I'm a big fan of this blog. Like many of you, I eagerly await Kate's posts - but instead of pushing the refresh button on my screen, I usually get to read them over her shoulder.
My name's Jeremy. I'm a 22-year-old New Yorker, a passionate (career) environmentalist, an ex-poet, filled with sometimes-disproportionate exuberance about everything from sloths to strange maps to bacon. And most importantly, I'm the guy who is lucky enough to be Kate's fiancé.
Tonight I'd like to step out of the hazy underworld where the future grooms of the world have been instructed to reside until their wedding day, and wade into the wonderful Arcadian blog-space that Kate has been building here. I will turn up now and again, when my work schedule (more projects than I can shake a stick at) and home life (a strict regimen of movie-cuddling, dinner-making, political blogging, and Pocket Tanks with Kate) allow.
There is so much to discuss - and naturally, Kate can hold down the fort here, whether I post or not - but with my column-inches I plan to delve into some Big Questions… like,
Where can we find a balance between personal values and political realities in this magnificent, cacophonous crashing-together of public/private spheres that is known as a wedding?
What are the underlying progressive values that can support great weddings and healthy relationships?
In a world enmeshed in environmental crisis, what would a sustainable wedding look like?
And how do grooms fit into all this, anyway?
Growing up as I have in a world that insufficiently values the contributions of women (in both the "public" and "private" spheres, whatever those terms are supposed to mean), I've always self-identified as a feminist. I first saw (and began the near-instantaneous process of falling in love with) Kate when she strode into a classroom a couple minutes late and breathlessly grabbed a seat in front of me in a college course called Philosophical Perspectives on Feminism and Gender.
But for all my commitment to equity and progressive values, I've always had the nagging sense that my lack of personal experience with significant oppression by the culture-at-large has kept me from fully "getting" how my loved ones (mother, sister, fiancée) must feel at being treated as unimportant, less valuable, or invisible by our society.
However, soon after I was (extraordinarily lucky to be) engaged to Kate, I encountered this very same unnerving experience of invisibility and discounted value, as far as my societally-expected role in planning and taking part in our future wedding.
Rather, I should say my lack of role. It turns out that (as Kate described in an earlier post) the black-suited grooms are blurred out and hidden in the background of wedding magazine pictures because the background is where we "belong." As best as I could understand it from reading websites, books, and other sources of popular opinion, my Job as Groom had been spelled out for me: I was to stay out of the way, half-heartedly tolerate my significant other's wedding interests, whine about all the work (that I wasn't doing anyway), throw an obscene, healthy-relationship-twisting bachelor party immediately before my wedding day, and then (with creepy, bittersweet reluctance) resign myself to a truly terrible fate.
How did we get to a
point where the beginning of the greatest journey of a guy's life is being
framed as that life's tragic endpoint?
But I don't want to spend too much time today on this issue, however important it is. In future posts here, I'll puzzle over, contest (and I hope, help to dismantle!) the disturbing role that our culture has carved out for grooms, which I want no part in.
Fifty hours a week, the gears in my head are whirring away
trying to find new and better means of overcoming the size, culture and inertia
of a large institution in order to help it realign
around the principles and practices of sustainability. I have an amazing job that lets me draw upon
my college academic and activist experiences alike, rewrite my entire job
description weekly, and manage significant resources and collective energy to
solve the environmental problems faced by my community - it's work that I feel very
proud of.
Since I while away my days greening a university, it would be impossible for me to think about an event as momentous as my wedding without thinking about sustainability. Kate has already touched on some of the enormous direct and indirect environmental impacts of weddings themselves - in terms of energy and water use, waste production, transportation, resource consumption, and much more.
Equally important is the underlying message that every wedding carries - the tapestry of subconscious threads that wind through the ceremony, reception, decor, vows, and the whole shebang. Weddings aren't just private events; they have something to say to the wider world. So I hope to dig deeply into the meaning of a sustainable wedding, zoom in on different pieces of the whole, and see what messages our wedding can carry.
Hopefully, this serves to give you all some sense of what I
care about (Kate, community, integrity, the Planet Earth…) and some of my future
writing interests. I look forward to
exploring the ins and outs of an "ethical" wedding - a wedding where
we can wear our hearts on our sleeves, fully valued and visible to each other and the world.
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