A feminist journalist is engaged. To a man. But before you start making assumptions, please understand that this is different from when regular women get regular-engaged.
Different how? you may ask. Well. She doesn’t have an engagement ring, because she insisted upon not having one. She sometimes calls her fiancé her “partner.” (Side note: this is confusing to me because, having been Canadianized, I’m now used to everyone saying “partner” in reference to their significant others, regardless of gender or legal status.) She wants to “overthrow… the patriarchy.” She’s having a bachelorette party but gets that it’s cheesy to do so. She is wearing white, despite finding “its allusion to virginity” problematic, but rest assured, she is wearing pants.
She is, in other words, getting married, like billions before her and billions after. She is, as I am, as you are, but a dot in the sea of humanity, which is itself the teensiest dot in an even broader context.
I had this sense that I’d written about the topic before, but was mildly appalled to realized that I’d done so a decade ago. While the Atlantic piece in question is paywalled, and I’m the journalistic equivalent of being locked out (barring workarounds I’m too sleepy to start with), I remember the gist. In 2013, as in 2023, a certain sort of woman had to live her life exactly like almost everyone else does (that is, following some traditions and not others; partnering with someone of the opposite sex) but has to insist that she, unlike (gestures at the mass of airheads), may have landed in the same place but has, please understand wrung her hands before doing so.
I have said before (for all I know, in that Atlantic essay!) and will say again that I sympathize with the women who do this. We live in a society that equates femaleness; the liking of men; and female heterosexuality in particular, what with the overlap, with being a brainless twit. I get wanting to say, yes, I’m like that, but I’m not LIKE THAT. But aaaah, other women have inner lives as well! Even the ones who don’t do a ritualistic wringing of hands before their own semi-traditional weddings.
What 2023 moi has more thoughts on than my 2013 self could have is, how to put this? The big picture. Not the big-big picture—I’m but a girl of 39—but the way life changes between the love-and-marriage and baby-carriage life stages.
All this obsession with whether the trappings of an engagement and wedding are feminist, all the parsing of dress color and jewelry choices and all the symbolism, seems… what, exactly, when you consider the years that will likely come next? Is it all just absurd in light of what happens when pregnancy/childbirth/children enter the picture? (Good luck having a 50-50 approach to pregnancy.) Or is it a grasping-at-straws, last-ditch attempt to control things that cannot be controlled, at least not on an individual level?
I found this lying on the ground, maybe you know who to return it to:
An Ironic, Low-Key, Unconventional Wedding Is Still a Wedding
An ethically sourced engagement ring doesn't change the fact that you're engaged, just like a girl who got her jewelry at Zales.
There are, the New York Times reports, engagement rings designed with "'gals'" who "'don't want to look engaged'" in mind. Rings with black diamonds, or a vintage appearance, that look more Brooklyn than Zales. Rings, that is, for women happy to get married, and to wear gendered diamond-and-gold engagement jewelry, but who would rather if the significance of said accessories be kept quiet.
The market for discreet nuptial rings points to a wave of ambivalence operating counter to bridezilladom, the phenomenon of brides-to-be obsessing over every detail of what they view as the biggest day of their lives. It is just one sign of a discomfort on the part of certain women who have heteronormative desires (an opposite-sex partner, a document acknowledging the relationship, a dress...) with what these desires say about them.
When first noticing this phenomenon in 2011, I not un-snarkily referred to it as "fauxbivalence", a term that doesn't quite capture what is really a mix of genuine ambivalence and a performance thereof. Fauxbivalence is to be distinguished from cold feet, or a simple lack of interest in marriage. It refers exclusively to women who do want in on the institution, but who find this somehow embarrassing.
Fauxbivalent anxieties center around engagement rings, so often perceived as the ultimate symbol of wedding narcissism. The rings elicit squeals, but also anti-squeals. Fauxbivalence is central to the strangely compelling Jezebel posts about engagement jewelry. The comment threads can turn into contests over whose ring strays furthest from Tiffany. "I recently got engaged and my fiance got me a beautiful ring - 3 uncut diamonds (ethically sourced) set in silver :)," writes one. Rustic and ethical is good, heirloom and non-diamond better: Writes another: "My engagement ring was a really simple ruby and gold ring that belonged to my husband's grandmother. My wedding ring is a titanium band that matches my husband's. We bought them as a pair from an Etsy vendor who makes their own jewelry." Etsy, of course. But one can do better! Writes another, seemingly in earnest: "I'd take a blueberry ring pop and wear the little plastic piece forever."
The site does have a sense of humor about this, giving "comment of the day" to the following: "MY engagement ring is made out of an ethically sourced diamond encrusted with lentils on a locally harvested unicorn poop band." The competitiveness one expects women to demonstrate regarding whose ring is flashiest lives on, only in the other direction.
A similar discomfort with wanting the traditional trappings of marriage is present in the comments to Liz McDaniel's clever story of being dumped just prior to her wedding, then landing a job at, of all places, a bridal magazine.
One wrote:
I read this hoping that it there would be a happy ending - that surrounded by the massive consumer industry that brainwashes women into thinking they're supposed to be 'brides', the author would realize that the gazebos, tulle, diamonds, cake, and all the other products she envisioned are completely meaningless.
This commenter, and others less sympathetic, interpreted the story as the justified comeuppance of a woman who wanted a wedding, who lacked the decency to at least feign blasé.
It's easy to see why many women would have qualms about the Wedding Industrial Complex. The symbolism of a wedding can feel not merely anti-feminist but out-of-date, relics of a time when a woman's wedding day was the decisive moment in her life. And bridal beauty! Who could forget the New York Times story on the feeding-tube bride? There are professional concerns as well. What message is conveyed if one shows up for a job interview wearing a ring? Does wedding-talk at work read as announcing one's departure? All nuptial hysteria is assumed to come from the bride until proven otherwise.
It can seem as though no matter how one imagines it will go, a wedding will almost atavistically slide back into traditionalism. There's a temptation quasi-apologize for these slip-ups. Much fauxbivalence results from situations in which a woman wants not just marriage, but some of the not-so-progressive-seeming trappings. If you see yourself as the kind of person who wouldn't want a white dress, say, you may find yourself explaining—to yourself, to friends, or to a mass audience—why you went with one. See one woman's thoughts on changing her name "for pretty idiosyncratic reasons," a piece she wrote after explaining her pre-wedding diet-and-workout regime as not vanity, but also about "getting much, much stronger." A serious woman will have at least thought through these various concerns, but may well end up where she'd have been had she unquestioningly embraced the default.
But fauxbivalence has the potential to be just as alienating and even snobbish as bridezilladom. What first led me to coin the term was an essay by a young woman who married her live-in boyfriend for health-insurance purposes. Certain details (the ironic dive-bar "'reception,'" in quotes in the original) suggest that the author and her husband did want to get married, but that this felt too bourgeois:
My coworkers from the suburbs had been hard-pressed to find anything to talk to me about, but now they were fawning all over me. Buried in their generic 'congratulations!' were little epiphanies—they'd finally found a way to relate to me.
Getting married revealed that the author shared something with suburbanites—and not the hip kind. As life choices go, marriage is the height of square. From her essay, it appears that the author objected less to the commitment of marriage than to the fact that being a married woman made her seem conventional.
But the pressure to be different can be its own conformity. This itself has class implications. As Bourdieu has told us, taste is wrapped up in socioeconomic class. Weddings are expensive, ergo the rich must be the ones going all-out. But it's like a hatred of McMansions. If spending less (and the tasteful choice isn't always the less expensive) is about seeming more intellectual or old-money, then it, too, is a form of showing off.
I sympathize with much of fauxbivalence, and welcome a counterweight to the extremes in the other direction. As excited as I was to marry my now-husband, planning a wedding—let alone going into debt for one—is not something that ever interested me, so I appreciate those who insist that one is no less married for choosing City Hall. And I never did like the idea of "engaged," although this may have been less fauxbivalence and more the effect of many childhood viewings of the Seinfeld where Elaine tells off a woman bragging about her fiancé: "Maybe the dingo ate your baby." I especially sympathize with angst over pre-wedding workouts and name-changing, having noticed myself emphasizing the lower-key aspects of my own wedding—the non-bridal dress, say, but not the absurd amount I spent on shoes. Shoes I have worn several times since—see, the urge to explain away is strong—but still.
Fauxbivalence loses me, however, when it amounts to a refusal to accept a basic fact about weddings, which is that they acknowledge the universal in the particular. Whether you're a hipster or an accountant, straight or gay, chances are you will at some point want a spouse, and your desire for one will echo that of every other human being to be in that situation. Every relationship is unique, but a wedding is a way of momentarily setting aside that uniqueness and accepting that what you're experiencing—the public sanctioning of an intimate relationship—has been felt countless times before. That even if you do not own a North Face or a pair of Uggs, you have not invented some radical new way for two human beings to relate to each other. If what you want is what most everyone else does, better to support those with less conventional desires than to pretend that your own are one of a kind. Rather than playing up the subtle distinction between your alternative, low-key wedding and that of a suburban princess, you might be an ally to those who don't wish to get married at all, or who do but cannot in their jurisdiction.
elm
🎼 up all night....oooo....we´re stayin' up all night
Sounds like one of the heterosexual ‘queer’ people who practice radical monogamy, which magically neutralises all of the icky traditional connotations of regular hetero marriage.