I was at a wedding last week. My own experience of marriage, back in 1983 aged just 20, made me realise the power of ritual. I wasn’t keen on the idea: for me, weddings should take place naked at Stonehenge at sunrise on a solstice, but as my fiancee pointed out, nobody would come along from our families … and probably few of our friends would have attended either!
It was financially convenient to get married, so I went along with the view that it’s “only a bit of hand-waving and singing” that needn’t really change anything.
I don’t remember much of the ceremony, apart from its rich beauty: we were married, by special dispensation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in Trinity College chapel, Cambridge, where we were both undergraduates. (Since women had only been admitted for a few years, we were the first such couple). As it was the middle of the Summer break, the wedding party had the whole place to themselves.
I always felt like I’d ended up there by mistake: radically anti-establishment, anarchic and angry, parachuted into the heart of the establishment, due to my enthusiasm for equations and skills with a slide-rule. I didn’t fit in – by day, lecture theatres full of anorak-clad geeks, and by evening pissed dinner-jacket clad toffs without any trousers.
I am lucky to have two passions in life, and enough aptitude to pursue either of them at graduate level: science and art. But only one student grant. I nearly left Cambridge to pursue Fine Art (there’s no art dept. at Cambridge), but then I fell in love and decided to endure another two years of anoraks.
Back to the power of ritual. Neither myself nor my wife felt magically transformed by the wedding; but I soon realised that all witnesses to the ceremony, and their friends too, *had* been transformed. At first it was the little things: women friends ceased to flirt; single friends stopped calling round, while we started receiving surprise visits from couples; members of my family, who I had spent years avoiding, started taking an uncomfortably close interest in my affairs, as did my in-laws; landlords and university started having higher expectations of our behaviour. We were no longer just students. Now, we were *married* students.
Eventually, the combined expectations of two conservative families, a conservative university, a cluster of conservative self-appointed friends, and conservative employers and colleagues, brought the relationship to collapse. The chief expectation being that I would behave like a properly married Cambridge chap, work ridiculously long hours within the profit-sector, and earn immoral amounts of dosh. It was not to be, and when I left my wife and dropped out to join the Oxford Writers and Artists Co-operative on the dole in 1989, I broke many more hearts than my wife’s.
For years I found weddings almost unbearable. Watching innocent young people drawn into the minefield of implicit, unstated expectations, of which they were broadly unaware. Until I realised that most people seem to enjoy the life of meeting other peoples’ expectations, and I was just unusual in my single-minded pursuit of what I felt was a vocation. Then I started to enjoy weddings again.
So, last week’s wedding was a great party. The greatest joy being my children sat next to me, the only difficulty being their mother sat next to them. Someone remarked later how “grown up” to attend such an event together, given the circumstances. It didn’t feel grown up, it felt hopelessly mixed up and f****d up.
Another joy was that the couple had sent out luggage labels with the invitations, with the request that they be suitably decorated for the wishing tree. Last time I tried post-card art I tried something experimental, and wound up with an object that looked like it had crawled out of the land-fill bin on a wet day. So this time I did what I know I can do well. Lovely colours …
