Of Weddings and Marriage

 

It is another Friday and once again we get to gather around the Richie Online blog to read a fact-based opinion. Here is one for the day.

One of my oldest friends is getting married next week. This is one guy I have been chatting, laying and making memories with since I got off my diapers. Me and this guy, who also happens to be a faithful Richie Online reader wrote out Malawi School Certificate Examinations in the same year and went to college around the same time. We probably started appreciating ladies around the same time, but that is a story for another day. He is getting married to his sweetheart on the 28^th of this month in Zomba and I will be there running around. For the first time in a long time, I am looking forward to a wedding because I believe this will be a celebration of love for me.

The time between August and November happens to be a season of weddings where a weekend hardly passes without a wedding of someone you know. Sometimes you must attend one wedding before going to the other. It just is what it is. After attending many weddings, I have discovered one thing; some are celebrations while some are not. This, however, mostly has nothing to do with the people who are tying the knot. I will explain.

Directors of ceremonies (ma MC) sometimes dictate whether a wedding is a celebration or not. I have attended two weddings that were perfect opposites. In one, it was a wedding of people who were graduates of the college that God loved the most (or so they say). There were so many groups that were called to present gifts and I could hardly get in. I had to join the groups that had to do with the Chancellor College Catholic Community. And yes. There were many of them and each would only have a minute or so to celebrate with the bride and groom. At another wedding, the MC took control in a bad way. She would pick on you for throwing the “wrong notes” into the basket and after you had run out of money, she would ask you to give a parting gift of K6000. Now that was wrong because she had somehow turned a celebration into a fundraiser. That is one of the things that ruins weddings and diverts them from the original purpose of celebrating love; fundraising. Have you seen those weddings that people do because the bride is pregnant? Not a true celebration either. That is the other non-celebration type and you can add the rest.

Another thing that a wedding should be is the symbolism of the beginning of a marriage. Now this is an interesting one because the concept of marriage seems to be losing its relevance nowadays. We have a lot of broken marriages that are just there by name but not by practice. We go to weddings knowing that the people getting married have been cheating on each other for years and that they are not going to stop. We have weddings that are not symbolizing the birth of marriage in its entirety and unfortunately that is what a lot of us might have to settle for; marriages that are broken for one reason or another.

Now and then a young man of my kind gets a question on when they are getting married. Turns out people are so eager to know as to when why will dance at your wedding without paying any attention to what kind of marriage you will have. All that Amir will care about is the dancing and all that Sophie will care about is the Fanta. Whatever happens to you two after the dance and drinks they do not care. This is what is happening in the later day world. People are getting pressured into marriage for the sake of a wedding.

I have one good friend who happens to be engaged to this beautiful lady. At some point, we were chatting and I turned into the idiot who unnecessarily poses the when are you getting married question. The answer I got was one of the best answers I have ever gotten since I started asking questions. “We are already married, bro. We have been married since day 1.” I found this liberal “you are as married as you feel” attitude towards marriage very interesting. I am actually considering adopting that mentality and should I do that, as long as I feel married you will not be invited to my wedding.

The thing with weddings of today is that they involve a lot and most times I find myself wondering whether some of these things are necessary. You struggle with asking someone out and then you begin dating. When you feel convinced that you can take someone in, you need to do that sort of staged proposal at Hotel Amaryllis after an expensive meal with Just Jerome taking the pictures. Then it is time for the ancestors to know about the two of you and you go for the traditional wedding where chickens are slaughtered for the go-betweens to eat. Weeks before the wedding you get to have all these crazy ceremonies; bridal showers, send-offs, hen parties, bachelor’s parties and all that hibber jabber. And after the wedding, I am told that people have to go for a honeymoon. Why do I have to do all that? For what? Kukwatira komweku? All these things need a unique outfit, by the way. Casual outfits for the proposal and bachelor’s party, traditional outfit for chinkhoswe, two suits for the wedding swimwear for the honeymoon.

The whole thing of having too many ceremonies had some people trying to justify eliminating some of them. While some were honest enough to talk about the money factor, other hardliners started to bring in the issue of culture. You know where this is going, right? “Technically, both the traditional wedding you have at your village and the so-called white wedding are both traditional weddings”. You may have heard this before and people who propagate this ideology claim that those who go through with “both traditional weddings” are colonized in the mind. Well. I beg to differ. As we at Richie Online always say, “osamapangirana zochita”. We need to let people cerebrate love in the way they see fit. After all this ranting they still go on and have the 5 wedding ceremonies, anyway.

I almost forgot about this. Wedding celebrations need a lot of money. You need to book a venue, decoration, sound system, cake, catering and all those useless things. Then there are the outfits. I will focus on the bridal party on this one. If you have been to a wedding lately, you will agree that the groom’s men wear weird suits that you can hardly wear anywhere else after the wedding. The bridesmaids are worse. They wear long pink dresses with slits that go out of bounds. The outfits are so much so that one might as well throw them in the bin after the wedding. Guess who pays for that? The people in the bridal party. But should that be the case? I will leave that to you. Then there is the issue of transport for people in the bridal party. Some of you will be getting married soon and some of you will be in committees. Can you please make sure that the people who spice your wedding up have a decent means of getting home or getting to the depot or airport they came into town through? Dress imeneija siyokwera nayo minibus, please. If you can manage to move her around in a Benz the whole day, you surely can manage to put her on an EcoRide Taxi home.

I have talked a lot but here is the article in one paragraph. Weddings are meant to be a celebration of love and symbolic genesis to a happy marriage. While it is inevitable that costs will be incurred in the celebration, people need to learn to celebrate within their means and not burden others in the course. When getting married, you got to make sure that you want it and you mean it. Get married to stay married.

Precious, who I am dedicating this article to asked me to add a bit about courtship. I will not. If you want, I can give you the space on one Friday for you to talk about it.

I will be going to a wedding next week and so will my parents. I am pretty sure my mum and dad will be looking at me with judging faces asking me when I will emulate my good friend’s example. I on the other hand like to go by Dave Chappelle’s teaching. If you want to know what he said about marriage, watch the Netflix Special called Deep in the Heart of Texas. Kapena mundifunse kumbali.

Have a wonderful weekend.