Category Archive

Philosophizing

How do you feel about your wedding? What does it all mean? How does wedding planning a metaphor for the rest of your life?

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How my dead cat helped me propose to my boyfriend

When Eric and I started dating I told him I didn’t think much of marriage and I didn’t know if I wanted to have kids. I felt like marriage ends in divorce about half the time, and kids infringe on your freedom. Why willingly subject yourself to that stuff? But seeing how much he was there for me during one of the harder times of my life made me trust him so completely. I began to think if he has this much patience and concern for a cat that isn’t even his responsibility to take care of, imagine how dedicated and loving he will be to our family.

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Social anxiety, expectations, and raising a child: Why we chose a pseudo-elopement

After three years of engagement, we finally started to figure out what we wanted to do for our wedding. Throw a big party? Throw a small party? Run away? Ugh, they all sounded hard and not right. I wanted our wedding to be special for us, and not be bogged down with anxiety, and feeling like no one was as happy as I wanted them to be. The one thing that kept sticking was pseudo eloping, and it was perfect.

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Reconciling marriage as a feminist: Does everything about the wedding have to be a feminist battle?

I feel that each of the choices we make for our wedding need to be conscious choices. We need to weigh the comfort of tradition against the statement (overt or otherwise) that it may make. Not every feminist wedding is going to look the same — and certainly one can be a feminist and have a more “traditional” wedding. I don’t decide who is a feminist and who is not — I only get to determine how my feminism manifests itself.

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Why is my wedding making everyone ELSE insecure?

As soon as my fiancé and I announced our engagement, there were a number of questions and comments we heard over and over and over again. But I was very surprised to hear this comment repeatedly: “Uh-oh, if you’re having a wedding that means I really have to start changing my body so I can be there!” I’ve done a lot of thinking about why people just attending a wedding feel the need to change their bodies. Understanding their reasons has helped me figure out how to best communicate to my friends and family that I love them just the way they are, and that they shouldn’t feel the need to change for me…