I'm so glad someone has mentioned this now. Thank you my little Baby Boomer compatriots, just about all the brilliant new ideas you came up with in the Sixties and Seventies were wrong.
Marriage isn't just what you soak your parents for and then you have to appear in public as a display for mom and dad (and maybe, but not necessarily, the bride) to show expensive photography-stuido shots of your self-centered little faces.
It is an event that affects all of society. Not JUST YOU, not just your immediate family, not just your family and circle of inner friends. It is an important event owned by everyone.
I began to understand this when I read a children's book about a couple of kids on their own in post-Roman Britain. The village had a wedding. The wedding was a major event belonging to the entire village. The village attended, and it wasn't just because they had an excuse to party it up and eat too much. At the wedding THE MEN brought the groom to the circle, THE WOMEN brought the bride to the circle, and everyone participated in uniting the two as a new couple. All of their society participated. Had they run out on their families and gotten married quietly by the priest at the chapel at the monastery half a day's walk across the countryside, they would hardly have been considered "married" by their society's standards, since their society had had no part in it.
And that is why, in the Anglican wedding service, the priest exhorts the audience to support and guide these two in their marriage, and the congregation promises, "We will." Such a pity we have lost sight of all the ways our actions affect those around us. More garbage from our Baby Boomer philosophers.
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