Black Meringue

Old Wives Tales

Danny Bowman has a look at a few age old wedding customs that might be best avoided on your big day...

There are many time-honoured traditions to uphold and expectations to meet on the big day – here are some useful tips to save you riding rough-shod over ancient marital custom.

Choosing a partner

First things first: you need to decide on a special someone. I’m assuming here that you’re going for just the one someone: many cultures worldwide have a long tradition of polygamy, so you might have a whole batch of prospective spouses in mind at any given time. “Plural marriage” became one of the most notorious practises of the Utah Church of Latter-Day Saints after a prominent member, Joseph Smith Jnr, advocated the idea in the 1830s. When the Mormons issued their 1890 Manifesto this practice was renounced, but they had a few enjoyable decades at any rate. In Buddhism, marriage is considered a personal affair rather than a religious one and so has very few constraints. The Buddhist lay person is advised to limit himself to only one wife, but hey, it’s only advice. Likewise most branches of Islam permitted and still do permit polygamy, although the Qu’ran dictates that a man should take no more than four wives and must treat them all equally.

There’s also nothing to say whether your special someone should be of the opposite sex to you or the same. Civil partnerships between same-sex couples only recently became legal in the UK with the 2005 Act, but there’s nothing new about the idea: it begins all the way back in Ancient Greece and was also extensively practised in Asia and the Middle East. A centuries-long heritage of organised Christianity was what suppressed it in this country for so long.

Despite all this freedom of choice, though, you also need one word of warning before you rush in and make a grab for it. Your prospective partner may seem perfect for you, but girls, for Heaven’s sake think, what letter does his surname begin with? For many centuries, a woman marrying a man whose name alliterated with her own was regarded as just about as unlucky as it gets. Take heed of the grim cautionary poem below, composed to protect young ladies from making such a disastrous choice:

To change the name
and not the letter
Is to change for the worse
and not the better.

Proposing

Once you’ve settled on him, her or them, what’s the next step? Letting them know about the arrangement, of course! It’s not always been the man who made the first move when it came to proposing marriage – in the past some cultures encouraged women to do it for themselves. In ancient Persia, a girl living on independent means was entitled to choose her own husband, so if she wanted to get hitched she would hang a blue apron outside her hut and sit waiting, peeking through the curtains, to see what happened next. The local lads would then adopt the habit of parading past dressed in their finest clothes, and if a chap who took the girl’s fancy strutted by she would run out and fling her arms about his neck. Within three weeks they would be wed.

For a second example, we have to venture back to the days of women being abducted against their will and forced to marry. In old Scandinavia, if a woman got wind that a man had plans to abduct her and force her into a wedding, she would befriend the toughest lasses in the village who would then act as her bodyguards. It was in a man’s best interest to behave himself in the presence of these bridesmaids-with-attitude, as their preferred method of defence was brute force and castration. (Any of us who’ve seen a pack of them fighting over the bouquet at a modern wedding will probably agree that something of this savage heritage remains.) However, those girls who didn’t have their own entourage of hulking harridans could expect to be kidnapped.

Some traditions of marriage indeed have some quite brutal beginnings. In a remarkably large number of cultures, matrimonial bliss began with the groom capturing the bride like something straight out of Borat. The purity of young Arab girls in Sinai was measured against the volume of tears they shed and the fight they put up on their wedding day. In Ireland, a marriage wasn’t considered the genuine article unless the bride made at least one attempt to escape for dear life. When Christianity arrived in Britain it tried to ban the practice of bride-kidnapping, but the native tribes kept it going for many years after. They often moaned that they couldn’t get women any other way.

Picking a day

The famous song might announce that it’s a lovely day for a wedding in May, but that little ditty can’t have been written by our ancestors. Over the years, May has been considered the unluckiest of all months to get married in, and this dates back to pagan times and the festival of Beltane. Mass public orgies were conducted throughout the month, so if you had any dainty nuptials planned for this time you’d have to pick your way through writhing bodies mid-bunk-up in the streets. This, let’s face it, would have taken some of the romance out of your day.

Additionally, according to Roman tradition, May was an unlucky time for weddings because the Feast of the Dead and the Festival of the Goddess of Chastity occurred then. The same civilisation held that June was the best month to marry, as it was named after the goddess Juno, queen of the gods. So bear all this in mind if you’ve been planning a May wedding: reasonable weather, yes, two Bank Holidays for your guests to nurse their collective hangover, yes…but you’ll be angering quite a few vengeful gods.

Finding a place

Once your plans are well and truly in motion it’s important that you settle on a matrimonial home. The very thought of this, of course, will have some shuddering at the sound of doors slamming shut: goodbye going out on the lash with your mates, goodbye free and easy lifestyle, hello pipe and slippers by the fireside and great heaps of ironing and dirty dishes piling up. But it doesn’t have to be that way, not if you found the sort of community where newlyweds wouldn’t have had any fear of feeling tied-down. Remember: location, location, location.

For example, one such place where you could have lived (if it had ever come to fruition, that is) is the egalitarian community planned by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his buddy Robert Southey back in 1794. This new country, named “Pantisocracy” – seriously, that’s what they were going to call it – was to be established on the banks of the River Susquehanna in America and would operate on a principle of sharing all the society’s goods…including the women. That’s right, none of this monogamy nonsense, the Pantisocrats were going to spread the love around and then some. Coleridge was already rubbing his clutching little hands together as he eagerly packed his bags, but Southey, made of arguably purer stuff, fell out with him over the idea and Pantisocracy never made it out of the top drawer.

A similar idea, and one which actually saw the light of day, was John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community which was founded in New York in 1848. In theory, every man in this society was married to every woman at the same time, meaning the male population had a constant circulation of sexual partners with whom to take widely varied enjoyments as and when they felt like it. However, before you chaps start thinking this doesn’t sound such a bad place to have lived all in all, it should be pointed out that “male continence” was also encouraged among the men of Oneida. As a rather masochistic-sounding counterpoint to the idea of communal marriage, men were expected never to ejaculate during coitus. This pseudo-tantric approach was to be maintained regardless of how many sexual encounters they had, and indeed male Oneidians were warned not enter into any relations until they had learned to fully control their release of semen. After the society collapsed in 1881 the Oneidians went on to form a successful silverware company. You couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?

What to wear

There has always been a great deal of importance placed upon the colour of the wedding dress. Even today, white is broadly considered to be the only one that’s good and proper, due in large part to its association with virginity, while most have thought green wedding dresses to be unlucky from time immemorial. This is because they supposedly connote promiscuity, as the green is acquired while rolling around a field like a common harlot. So, by the same token, getting married in a dress that looks like it’s been rubbed up the back of a pub lavatory should be seen as unlucky today.

But fear not. If you’re worried your potential spouse will leave you in a bloodied heap for wearing the wrong colour at your wedding, someone long ago had the foresight to compose a guide to the dos and don’ts of wedding dress colouration, and expressed it to us through the gift of verse. Is it me, or did our forefathers really like poetry?

Married in White,
you have chosen right,
Married in Blue,
your love will always be true,
Married in Pearl,
you will live in a whirl,
Married in Brown,
you will live in town,
Married in Red,
you will wish yourself dead,
Married in Yellow,
ashamed of your fellow,
Married in Green,
ashamed to be seen,
Married in Pink,
your spirit will sink,
Married in Grey,
you will go far away,
Married in Black,
you will wish yourself back.

Then there’s the veil. These feature in weddings throughout the world, and originate in the times when most marriages were pre-arranged. This was usually for personal gain on behalf the bride’s kin: a kind of “I’ll swap some of your money and influence for one of my comely lasses” situation. The veil was actually to help the family of the bride make this bid, because it could hide the features of a less-than-picturesque daughter while a rather lovelier sister, cousin or neighbour’s daughter was paraded before the groom-to-be. This would of course leave the poor blighter on the day, once the lace had been lifted, frantically pointing at his new wife’s prettier sibling and wailing: “But I wanted that one!”

The day itself

Every wedding needs a best man and bridesmaids. As we heard before, part of the latter’s origins lie in their role as private security personnel to save the bride-to-be from kidnap. But there’s also a tradition whereby bridesmaids were used to surround the bride with other richly attired women and so confuse evil spirits. We must conclude that these spirits were of either the short-sighted or slow-witted kind.

The traditional role of the best man is to protect the groom from misfortune, and not, as some have erroneously thought, to cop-off with the bride the night before. The best man is to ensure that once the groom is on his way to the altar, he doesn’t about-face and bolt like a scared dog with a case of liver tick. Therefore, he who takes the groom by the shoulder on his big day and sternly says, “But my dear fellow, think of all the fine fillies you’ll be missing out on,” is doing a woefully inadequate job.

Lastly, once the ceremony and reception are over, there is of course the wedding night. This final example will probably change your mind about a return to traditional nuptials even if nothing else in this article has. During the Middle Ages, priests went to extreme measures to ensure none of their flock was issuing illegitimate children, and this would include being present, with witnesses, during consummation. So imagine this if you will: there you are, trying to go about your duty as a new husband or wife, and all the while the vicar and his mates are gathered about the bed, drooling, gibbering and maybe even clapping in time. Not that they’d take any enjoyment in it, of course, all just part of their holy duties.

So, the next time you meet a couple who gushingly claim to be having a traditional white wedding, don’t forget to check that they are not marrying in May, and that their surnames do not begin with the same letter. If they want to obey the whims and rhymes of some long-gone nutters then that’s up to them, but they shouldn’t be able to pick and choose – it’s all or nothing we say. And luckily, with Black Meringue’s bounty of alternative ideas, there’s not much danger of you tripping over the traditional here.

BM