Joyce, one of my wonderful past brides, has put together her thoughts regarding wedding traditions. I would love it if you would send a blog post or idea my way. Send me an email! Emily [at] theganeys.com!

I use Tradition with a capital T because this can mean different things to different brides. For example, within Chinese culture (which I am), the tradition is for the male’s family to pay a dowry/offering to the female’s family. For my husband (American), it’s usually the bride’s family that pays for the wedding. Depending on what your husband and yourself believe, planning a wedding and following all of the “traditions” can be pretty daunting and surprisingly tough.

When my husband and I started planning our wedding, we had to communicate and clarify a lot of what we meant to prevent assumptions that could get us in trouble later. Our families would want to be involved, but we also agreed that we’d support each other and make decisions together first and foremost, with or against our families if needed. We were going to be starting our own Traditions, and we wanted to start this by challenging the typical “Wedding” traditions.

Our first discussion was the bridal party. We both knew that it was usually universally gendered with the bride and groom. We were concerned about how we could integrate each of our friends and siblings of the opposite gender into our respective parties.

“Should he stand on your side or mine?”
“What about her?”
“Would she wear a dress or a vest?”
“He can only wear a vest. I don’t want to see him in a dress >_<”
“How can they be involved in the bachelor/bachelorette parties?”

Eventually, we concluded that our friends would be on our respective sides while our siblings would be on the other side. We chose this split because our friends knew the rest of the party while our siblings didn’t really know anybody other than us. Therefore, we gave our siblings the chance to meet new people while our friends got the chance to help plan a party for us that they knew we’d enjoy. This eventually caused some raised eyebrows, but because my husband and I were on the same page, we could explain and defend our decision together.

Putting ourselves first for the wedding was an absolutely necessary decision we needed to make. While people would immediately echo with “Well of course, it’s your wedding!”, we have both heard a lot of horror stories about how dramatic wedding planning can get. From hurt personal feelings to assumptions such as, “You’re getting married in a church!”, we needed to put our own feelings as a priority. We didn’t want a church wedding and I didn’t want a white dress (it ended up being ivory which is a subtle but important difference for me [white symbolizes death in Chinese culture]). Consciously taking ownership of our wedding and planning it diplomatically and cooperatively, we created a wedding that wouldn’t egregiously offend anyone in our families but not compromise our own feelings. Planning our wedding together was a big step that helped us understand that we were no longer just dating, and showed us how much we could implicitly trust each other through our marriage. Establishing what was important to us as a team was the beginning for our Traditions, and we hope to keep that perspective through the rest of our marriage.