How to Personalize Traditions in Gay (and Straight) Weddings

Your Wedding Challenges are Opportunities

With no GPS to lead the way, you and your fiancé are forced to ask yourselves three important questions: 

1. What are we doing? 

2. Why are we doing it?

3. How do we make it happen? 

Same-sex couples have always been forced to be awake at the wheel of their relationships and marriages. I feel it’s because they have had to fight for recognition in the face of adversity. So – along with straight couples who deviate from the norm – think of your wedding-planning challenges as opportunities to create meaningful celebrations on your own terms.

Incorporate Guests Into Your Story, Not the Other Way Around

Assemble a menagerie of faces that make you feel like you. And choose not to invite anyone who might compromise your event with what I call ‘Overtly Toxic Prejudice’: a reflexive, pernicious need to induce shame in those they do not understand. Anyone down with OTP does not have a place at your wedding.  

By taking charge of your guest list, you also empower yourself to bring people into your world, on your terms. For instance, when family members slip up and call your event a “party,” just remind them how important the day is for you, how important the word “wedding” is, and how meaningful it will be for you to share it with them. 

Remember, you are inviting them into your story as a couple, not contorting yourself to fit into theirs.  

Personalize, Rewrite, or Create New Rituals    

You get to think about which wedding rituals you like, which you do not, and which are rooted in the tradition of brides as property (which are many of them). You then get to decide which of those rituals, if any, tell your story. If none do, you can always create your own, and then celebrate them in your own way. 

Here are some examples:

The Proposal. You can reenact a “traditional” proposal where one proposes to the other on bended knee. But you can also invent a refreshing proposal of your own. And you can cast yourself in the role of proposer, proposed to, or both.

For example, my husband and I invented Proposal Week: a mini-vacation during which we agreed to psyche each other out with almost-proposals at various dinners and excursions until it spontaneously happened for real. Instead of exchanging rings, we created a symbolic video featuring the people in our tribes and emailed it to them. It served as both our engagement announcement and our save the date.

Parties. Have a shower, a bachelor(ette) party, or any other pre-wedding bash if you want. Whatever you end up doing (i.e., cake decorating classes, wine tasting, bar hopping, or bungy jumping) just make sure you actually have fun and that the party symbolizes who you are, independent of your spouse-to-be.  

The Wedding Party. And speaking of parties, you get to decide who you want to represent you on the big day, without the gender binary getting in the way. That means that unlike many brides and grooms in the past, you get to choose bridesmen, groomsgals, or any other attendant in your wedding ensemble without the oppressive rule of “boys on this side of the aisle, girls on that side.” 

What is also trending is not settling on any specific color theme for attire; don’t feel the pressure to have everyone in the wedding party match ensembles. For example, for our New England fall wedding, my husband and I chose to wear non-matching brown suits and asked our parties to wear any fall leaf color of their choosing. It was wonderful to watch the autumnal ensemble flurry their way down the aisle.

The Ceremony. Don’t feel as though you have to abandon tradition altogether. There may be aspects of sectarian customs that inspire you. For example, my husband and I both grew up going to Christian churches, and though we are not religious now, we liked some of the aesthetics of the services. We chose classic texts that reflected stories like ours – drawn from Gilgamesh and Plato – as well as church-like music selections that felt personal, from Philip Glass and Sinead O’Connor. Our spiritual guests not only got to reflect on our love, but also had no idea the service wasn’t taken from the Bible.  

The Reception. Do you need to smash cake in each other’s faces? No. So if you don’t want to, don’t. If you want a first dance, do it: fast or slow, just the two of you, or with everyone as a big group. And if you want to dance with parents, why not go ahead and dance with your same-sex counterpart? 

Your Wedding is a Performance

Don’t be afraid to embrace the limelight. It’s your day, so you should enjoy it.

That being said, you’ll want to prepare for show time the way actors do for a play. Allow yourself to daydream about each stage of the wedding ahead of time. Fantasize about the attention you will receive each step of the way, and how nice it will be to take that in. The more you are prepared to enjoy the attention, the better time you’ll have and the better time your guests will have. Trust me.

Also, don’t be thrown by relatives who may cringe at the sight of you kissing your beloved at the altar, your PDA in photographs or on the dance floor, your choice of outfit, or any other way in which you choose to enjoy the spotlight. These “traditional” or conservative relatives might induce inhibiting shame in you. Don’t let them. They are not the arbiters of appropriate. They simply suffer from what I call 'Spotlight Ambivalence': mixed feelings about exposing truth when it challenges the norm, causing folks to object when you take center stage. It’s about them, not about you. 

But you might be able to actually glean tips from these same relatives. Ask them about their weddings and conflicts they had with their relatives when planning them. You might disarm them and find connections in unexpected places.

What You Take In Is More Important Than What You Put Out

Whether we’re straight or gay, we all face the exact same wedding dilemma: How to celebrate who we are and who we love, and how to take our crucial people along with us for the ride. The ensemble you assemble will nourish you – if you mentally prepare to take them in.  

Mark O’Connell, LCSW is a NYC-based psychotherapist in private practice. He is the author of Modern Brides & Modern Grooms: A Guide to Planning Straight, Gay, and Other Nontraditional, Twenty-First Century Weddings. He also writes for Psychology Today and The Huffington Post.

Opening photo by Turn Loose The Art