bridentity
A couple of weeks ago, I browsed Amazon for books about weddings. I definitely wasn’t looking for any tips on matching china sets, or “Plan Your Dream Wedding for $899!” kinds of things, but rather on the psychological and cultural issues around weddings. I did find a book for BF, which was part of my intent (I got this one, and so far it seems to be good, and it has frigging awesome illustrations), but I also purchased this book and this one. (Amazon Prime + used books + fulfillment by Amazon = COMPLETELY WORTH $79 per year.) The Conscious Bride has been pretty interesting (I am nearly finished with it), but I’m sort of concerned about how little of it has seemed to apply to me. It discusses the pain of separation that a lot of brides feel: from their families (even if they moved out long ago), from their girlfriends, from their identities as single women. It talks about how you have to move away from the old identities and priorities and move towards your identity as wife, and the fact that you’ll put your new family first, before your old family or your other priorities.
I agree that this is probably a problem a lot of brides have – particularly the not-so-self-aware ones – but I am just not seeing it in myself so far. It makes me feel kind of arrogant to say so, because it’s as if I’m inviting the universe to smack me. But I feel that my identity as BF’s companion has already been formed, through a few years now of exploration, of trial and error, and of emotional work. My identity as an individual is one that has already been blended with my identity as his partner, and although I identify myself as an independent personality, a major and important aspect of my identity is that I am with him. He has been my first priority for years now, and I have learned over time to see the world from the perspective of part of a pair with him. I am sure that it’ll feel different to be his wife (and I don’t presume to know how), but I don’t think that the identity work is work I haven’t done yet.
As for separating from my family, I have felt as if I’m on my own, no home to go to, since I began college. A lot of brides expressed in this book these strange feelings of wanting to return to the family home and live there with her parents (or just her mom), and I haven’t felt that way since I was about 20. Even brides who had weird or bad relationships with their parents felt the pain of separation, of moving away from the old family and into a new one. I am not getting that at all. At all. In fact I have been wondering lately if there’s a way I could feasibly tape my mother’s mouth shut for about three months, up to and including the date of the wedding.
Although, the sections about what the father of the bride might be feeling have been downright illuminating. I am starting to wonder if the entire episode with my father this year is because he has inner anxiety about me being married. BF said that he has never seemed like a particularly sentimental father, never seemed to see me as his little girl, and that feeling separation anxiety about me being married seemed unlikely. There’s a way in which he’s right, but I believe Dad has a very muddy perspective of me, memories of me as I grew up mixed in with memories of my mother. My mother has cast a very long shadow over how he perceives me, I think, and if I add up all the time he has spent with me in my adult form, from the time I graduated from college, I come up with a few months shy of a year – four months when I lived with him in London immediately after college, when I was all of 21 and sort of an idiot, and almost five months when I moved in with him after the New England debacle, when I was at the lowest point in my life. All the growth and development between age 21 and age 29 is largely lost on him. His clearest memories of me are probably from high school, because that was the longest span of time when we were living in the same house and he was not on deployment every six months. (Who wants to be remembered by their parents as the person they were during high school? Show of hands?)
So if I see his behavior as a strong and unconscious reaction to his feelings of being replaced as the man in my life, to the final emotional separation between him and me, to the fact that I. Have. Sex. With. A Man. and he can no longer deny it, it all suddenly makes a good deal of sense. I haven’t quite made up my mind whether this potential motivation affects my reaction and perspective on what he did. I don’t think it does. Too much bad blood came before this incident, and he had plenty of time to think through what he was going to write before he wrote it.
Father issues aside, the point remains: I just have a hard time with the whole premise of changing identities as you approach your wedding. Unless you’re going from your father’s house to your husband’s house, it implies that you have failed to form an adult identity away from your family, and that you have failed to form an identity as a couple with the person you have chosen as your mate. (These are hard things to do, and I’m not dissing people who haven’t managed them.) I feel that I have already done both of these things. So I’m not sure I need to be any more of a conscious bride than I already am.
I haven’t started The Meaning of Wife yet. Ironically, I’ve been too busy knitting. It is printed with much smaller font, and appears to have research and such. Hopefully it’ll be useful or interesting anyhow.
October 28, 2010 at 11:19 am
You may have something there in terms of your father’s reactions and so forth. It does make a sort of sense – although it in no way excuses his behavior, it can at least give you one possible avenue to understand it. (Although it’s certainly not a given.)
I couldn’t resist looking through the “Look inside!” on Amazon on The Groom’s Instruction Manual and I LOVE IT. AWESOME!!!
November 1, 2010 at 5:31 pm
From what I’ve personally seen in friends and family, the identity shift has more to do with the “Bride” identity that women take on for the purpose of crafting the wedding and “being married” as both an event and as an activity.
Once that’s over…the bride role largely dissipates, leaving this void. In our culture, the gap from fiancée to wife isn’t what it used to be which seems to have curtailed some of that next step transition.
One of the things in The Conscious Bride that I found interesting was the point that American culture doesn’t do transitions well. It’s not like everyone in the tribe is gathered around the person helping them to mourn for what’s passing and prepare for what’s next. It’s more stress heaped on him or her throughout the process, whatever it may be.
I say that if you’re comfortable with who you are before you become “a bride” and BF is comfortable with who you are…then you’ll be comfortable in the role of “wife” when you get there. It’s not so much a role to put on as a title that you earn.
And if Bravo television has taught me anything, you earn it by tearing the heads off of florists and sacrificing cake decorators to dark and squamous gods (i.e. David Tutera) while wrapping your friends in the ugliest taffeta and chenille money can buy.
That’s not exactly the kind of wife I want to be.
November 2, 2010 at 2:02 pm
LOL, no…the last paragraph was pure sarcasm.
All I meant is that “wife” (or “husband” for that matter) seems to be more of a title we earn by stepping up and declaring something publicly, and then living that way by choice…than as a “role” we fulfill like in times past. The women I know who are wives aren’t by-and-large doing anything different than they did as “girlfriend” or “fiancée”…they just accepted a new title and a promise that goes with it.
Agreed.
A hundred years ago, that was a totally different story, with roles and transitions and whatnot.
I’m curious (by your use of the word mourn) if you feel like you’re losing something in marriage? Fear of giving up freedom, or a future, or something like that?
Personally, not really. (That’s sort of what this post was about.) The book says, and I think, that as a culture, we have no ability for subtlety when it comes to transition. Something is either entirely good or entirely bad. Life is not that way; in the midst of moving to a great new city for a cool new job, for instance, you are still leaving behind a great deal, and if you fail to acknowledge what you are losing in taking on a transition for the greater good, you will probably find yourself with backed-up emotions later. I’m leaving behind the phase of life where I was a single woman committed to a man without marriage, and I’m taking on the mantle of wife. This is, for me, 99.9999% a good thing (not always such a high percentage for others, who might regret their loss of independence, resent the new expectations of their new role, or dislike their new family). But I don’t want to fail to acknowledge that I’m saying goodbye to my old identity as a single woman, and to my old name, and to all the things that those pieces of my life represent to myself and to others. I happily bid them farewell, but it’s still a parting, not to be ignored.