A Feminist Marriage: Modern Values Meeting Traditional

Most people that know me know that I identify as a raging feminist. My feelings about gender equality are some of the most defining parts of my personality. Right up there with my love for cats and my siblings. But sometimes being a feminist can be exhausting. This Onion article is probably the most accurate description I have ever seen of how it feels. When it came to marriage my feelings were definitely complicated. At least about the institution, not the the person I wanted to spend my life with.

Chelsea Wagner Photography

Like many other women I love weddings and everything about them. I've watched all of the TLC shows. I take David Tuttera's advice on everything to heart. (He thinks green is a horrible color FYI.) And I want Kleinfeld's to stock something other than just that one see through Pnina Tornai dresses. For myself personally though, I felt like marriage might betray my values that I can't shut up about. There are so many pitfalls from vowing to be an obedient wife to wearing white to display my purity to the giving up my name. Not to mention that the origins of marriage is basically just a business transaction between my husband and father. 

While I know a lot of those ideas aren't really what marriage is about today, it still felt like I was turning my back on things that I said were identifying qualities of myself. Ultimately, I fell in love with a wonderful human being and I did almost every one of these things that I felt a little icky about originally.

Chelsea Wagner Photography

I realized that I have control over what my wedding and marriage is all about and I can make it fit our values and ideas of a marriage. Also, there is something undeniably appealing about publicly committing yourself to a person that you love. You want the world to know that this is your lobster!

We chose to do our wedding our way. Sprinkles of tradition mixed in with lots of references to our cats and love of cats and how we were only getting married so our cat's parents would be together... (We're kinda weirdos.) We were married by one of our very close friends who made the ceremony extremely personal to us and I wrote the entire ceremony myself to ensure that all of the language described us as a team, not as a wife vowing to be loyal to her husbands wishes. We also skipped things that we didn't like or didn't think really fit us as a couple.

I also came to the decision to change my name to Grace relatively quickly because I was taking the name of people that I was proud to be related too and that I would be proud to have any potential future children named after too. It wasn't giving up who it was, it was growing to be apart even more family!

Chelsea Wagner Photography

Each step of our wedding was discussed and ultimately decided between my husband and I not because that's what we had to do, but because it was things that we wanted to do for our own personal reasons.

Ultimately, I realized that the beauty of feminism is that we can make whatever choice suits us best. We are not confined into being right or wrong in how we live our lives and what makes us happy. We are just a little over a year into our marriage and I couldn't imagine life any other way.

 To be honest not much has changed besides our legal status as a couple and our life insurance policies. Alex still leaves his socks everywhere and I still continually forget where I sat my phone/car keys/wedding ring. Marriage doesn't change us, but it does add something a little extra special to our lives.

Now I can describe myself as a loving cat mom, feminist, AND an amazing (at least I think I am) wife.



XOXO
Hayley

Is everyone getting married without me?

For everyone not in the Midwest, this may not be as much of an issue right now. But for all of us living in the very exceptionally landlocked part of the country, saying that everyone you know is getting married or having children may actually be true. In fact, I don't have enough fingers to count all the people that are my age (22) or below that are married or engaged that I've been friends with. It's sort of a surreal feeling to imagine people like you spending the rest of their lives with someone when you still feel like you're that awkward girl with the braces and cat eye glasses that was dying to be kissed.

So why does it feel like everyone is getting married? And why is it totally okay if they are and you're still in the single ready to mingle point in your life.

First off, the reason that you seem to feel surrounded by married couples and soon to wed ones is because you have much greater access to acquaintances and not super close friends lives. Before people had Facebook and Instagram to bombard with photos of their ring and dress and flowers and #MCM husband the only way you found out was through word of mouth or the announcement in the newspaper. If you limited everyone you know that's engaged or married to only posting one thing about  it, I bet it will seem like a whole lot less than you felt like before.

But all that being said. There is nothing wrong with people being super excited about the person they are going to spend the rest of their lives with. I mean, I can hardly restrain myself from posting every single picture I take of my beautiful niece because I want to share with the world how incredible she is when she makes one of her 5 different infant faces. Being excited is the completely natural thing to do and wanting to over share is pretty normal also.

The problem becomes when you take their gushing about their love as a challenge or an attack on how your love life is going. I firmly believe that 99.999% of the time it has absolutely nothing to do with you (sorry).

But still, you say, it makes you feel your single hood even more (grabbing the nearest cat and a pint of Ben and Jerry's). The biggest mistake you are making probably lies in that you are ignoring all the totally awesome things you have done too. For myself I went on a super awesome adventure and got a dog and have now realized I have a long way to go before I should ever be responsible for another human being.

Just don't let this happen!

I guess the problem is that we try to turn our lives into one big marathon. We assume that we're all on this same path and that these people are meeting checkpoints ahead of us. When in reality it's like we're running in completely different races or maybe aren't wanting to be in a race at all!

So maybe everyone is getting married (probably not completely true but we can go with it), SO WHAT? Be happy for them but also be happy for yourself. Our accomplishments aren't limited to specific categories like relationships, worldly experience, education... they are open to being anything in the whole world which is pretty awesome.

And if none of that works at least you get to go shopping because you're going to need some outfits to wear to all those weddings.


XOXO
Hayley