#wedding receptions,

[chasingrainbowsforever]

~ Orange and Silver ~

[thatscarletflycatcher]

I recently saw a post about different styles of posting on social media about one's engagement, coming right after I finished a conversation with some friends about weddings, and it struck me once again, the slow loss of our privacy coupled with a progressive increase on our personal isolation, and how that is, hm, bad.

I'm gonna try to explain. Back when my parents married (Uruguay, early 1980s) a wedding was an important event because marriage was a socially relevant thing. Not telling someone you were getting married was seen as extremely rude; it was set custom to make two sets of wedding invitations: one, including the information about the reception, for the people you were inviting to the party, and another with just the date, time and place of the ceremony, ending in "the bride and bridegroom will greet you at [insert the entrance to the location where the wedding was to be performed]" that you sent to acquaintances and pinned to a corkboard at your workplace/social club/dance studio/whatever. Basically everyone was notified and invited to attend the ceremony and bring a gift if they were so inclined, or not, at will.

A decade ago people would catch wind of your engagement because you changed your relationship status on facebook. The more daring would post a picture with some text. Fine. Nowadays you catch wind that someone is engaged or married by being bombarded on instagram by pictures of the proposal, wedding, reception and honeymoon, for which you were never even given a short "hey, I'm getting married!!!" text.

Expectations for wedding receptions are sky high. You need to show off the wealth that you most likely don't have, and everything that gets the wedding label automatically becomes 10x more expensive. So people, reasonably, invite less and less guests to their weddings. Some schew the whole social event altogether and elope or get secretly and quietly married.* And yet most of the time you are still getting the unsolicited picture album. And maybe some people think that the picture assault is notification enough. But that's also something I positively dislike. Telling someone you are getting married, a proper communication, is not the same thing as just posting pictures. One is personal, the other is impersonal.

In other words, what used to be more private and personal (the pictures and video of the event, what you shared with close relatives and friends) is now broadcasted, and what used to be the thing you broadcasted (a communication to everyone of your new relationship status and establishing of a new family) is now rather private. There's a dissonance by which less and less people get to participate in a wedding, but more and more people are made to watch it from outside as complete strangers. It's mildly voyeuristic, and from and for a lot of people, a sort of "rubbing in their faces", a fundamentally adversarial attitude.

*mind you, my parents had a wedding reception consisting on "sandwiches, cake and soda" at grandma's house, where people took turns to sit and where dishes and cutlery came from several different borrowings to make up the number, and if there was whiskey that was because one of the guests brought a bottle. But that's hardly an instagrammable reception these days, says I like a cranky 80 year old.

[coolnessgraphed]

[chasingrainbowsforever]

~ Purple ~

[chasingrainbowsforever]

~ Purple ~

[cpkansascity-blog]