to the proposal seems to me to be more than politeness,’’ she says. ‘‘Underneath it all is an anxiety about the threat that independent women pose.’’

Not all grooms-to-be adopt the custom. Christopher Cole of Winthrop, leader of a wedding band called Kahootz, didn’t approach his fiancé’s parents before he proposed in a Vermont restaurant.

‘‘The biggest reason was that she’s an adult. It’s not respectful of your fiancé as an adult woman,’’ he says.

‘‘I’m very glad he didn’t,’’ says his fiancée, Nikki Wescott, 33, a hotel wedding coordinator.

- Irene Sege 10/09/07 (complete article)

Let's hear it for Barbara Gottfried, Christopher Cole and Nikki Wescott! And let's be honest about the words we speak, the gestures we make and the symbols we lift up. This is but one of so many wedding customs that speak, gesture and symbolize concepts that virtually all of us have left behind or outright rejected.

It's no secret that in the not too distant past a woman was understood as a kind of property which, in marriage, was transferred from her father to her husband. I've been presiding at weddings for 35 years and have yet to meet a bride who would walk down the aisle with a mind to such a purpose - and yet almost every one of these brides wants her father to "give her away" to another man, her soon-to-be husband. As Stephanie Brennock said, ‘‘It’s just the parents handing over the daughter to a new guy and taking care of me."

Question: Why is the father's permission sought and not the mother's? What does that tell us?

Question: If permission from parents is in order, how is it that the woman is not expected to seek the permission of the man's parents? What does that tell us?

Question: If the man and the woman are indeed mature enough to enter into a life long commitment, whose permission do they need except each other's? If they need some form of parental permission, what does that tell us?

Question: If such gestures of seeking and granting permission are only quaint niceties or pleasant formalities, why go through the motions, considering the message such a practice sends?

Most Baffling Question of All: What does it mean when a man seeks nuptial permission from the father of the woman with whom he's been shacked up for some time, already enjoying with her the benefits once reserved for the married. Now if you want to talk about real tradition, we could start here...

Since the early 1960's, the Roman Catholic Rite of Marriage directs that when all is prepared, the priest goes to the doors of the church and there greets the bride and groom and their parents and close friends and then leads them in procession to the altar. Does this sound unusual?

Most of my readers have never witnessed such an entrance at a wedding. We are accustomed to what I call The Marginalized Groom Arrangement. In this "traditional" scheme of things, the groom and his best friend stand off to the side (in some churches, out of sight) while all attention is trained on the apparently one important person of this day who enters on the arm of another man, usually her father. When the bride and her attendants reach the sanctuary, the groom comes out of the shadows and the bride's escort "gives her away," taking and placing her hand in the groom's.

Pictures speak louder than words and that picture speaks volumes.

There are many wedding customs which not only have no basis in Catholic liturgy but which stand in stark contrast to the Catholic understanding of marriage and sacramental prayer. Asking a parent's permission for ministering a sacrament to one's beloved is one example. The entrance rite which gestures an inequality between the two persons entering into marriage is another.

OK - I've had my rant! It was good to have a forum in which no brides and grooms in the parish played any part. Now it's your turn: have at me!