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How Should An Orphan Get Married?
Jan. 16th, 2021 07:58 pmhttps://www.quora.com/What-should-an-orphan-girl-do-to-get-married/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper
Q. What should an orphan girl do to get married?
A. Are you asking how a person without living parents goes about finding a romantic partner who will eventually become a legal spouse? Or are you asking how to conduct a wedding ceremony without living parents to fulfill some of the traditional roles like the father walking the bride down the aisle or the father-daughter dance? Because those are two very different questions.
A person without living parents goes about finding a romantic partner in the same way that everyone else does - they meet people, eventually falls in love with one (or a few) of them, decides that legal marriage is the right step, and then gets married. There is nothing about parents necessary for any step in that process.
Some cultures do set up marriages through the parents as brokers. The parents find the appropriate spousal applicants, a choice is made (either by the prospective bride and groom or by the two sets of parents), and then the parents arrange for the wedding. In that case, when there are no parents to make these arrangements, the process is going to be much more difficult for a person without living parents to find a spouse.
For that scenario, I can’t offer any advice because I am not part of a culture that encourages this process, so I don’t know what the acceptable alternatives would be for them, because each culture that has this practice might have different protocols for choosing alternatives. Perhaps some elderly neighbors would step in as the parents? Maybe there are organizations that perform this service for a fee? I don’t know.
As for how to have a wedding ceremony when there are people missing from certain key roles, well, there are tons of alternate wedding ceremonies out there. Unless you are just absolutely dead-set on having a traditional wedding where those roles are mandatory, in which case, again, I can’t help you with that. You have to be willing to be flexible if you want to participate in a tradition when you are not in a traditional situation.
My parents are living, and yet I did not have any traditional parental roles in my wedding. My father did not walk me down the aisle, we did not have a father-daughter dance, my spouse’s parents didn’t attend at all so he didn’t have a mother-son dance, my father didn’t give me away, they didn’t even pay for the wedding.
We designed our own ceremony that followed the *pattern* of a generic American Christian wedding ceremony, but that actually subverted all of the traditional elements.
In our “unity ritual”, we performed a ritual that emphasized our individuality and interdependence rather than our joining into one. In our family ritual, we acknowledged the importance of our other partners and family members as part of the whole and including them in our marriage, rather than talking about the family we would be creating with each other.
We did not have an aisle at all and the groom not only saw me and the dress before the ceremony, we got ready in the same room. The entire wedding party (including the bride and groom) mingled with the guests before the ceremony, and when the wedding music started, we just all met up on the stage from wherever we were standing, rather than walking down any aisles. We also did not have a groom’s side and a bride’s side. We had our bridesmates and groomsmates standing interwoven with each other in a semi-circle behind us, with us facing the audience (so they could hear), and our officiates standing below and between us and the audience. Also, we had mixed genders in our respective wedding parties.
Q. What should an orphan girl do to get married?
A. Are you asking how a person without living parents goes about finding a romantic partner who will eventually become a legal spouse? Or are you asking how to conduct a wedding ceremony without living parents to fulfill some of the traditional roles like the father walking the bride down the aisle or the father-daughter dance? Because those are two very different questions.
A person without living parents goes about finding a romantic partner in the same way that everyone else does - they meet people, eventually falls in love with one (or a few) of them, decides that legal marriage is the right step, and then gets married. There is nothing about parents necessary for any step in that process.
Some cultures do set up marriages through the parents as brokers. The parents find the appropriate spousal applicants, a choice is made (either by the prospective bride and groom or by the two sets of parents), and then the parents arrange for the wedding. In that case, when there are no parents to make these arrangements, the process is going to be much more difficult for a person without living parents to find a spouse.
For that scenario, I can’t offer any advice because I am not part of a culture that encourages this process, so I don’t know what the acceptable alternatives would be for them, because each culture that has this practice might have different protocols for choosing alternatives. Perhaps some elderly neighbors would step in as the parents? Maybe there are organizations that perform this service for a fee? I don’t know.
As for how to have a wedding ceremony when there are people missing from certain key roles, well, there are tons of alternate wedding ceremonies out there. Unless you are just absolutely dead-set on having a traditional wedding where those roles are mandatory, in which case, again, I can’t help you with that. You have to be willing to be flexible if you want to participate in a tradition when you are not in a traditional situation.
My parents are living, and yet I did not have any traditional parental roles in my wedding. My father did not walk me down the aisle, we did not have a father-daughter dance, my spouse’s parents didn’t attend at all so he didn’t have a mother-son dance, my father didn’t give me away, they didn’t even pay for the wedding.
We designed our own ceremony that followed the *pattern* of a generic American Christian wedding ceremony, but that actually subverted all of the traditional elements.
In our “unity ritual”, we performed a ritual that emphasized our individuality and interdependence rather than our joining into one. In our family ritual, we acknowledged the importance of our other partners and family members as part of the whole and including them in our marriage, rather than talking about the family we would be creating with each other.
We did not have an aisle at all and the groom not only saw me and the dress before the ceremony, we got ready in the same room. The entire wedding party (including the bride and groom) mingled with the guests before the ceremony, and when the wedding music started, we just all met up on the stage from wherever we were standing, rather than walking down any aisles. We also did not have a groom’s side and a bride’s side. We had our bridesmates and groomsmates standing interwoven with each other in a semi-circle behind us, with us facing the audience (so they could hear), and our officiates standing below and between us and the audience. Also, we had mixed genders in our respective wedding parties.
We kept the ring exchange, because Franklin likes wearing rings, but we have an understanding that I will not wear mine regularly because I don’t like wearing rings in my dangerous, manual labor job. We kept the first dance because the thing that started this whole ball rolling was my passion for dance and Franklin recently discovering his, so dancing together was an important symbol for us.
We didn’t have a cake cutting (I made mini cupcakes), we didn’t have a bouquet toss or garter toss, we didn’t have rice (but I did provide bubbles), we didn’t have a bachelor party (we had a pre-wedding party that everyone attended together, no gender segregation) … we didn’t have most of what makes an American Christian wedding a “wedding”.
And yet, it still looked like a wedding.
I have the entire thing detailed at http://bit.ly/SquiggleWeddingCon - the ceremony, the food, the music, the dress, all the pictures, everything.
Your wedding can be however you want it to be. If you want it to *look* traditional but make some changes like not having parental participation, you can do that. If you want to go out of your way and make it look totally different, you can do that too. It’s your wedding. It’s supposed to symbolize the people getting married - who they are together and the life they are building together. So make your wedding ceremony reflect that. If that means that someone doesn’t have living parents, then that’s how the ceremony will look.
