Here’s a great question about wedding ceremony planning that we recently received:
I’m getting married this summer, and everything wrt wedding planning is going smoothly. I’m actually surprised how easy everything has been, since I didn’t know much about weddings before getting engaged. The only problem? My family and my fiance’s family practice very different religions and both have made themselves clear with regard to their expectations where the wedding ceremony is concerned. Long story short, each family is assuming that we’ll get married using their traditions. We, however, are pretty agnostic where religion is concerned and want a non-religious (or at least religiously ambiguous) wedding ceremony. How can we make this clear without offending anyone?
Oh, family. Can’t live with them, can’t beat them about the head with the proverbial rod. Well-meaning relatives cause more wedding planning strife than all of the wedding vendors in the world put together, and that’s just the ones who aren’t actively trying to offend you! When it’s just the appetizer selection that’s causing disagreements among family yet to be bound together by matrimony, it’s pretty easy to smooth things over. It’s when things like religion (or divorce, remarriage, cultural traditions, etc.) are involved that things get hairy.
Why? Because a family’s religion is so bound up in that family’s identity that it can be hard for relatives to understand that the younger generation doesn’t necessarily believe in the same things. Couple that with wedding ceremony planning and you have a recipe for misunderstanding that results in a pretty sour dish.
Now it seems like you have two problems here. The first is that your families are expecting different wedding ceremonies, each based on the religions in which you and your fiance were raised. Sometimes differences like this can lead to competition among families. The good news is that since you don’t want your wedding ceremony to reflect either religious tradition, one family won’t seem like a winner while the other seems like the loser. Your second problem is that both sets of relatives are expecting a religious ceremony, and that’s not what you want.
Uh-oh! From where we sit, it looks like you’re just going to have to come right out and tell your families that you want a non-religious wedding ceremony. If nothing else, you can always frame it like so: “We don’t want to offend either family, so we’re keeping the wedding secular.” Of course, that could also be seen as offensive. We think that it’s time you and your fiance tell your parents the truth. You’re both adults, after all, and coming clean will save you a whole lot of time in the future if you think your families will expect you to take part in religious ceremonies or holidays in the years to come.
We can’t, however, say that no one will be offended, since religion is a touchy topic at the best of times, and this is wedding planning, where whoever can find something to be offended about, will. Tread carefully, but be true to yourselves. You’ll treasure your wedding ceremony memories so much more if you don’t let anyone tell you what it should be. Have the wedding ceremony you really want and cope with the consequences as best you can.
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