This post was written by Friday guest blogger Emma Garman.
Novelist Kate Saunders (The Marrying Game) approves of Anne Kingston’s The Meaning of Wife which is, she says, a
pitiless meditation on a myth that won’t leave us alone. If you know an otherwise sensible woman who has started drivelling on about white frocks and wedding place-settings, please give her this book. Encourage her to wonder what the act of becoming a wife will do to her relationship. What will the world expect of her once the gold band is on her finger? More crucially, what will she expect of herself?
When nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, Kingston asks why women are still in a state of collective pixilation about weddings. A traditional marriage will be most advantageous for the blushing groom, but it’s not the oppressive males who are forcing us up that aisle, or shoehorning us into white meringues. Oh dear me, no. A traditional wedding is something that brings many a man out in hives. It’s us girls who are keeping what Kingston calls “the wedding industrial complex” booming. We’re hurling ourselves up the aisle like lemmings.