The Marriage Day

Marriage is an especially prominent target of complementation ideologies, whether they are religious distortions or secular distortions of the truth.  There are idiotic wedding customs that directly or indirectly treat men as if they have a special status over women, like the idiotic practice of "giving the bride away," but there are also very overt components of traditional American weddings that treat men as if they are irrelevant to the marriage or lesser than women.  No matter which gender is given precedence over the other, the misconceptions of various kinds of complementarianism are always behind this, with nothing but demonstrable philosophical errors or assumptions behind them.

One somewhat popular misconception is that the marriage ceremony and day are for the bride, a formality meant to make her feel special and treat her specifically with some kind of public honor, but not necessarily the groom.  Some women, irrational enough to submit to stereotypes just to go along with them instead of being authentic, turn this into an avoidable but self-fulfilling "prophecy" of sorts for their own individual lives.  They act as if it is their obligation to plan their wedding around their own personal whims just because they are women or as if the ceremony itself is about showcasing their own aesthetic preferences or physical beauty, as if women are more beautiful than men or could possibly deserve to be treated as such.

Sometimes this cultural bias manifests as a total neglect of men's desire to be physically attractive on a wedding day, a denial that they have such desires at all, or an asinine insistence that they just act like women deserve to be treated as more beautiful.  Sometimes this manifests as sidelining the groom's role in planning a wedding.  However it might be expressed, it is folly and erroneous to pretend like marriage is about one partner instead of the other, and, regardless of whether it is a husband or wife that is elevated above the other, it will also set the marriage on perilous ground if the ceremony is intentionally structured to honor one partner more than the other.

A marriage, or one that is not coerced or marked by stupidity and superficiality, is a mutual relationship where a man and woman come together with all of their individuality.  Nothing about this means that a marital relationship or the event of marriage, the ceremony itself, is about the groom or bride more than it is about the other, and anything other than a mutual, equivalent celebration of both excludes this truth.  It is irrational to believe otherwise on any level.  Marriage does not involve one person (even so-called "sologamy" is not a relationship, as it does not involve one person relating to another), so it is philosophically idiotic by default to emphasize one partner more than the other at a wedding unless one of them, due to their personality, would prefer less of the figurative spotlight.

The marriage day is not about the man or the woman specifically, but the public uniting of them as a couple, a pair of individuals who desire each other's presence and intimacy enough to commit to each other.  This would be easy for almost anyone to immediately or almost immediately prove by logical deduction if it was not for years of societal biases for or against each gender, sinking their talons into even something as celebratory as the actual ceremony on a marriage day.  Of course, there might also be women who want to pretend like a wedding is about them out of personal arrogance and men too lazy or relationally uninvested to even put any effort into planning or enacting a wedding.  They are fools who believe or promote the idea that a marriage ceremony is about the bride in particular just so they can make their own shallow selves seem more legitimate.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.