My resistance to having a wedding mainly comes from a few considerations. First, ever since I was little, I’ve been very averse to being “the central figure.” Second, arranging and hosting for relatives and friends is not something I’m good at. I do have some vanity, and when I achieve something I do hope to receive some praise. But being the main character in a setting where I’m being praised, or suddenly becoming the center of attention in some situation, makes me extremely uncomfortable. It’s been like that all my life. Unlike some friends, I’m not afraid of or opposed to contact among blood relatives, but when it comes to getting married, sending invitations to various relatives and friends with whom I don’t have much regular contact is, honestly, a significant psychological burden.
However, there are some things in life where you don’t really get to skip the option, and a wedding is one of them. During this period my partner and I had our share of planning and struggling. The first step in the middle of all this was working on my mom’s thinking. Perhaps out of a desire to respect the two of us, my mom didn’t insist too much at first, which gave us a kind of illusion that the situation was optimistic. We muddled along like that until a few months before the wedding, when our parents from both sides met and seriously discussed the wedding. Only then did we realize how difficult it would be to not have a wedding at all, or to just do a very simple ceremony.
Over this process, the two of us gradually came to understand the precise role of the bride and groom in a wedding—something that’s hard to truly grasp just by watching TV dramas or observing others. One of us is an only child, and the other is the eldest in the family. Our parents have spent half their lives working and living in the county town and need this ceremony as a kind of milestone. At the wedding, our own friends were actually in the minority; more of the guests were relatives and our parents’ friends. So we were the prerequisite for this ceremony, but not its absolute main characters.
Wedding preparation is an extremely complex project. As weddings in the region have gradually merged in people’s minds into a common pattern, an incredibly intricate process has formed, with all sorts of sub‑procedures that have ended up becoming “generally accepted” as indispensable. This means that the matter itself is not something two individuals or a small nuclear family can handle alone. Throughout the process, my older cousins, scattered in different places, were all bustling around as if it were the New Year, busily and energetically helping out—only this time it was for me. That feeling was very warm. Because of this atmosphere, it also became clearer that marriage is not just a matter between two people; it’s the beginning of communication between two big families.
With the support of this big extended family, in the run-up to the wedding, the two of us actually seemed rather relaxed. Aside from things only we could do—like trying on clothes and introducing the two families to one another—there wasn’t that much else that kept us so busy we couldn’t see straight. On the contrary, it felt like going back home for a long‑awaited holiday—lighter even than during Chinese New Year. Interestingly, the two days before the wedding were probably the days when my partner and I communicated the least since we first met, simply because there were still so many things that needed to be coordinated with others. So much so that on the night before the wedding, lying in bed, I actually felt a kind of loneliness.
On the wedding day itself, it was just as my teacher had reminded me beforehand: there are many details that you can either care about or not. I, of course, did not care. As long as the ceremony could proceed normally, the final verdict on it would only ever be that it was “a complete success.” Although there really were quite a few minor mishaps along the way, they just ended up giving us more stories to tell.