Actually it wasn't entirely random, i remember exactly how i arrived at that train of thought. I was running that song "Like You'll Never See Me Again" by Alicia Keys through my head because I at that point really felt like hearing it...I LOVE that song...
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Sidenote:
I've made up my mind that I'm in love wit Alicia Keys...She's jus way too EXTRA cool a person to not pay attention to. I'm firmly decided that i would marry her on site without hesitation. Alicia Keys is definitely the answer to all those theoretical "If you could ____ with any celebrity..." type questions for me. Back to the original thoughts...
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...and in the middle of my meta-cognitive concert i started thinking "I don't think I'd mind gettin' married to this song...yeah...i could kinda see it"...this is a semi-habit i picked up from somebody. Anyway my water reached the ideal temperature i sought, so i returned to my desk and my computer at work and found to my delight that the song was actually playing on the radio back in bmore which i was streaming over the net (YESSSS...good looking out Lord, lol)
But, In my Psych of Women class we had recently been talking about relationships and the like, and naturally along with the discussion came a lot statistics about marriage, and cohabitation, and divorce etc... and not surprisingly they all basically said marriage is a failure better than half the time. With that on my mind i ran the scenario of a typical wedding through my mind and felt like "its no wonder...what IS a wonder is why MORE don't fail given the way we do this."
My reasoning like is like this:
Both men and women too often step too far outside their world and purposely discomfort themselves. Its too often the case that we go places or say things we shouldn't (or aren't ready too). And this is due in large part to the fact that nearly every aspect/institution of our society has us acting like someone else in order to get somewhere. Think about a wedding and what typically happens in the general and most traditional sense; We spend exorbitant amounts of money on food and drinks we often haven't heard of, probably cant pronounce (neither the ingredients, nor its supposed "lay-name"), and definitely wouldn't normally eat; We invite obscure members of our families that we, in most cases, hadn't even know about or heard of (i'm talkin bout dem 12 times removed cousins tha was livin in tokyo your whole life and somehow managed to figure out that you was engaged all the way back in baltimore); We sterilize and where things WAY beyond our normal price OR style range; Granted, such a joyous and monumental occasion deserves quite a bit of extravagance and is definitely worth adding a couple of extra miles to your life for a little while because after all i can't stunt like i might not do a lot of the same thing since a wedding is in part a gift to the wife most of the time, and every sincere "husband-elect" would want to see her happy. So i guess there isn't really a whole lot wrong with these things, what bothers me the most really is all the formatting that alters everyone's behavior drastically...actually i was thinking specifically of the vows when i got the volition to write this note as the title implies.
So many people "recite" vows when they get married...
re·cite [ri-sahyt]
–verb
1. to repeat the words of, as from memory, esp. in a formal manner: to recite a lesson.
2. to repeat (a piece of poetry or prose) before an audience, as for entertainment.
3. to give an account of: to recite one's adventures.
4. to enumerate.
...so essentially spittin somebody else's words back at the person they claim to want to spend their life with. That's what i mean by people stepping to far outside of themselves and saying things that shouldn't be said. I feel like marriage shouldn't be occurring if you gotta recite ANYTHING. Whoever wrote those knew what the were saying and understood how THIER relationship was to be...but all people are different, there's no "one size fits all" for this kinda of thing. The same goes for those questions the priest (or rather "wedding agent" i'll say, not everybody has a priest or pastor, etc...) asks for each the bride and the groom. Why is the "wedding agent" speaking for anyone during the wedding...how do HE know what the bride wants from the groom and vice versa. Think of all the movies slash tv shows you seen...whenever the relationship runs into issues or a divorce is eminent there's always an allusion to the promises "recited" in those questions the "wedding agent" asks: "when we got married, you promised to blah, blah, and most of all blah..." right?
And now I'm sittin here like (in a general cognitive response to all such situations i've bore witness to): Well uhhh..you yourself never asked him/her to be what you wanted him/her to be in the union...you just stood in front of the altar while wedding agent spit this and that, then both of you was like "yeah, what he said" and he pronounced you married. So are those things what you really wanted? Is that all you wanted? This is kinda both of yall fault, yall should have spoke more at your own wedding...
Yeah, so needless to say, if and when i marry i plan on doing a lot of the talking...and in my own dialect. I feel like its impossible to be sincere when you're speaking as another would, which is why i don't often bite my tongue or switch my vocab up in situations where most others feel its "socially appropriate."
This ended up being a lot longer than i envisioned it...oh well.
©Brandon Baker, 2010
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