What is the power and purpose of ritual?

It was impossible for me to plan a wedding without thinking about ritual.

In planning our wedding, my wife (!!!!!) and I thought a lot about ritual. We kept saying that we wanted our wedding to feel less like a wedding and more like an experience. 

My theory is that rituals allow us to find joy in the passing of time — a thing that is otherwise, often, terrifying. A birthday means you’re one year closer to inevitable death, but a birthday party means celebrating the milestone, hanging out with friends and family, eating cake, generally having a good time (one hopes!). 

So what is the purpose of the wedding ritual? Keep in mind a wedding is different from a marriage. Marriage is the thing; a wedding is the ritual that honors and celebrates the start of the thing. You can get married without having a wedding, so why have a wedding?

I thought about this a lot over the course of my lifetime. My answers have, unsurprisingly, shifted over time.

When I was a teenager, I thought of marriage as largely unromantic — a tax benefit, a permission to enter a hospital room, etcetera. I found it suspicious and odd that the American government incentivizes marriage through tax benefits — what benefits does the government reap by encouraging a married public, indirectly discouraging an unmarried public? I’m not sure I even really want to know!

So suffice it to say that I felt weird about marriage; I felt even weirder about weddings. A public declaration not of love per se but of the government jumping into bed with you? If you really love each other, why do you need public recognition? Surely the need for a wedding indicates a cloying need for public approval, an insecurity that a more evolved person with a more evolved love wouldn’t feel, I thought. 

However.

Some time in the last few years, I caught myself referring to Jess in my head as my wife. And it hit me, not gradually but rather all at once, that I wanted to pay taxes with her. I wanted to be the one in the hospital room. I wanted everyone to know I was committed to her and she was committed to me, emotionally, legally, logistically, figuratively, literally. I wanted the language in my head to match the language outside my head. I wanted, I realized, to marry Jess. 

We discussed whether or not we wanted to have a wedding. It was a real question! For better or for worse, I need to understand every choice I make; I want to know with certainty that I’m doing something because I want to, and not because I’m supposed to, or feel pressure to, or should, or whatever. (Unsurprising to anyone reading this newsletter in which I do precisely that.) When it came down to it, we decided to have a wedding mainly for one reason: we thought we could throw a really good party. As my friend Jane said, a wedding is just a party — a party and the rest of your life. 

A wedding is like other rituals. A wedding is like a graduation: a transition from one phase to the next. A wedding is like a birthday party: a gathering of friends and family, where cake is considered a social requisite. A wedding is like a funeral: a gathering of friends and family, a transition from one phase to the next. A wedding is like a holiday: it endows an otherwise arbitrary date with meaning and memory. 

But a wedding is also unlike these other rituals. The main way a wedding feels different to me than a birthday, or a graduation, or a funeral, or a holiday, is that a wedding, for me, is deeply voluntary. If you make it another year, you get a birthday, whether or not you get a party. If you make it through school, you get a graduation, whether or not family comes from far and wide to celebrate it, and whether it was hard or easily won. You get the idea.

But a wedding doesn’t just happen. A marriage doesn’t just happen. Barring extreme circumstances, one chooses to get married and one chooses to have a wedding.

And this is what made me think of our wedding as, more than anything, a night of theater. We chose to write, direct, and produce a one-night-only event with a script, costumes, and a set. At times throughout the night, the people at the wedding — both Jess and I and the others in attendance — were both characters and audience. Sometimes, Jess and I were the characters and everyone else the audience. Other times, Jess and I were the audience.

Other times still, we all were the characters, and who, then, was the audience? Something else, something bigger, something we cannot see and perhaps cannot even name.

To process stepping into this next phase, Jess and I conceptualized a ritual — but it was only through others’ participation that the ritual was executed. We spent nearly a year dreaming up ways to make every single person at the wedding feel, well, implicated. Because whether they knew it or not, every person there was essential to the ritual. They weren’t only witnesses; they were also participants. 

To step into this next phase is both terrifying and thrilling. I have never done anything like this before (lol). I have never before promised life-long-and-then-some loyalty to someone else, someone I met by chance, at a 24-hour play festival seven years ago. This transition means I am now someone capable of making this choice. I haven’t always been that someone. This transition implies I am, indisputably, growing up and growing older. And that’s scary. The passage of time is scary. Time passes; death approaches. 

But what joy there is in the terror! My wedding unlocked a happiness so profound it felt surreal. I wondered several times throughout the night — and I’m still wondering — if any of this really happened. 

This, I think, is the power of collective ritual. The wedding was an opportunity to take stock of who I’ve been, who I am, and who I’ll be, and I hope it did the same for others there. It pushed me to articulate how and why I love Jess so much and it gave me the gift of hearing her do the same. All those people that know all the me’s and all the Jess’s over the course of our lifetimes — those in the room, those in other rooms, those beyond — gave us the impetus to celebrate not the restriction of commitment, but the joy of it. That commitment grants infinity to the personal finitude of one’s own lifetime. How beautiful, how foolish, how beautiful, to choose love in the face of an aging, despairing world, in an aging body. How beautiful for us to do that all together. 

I imagine telling my teenage self about my wedding. First of all, I’d tell her I married a woman not a man. (I think she’d be surprised for about three seconds, and then she’d be like, oh, right.) Then I’d tell her it wasn’t just for tax purposes, though I am genuinely excited to do our taxes together. I’d tell her I found someone I love more than I ever thought possible, someone who makes everyday fun, someone who makes me feel like a superhero and who I make feel like a superhero. I’d tell her we threw a wedding that felt more like a night of immersive theater than anything else. Maybe she’d be confused about how I became such a sap, and I’d remind her we’d always been this way. And then, because she is me, feeling pride, fear, but most of all joy, such joy, she’d cry.