Engaged

My boyfriend and I have known that we were going to get married for well over a year now, and we've been calling each other "husband" and "wife" for long enough that I can't even remember when that started. (Not in public, of course, because we are not legally married and don't want to confuse others, but we'll say things like, "My darling husband" or "my beautiful wife" to each other in private.) Our society's standards dictate that we can't technically refer to each other as "fiancé(e)" without a formal display and a gift of jewelry, but for all intents and purposes, we considered ourselves affianced.


So when he took me up to Foothills Parkway (this is in Blount County, Tennessee) and asked, "Would you marry me?" as we were gazing at an absolutely gorgeous mountain view, I just smiled and said, "Of course!" without even thinking about it. (When he asked a second time, I realized this was a formal proposal, and gave an unequivocal "yes." At least it gave us a funny story to tell.)


Picking out a ring was almost anticlimactic. We wound up with a silver ring with a Celtic design and a synthetic emerald stone. My grandmother, of course, thought it was incredibly insulting that the ring was silver instead of gold or white gold, insisting that she had never heard of a silver engagement ring. (At least she understands my feelings about diamonds.) Grandma also was shocked that it is likely going to be well over a year before we have an actual wedding, and could scarcely believe it when I told her that the average engagement period for U.S. couples today is something like seventeen months. Of course, one has to remember that (a) she grew up in rural Lithuania and what little she knows of wedding customs in the United States comes from who-knows-where, and (b) she got married at the ripe old age of sixteen to my grandfather when she'd known him all of three weeks. This same grandmother, incidentally, has had a wedding fund set up for me since way before I even met my fiancé, let alone had anyone on the horizon with whom marriage was a remote possibility... but never set up an education fund. You can see where her priorities lie!


What's interesting is how people treat us differently now that we are formally engaged. Empirically, nothing has changed except I have a ring on a certain finger. But friends and family alike are "squee"-ing and applauding and squealing excitedly, and asking us if we've set a date, where we want to have it, et cetera, et cetera, and prevailing norms dictate that we now call each other "fiancé(e)" instead of "boyfriend" or "girlfriend." Funny the difference a social construct can make. I guess we're officially in a sort of liminal state.


Now, the question becomes: How can an anthropologist get married without analyzing the whole process?