I’m thinking about marriage rather than weddings today. Of course, the two are highly intertwined and both are rocked by large and small-scale controversy. Did you hear about the Massachusetts man suing his son’s bride and her family because she is “too ugly?”
Dr. Pandey of Belchertown (hee!) said in his lawsuit that after they had flown to India to meet the bride, his wife, son, and daughter were “shocked” to discover the Indian woman was “ugly with dark complexion and protruded bad teeth and couldn’t speak English to carry on conversation.”
While that isn’t exactly a nice attitude for people to have toward marriage, it does take all kinds. For example, if you’re not keen on a traditional western wedding, you could try Nikah urfi, handfasting, a digital wedding, or a modern-day Fleet wedding (seen below).
When it comes to marriage, there are also some interesting options that go beyond your one-on-one love marriages and your arranged marriages. There is covenant marriage, sororate marriage, levirate marriage, morganatic marriage, common-law marriage, circle marriage, open marriage, and serial marriage. Whew!
Personally, I’m still partial to the ever-popular monogamous marriage, but I’m not about to deny two or more consenting adults (humans, that is–dolphin and snake lovers can step aside) their chances at happiness. According to Truth-Or-Fiction.com, the odds they’ll stick together are better than I thought.
wow
useful info. How many wedding types we have!:)
Wuv…twoo wuv…
Hurray for positive statistics! I get so sick of hearing about how marraige is doomed to fail. I think some people use it as an excuse not to try.
Who knew we had all sorts of marraige options? I’ve always been intrigued by Celtic Handfasting and would love to incorporate some of it’s aspects into our wedding. Interestingly, we might also have an online wedding. We actually met online, and my fiance has a great number of friends he’s met through MMO’s over the years. Talk about marrying the old and the new.
patient one: Two friends of mine held a handfasting ceremony rather than a traditional English wedding ceremony. I couldn’t attend (continental differences and all that) but the whole thing looked so wonderfully earthy in photographs.
If you do have a supplementary online wedding, do let me know how it goes. I met The Beard online and we have a ton of friends from all over the place who would probably think something like that would be great fun 🙂
And the my family complains because I refuse to get married to some nice Indian boy they picked for me:) That family is a major ass and I don’t believe the story played out that way. There is NO way that they would have agreed to the engagement without getting a huge portfolio of photographs and then local relatives would have visited the bride’s family and sent back a first hand report. There is some other trouble over there but I can’t put on my finger on it.
Yes, if you are dark, you can be the world greatest genius and still be treated as a waste of oxygen. As long as you have a fair skin you can have a face like a horses bottom and still be “desirable.” Such is a the racism of the Indian marriage mart.
How old am I? 13 for Pete’s sake?! I snorted out loud when I read “Belchertown,” too. The only thing that could have topped it would have been something like “Fartville” or “Butte.”
I guess it’s nice to know that I haven’t become jaded…
Just a quick note about funnny place names:
I once read about a tiny place called Higgin’s (or something like that) Bottom in the boonies in India. Turns out that during the Raj some Brit officers tired of the heat had gone on a hunt and one had fallen into the bramble patch. Unfortunately for him, the entire hunt passed by when a kindly lady was removing the thorns from the unfortunate Mr. Higgin’s very naked bottom.
You can’t help but love a place named after a poor Englishman’s bum.
That’s awesome, GK. I usually assume there is some non-silly explanation for these things. But now that I know about Higgin’s Bottom, I will forevermore that funny place names have funny backstories.
Who knew it could be so complicated. And here I thought it was when one person said, “Hey, wanna hang out for the rest of our lives?” and the other said, “Sounds good. And we ARE honeymooning in Hawaii, right?” or something like that.
I’m right there with you, Andrew!