@silverflcme said: 🔥 marriage
Spilling the tea so you can send flame emojis as well as tea emojis
Let’s get out the obvious: Marriage is not the be-all, end-all to personal happiness. Neither are romantic relationships. Marriage, in plenty of ways, can make your life far more difficult than remaining single would be and those are challenges you have to be willing to face, work through, listen, and most importantly, compromise with someone else. If you cannot do that, do not get married.
Additionally: if you are not on the same page with your future spouse regarding career trajectories (or at least what you’d be willing to change about your life in order to support them or take on a new opportunity yourself), financial planning, financial spending, home maintenance, understanding each other’s love languages, and children, DO. NOT. GET. MARRIED. Sincerely, someone in her thirties who’s seeing her friends going on their first round of divorces for several years at this point.
Now, with that out of the way...
...weddings are a complete waste of money, for the most part, for the couple getting married.
They mean everything to the families as a way to show off “LOOK WHAT MILESTONE MY OFFSPRING HAS ACHIEVED” but for the actual couple? Planning and participating in it involve descending into a special level of hell that, if you emerge unscathed, you’re probably going to succeed in marriage. It is a hell of a lot of money to sink into a single day’s celebrations overall (and that doesn’t include the showers. Or the fact that everything with ‘wedding’ attached to it has a giant price markup) when most couples could really use such funds for their future lives together.
Or, if you’re like my fiancé and I, would rather spend such funds on our future lives together and material goods and experiences that bring us joy. If I want to wear a ballgown, I’ll damn well do it for a costume. Bonus? I can wear it to multiple events! Wedding gowns are a one and done deal most of the time.
Basically: Do not sink a ton of money into a wedding unless your family is really pushing for it (and will pay for it). But understand that the whole event is really for them, not for you. Getting married in front of 500 people and having a grand reception is not a guarantee for happiness any more than getting married at city hall and having an intimate dinner with your closest family and friends is.
And for my final marriage hot take in this post: It is perfectly fine to not have diamonds in your engagement or wedding band. It’s perfectly fine to have lab grown stones. The diamond industry is absolute crap and has been pushing out absolute crap in its advertisements for decades.
Do not shame your friends if they do want ethically-sourced stones in their jewelry. I cannot tell you the amount of shit I’ve received on Facebook and offline from ‘friends’ who either judge me or are jealous of me for using inherited/vintage/secondhand stones in my engagement ring, and will be using such stones in my wedding ring as well. I do want real diamonds in my wedding jewelry, but I refuse to purchase any brand new stones. Inheriting and sourcing secondhand pieces and having something custom made is my (and my fiancé’s) way of going about this that makes us feel good about how we’re spending our money and supporting the jewelry industry (and we’re going with a small, independent shop in our city that specializes in custom designs, too!).
tl;dr: Stop ring-shaming my jewelry just because you’d rather have a giant sparkly lab-grown stone and you can’t afford the real thing/don’t want to support the real thing.
It’s kind of amazing I’m even getting married, really. My method of flirting as a mun is roasting the crap out of fiancé and the idea of a wedding makes me repulsed. We’re spending money on an elaborate honeymoon instead and buying material shit we enjoy far more than people we barely know asking us when we’re having children (answer: lol never).