Yes, I will...

The date has been settled, the venue booked, the priest holds our background information... Our wedding is well under way and that is probably the reason why I tend to pay an exacerbated attention to the engagements that occur around me. I am indeed looking for good ideas, worst practices, trends, etc.

But now that I have dived into a new culture, I realise how old-fashion I could have been. Or maybe this is only because France, like the other Latin countries, is somehow traditionalist when it comes to ceremonies?

Love is blind, marriage asexual.

My first acknowledgment happened at work, when I exchanged with a colleague who was busy organising the wedding of her best friend. She was so enthusiastic that it allowed me to quickly assimilate the relevant vocabulary. Engagement, Groom, Pre Nup, Best Man... Well, that was what I initially thought! The English language lacks of one critical thing compared to French or German: it has no gender (what led me to my first major misunderstanding).

I considered myself as open-minded and I indeed coped very well with the ceremony happening in the London Eye, with a "Ghetto Bling" theme and some Ibiza-inspired soundtrack. I appreciated the efforts to create a non-conventional scenery for this very special day. But it was the actors who fooled me...

I should have been more cautious, especially in the country of Shakespeare whose tragedies were originally exclusively played by male actors. It actually took me a month to realise that when my colleague was referring to her "best friend and the groom", she was in fact evoking "her best friend and his groom".

Hype Pod: gay wedding in the London Eye, give some height to your love ceremony...

Don't get me wrong. I was not puzzled by the Gay wedding. On the contrary, I think that UK is a step ahead of France with it. But I was stunned by my initial assumptions. In my apparently too traditionalist mind, the spontaneous associations were "wedding = groom+bride @ church+city-hall". I needed to reevaluate my referential scheme. And so did I.

Woman in black

As a matter of fact, when my fiancée went home the other day reporting another quite different wedding, I was not moved. Not even surprised. Even if for this Gothic ceremony the bride was in black, wearing a veil with skulls and the newly-married were offered tattoos as presents...

After all, why should we get stuck with conventions, codes, traditions? We need to evolve with our society diversity. For the better, and for the worse...

Well, not sure that for my own ceremony I would get rid of the waltz as the first dance. Would you?