I am sharing this post because the personal is political, and because quite a lot of thought went into this wedding, so for us reflecting on what we did was an important part of the process. Maybe you will find inspiration in the reflections. 🙂
Getting married as a couple of outspoken feminists born and bound to educate on sexism, oppression, discrimination and abuse, seems paradoxical at best. There are some thoroughly patriarchal aspects and symbols of considering marriage that do not look very compatible with feminism: ring traditionally signifying possession, renouncing one’s identity through name change, and going from being symbolically owned by a father figure to being symbolically owned by a husband. Whew.
We love ourselves a bit of paradox. When T and I had been together for a while, we had a strong desire to deepen our commitment, so we decided (sometime in early summer 2017) to get married. We had our official civil wedding ceremony on 9th December 2017 here in the village where we live. It was a baltic -10°C that only our close families withstood.
We still wanted to celebrate our commitment to one another in the summer 2018 with friends and family (fremily as they say), so we had been planning this event for summer 2018. Now, we are in the aftermath of a beautiful celebration and it’s both odd and a bit of a relief that we are done planning it.
From the start, we were quite sure what we did not want in terms of celebration. We wanted none of the patriarchal symbols: the giving away of the bride, the taking on the husband’s name, the first-look ritual, the cake with the effigies, the tossing of the flowers towards so-called ‘eligible’ girls, having a priest or some other religious authority lead the ceremony, etc.
Being a bit tired of the way in which (beautiful nonetheless) weddings can be a bit schematic, stiff, and often make participants feel like they need to just sit them out and leave as soon as is politely possible, we wanted to organise a celebration that would be as ecological/regenerative as possible, while creating a space that was socially rich, interactive, fun and slow, and where people would want to linger a little longer.
We wanted to have a celebration that was feminist, participatory, in line with our ecological values, and, importantly, laid-back. We wanted a new paradigm wedding.
We had been looking around (on the web, mostly) for an appropriate venue since summer 2017. We looked at a load of chalets and other cool places that were often too expensive, too far away or booked out.
We were really happy with our decision to celebrate our wedding at a youth centre in Belgium in a beautiful rural setting not too far from Namur (as we described it in our invitation ‘somewhere halfway between château and scout camp’). Historically, the place has been a fortress, a hospital, a prison, a sanatorium, and since the 1960s, a youth centre belonging to the Girl Guides of Belgium. Our guests would be able to stay the night in dormitory-style rooms of various sizes or camping out in the forest. We had two large rooms, a football field, a barbecue area, a courtyard and a forest to serve as places for the different parts of the celebration. We wanted to spend quite some time with our friends from further afield so we wanted to make the main celebration from Friday to Sunday (setting up on Thursday and packing up on Sunday afternoon) and not just a day, to avoid being rushed and not having a chance to actually sit down for a proper chat with all participants. We also wanted the possibility to be outdoors for a lot of the meals and activities.
The venue allowed for exterior (independent) catering, which was important to us. We also took over organising everything related to decorating and hosting more generally so we could be in control of these core aspects.
ECOLOGICAL (SUSTAINABILITY) ASPECTS
So, when you organise a wedding celebration, you inevitably get dragged into issues of so-called ethical consumption and how this might or might not be effective in terms of bringing about change. In the current conundrum that humanity faces, ethical consumption might be but one small lever, and for my love and I, this was about making better, by no means perfect choices. We do not expect that our wedding prevents ecosystemic and social collapse. Not by a far cry. Nonetheless, we believed we wanted to put our values into the choices we made for this celebration, since it is an essential part of how we want to live.
Transport: We do concede that there would have been less carbon emissions, had we not moved 80+ people across average distances of 100 km and, in some cases, across the Atlantic, or most of Europe to attend. This is an issue with both T and I having lived in various places and with our friends being scattered around the world – we are working on gathering everyone in a beautiful ecovillage for the collapse, but that is a different story for a different post :-). Given the rural nature of the venue, it was difficult to reach (especially for family constellations with kids and luggage) with public transport. We did organise carsharing, which was taken up quite a bit.
Food and Drink Sourcing: All our food was sourced as organically and as locally as possible, and with attention to it being halal, too. We had our dear friends Fred and Eveline, founders of the amazing Délice Végétal cater the food for Saturday and Sunday (as well as the breakfasts on Thursday and Friday), so about 90% of the food served at the wedding was vegan, organic and seasonal.
Apéro Delights
This choice was an acknowledgement of current industrial meat and dairy raising practices are very detrimental to earth’s ecosystems and life, and a major contributor to disruptive climate change. We did have a barbecue organised by the couple on Friday, where we served some halal meat besides vegan options. The alcoholic drinks were organic (wine, beer), and the softdrinks too. We had some sparkling local water and used tap water in glass bottles.
A Part of the Evening Buffet
Flowers: If you want local and organic flowers for large events, you are usually not (yet?) spoilt for choice. For us, it was a no-go to have some pesticide-laden flowers brought in from very far just for the day and enriching some large-scale flower trading company. In Luxembourg, we would not have had any choice in this regard, so avis aux amateurs :-). Definite market niche. Since we were close to Brussels, we had the pleasure to work with Amandine of Haut les Coeurs, who delivered stunning flower bouquets for our tables and single flowers as well as a bouquet for the ceremony.
Some Dessert and Flowers
Because of the ongoing heat wave and drought (we had 35°C on Friday and Saturday), it was quite a challenge for Amandine to secure the flowers and bring them without the sunlight killing them before their time, but it went really well. I loved the flowers since they were a little bit wild like the anarchist-feminist wedding they belonged to. We gave a lot of the flowers away to people after the wedding to take home and take care of.
The Bride’s Bouquet
Rings: Before the civil ceremony, we chose rings that we’ve been wearing ever since 1stDecember 2017 🙂 when we exchanged them on a rock. My love vetoed wooden rings despite my insistence that they would probably be sourced more sustainably than any metal, given the informal nature of most mining that is going on today in the world. Luxembourg, as ever, is not part of the avant-garde with regards to ethical jewellery… We found some ethical jewellery in France but it was waaay out of our budget range. So we went with a recycled titanium set of rings beautifully crafted by Valerie Kasinskas of VKecojewelry whose work we found through etsy. The making and delivery process went really smoothly and we are very happy with our rings from Titan. 🙂
Clothes: Our wedding clothes selection could have undergone more stringent checks in terms of ethics, given the appalling state of 99% of our global textile production manufacturing, but I just did not have it in me at the time. The choice of the dress I wore for the ceremony was determined largely by the circumstance that I was six months pregnant at the time of our wedding celebration. For the longest time, I had no dress at all, and I had little inclination or energy to be spending time stressing about it or doing something about it. A dear friend (merci Fabienne!) gave me a hint that a nearby pregnancy clothes shop (something that was not on my awareness horizon until she mentioned it :-)) was liquidating all of its wedding gear, and that I should go have a look. That way I took a detour after work one day and, without much expectation, ended up spending half an hour in one shop (blissed out all alone and unbothered by salespeople) getting a beautiful romantic wedding dress for €140 (around €450 original price), which was comfy and accommodated my growing belly. It also happened to be white, which I had not originally planned for (on how the patriarchy snuck back into the wedding in other interesting ways, please read on). I am planning on dyeing and altering the wedding dress so I can wear it again someday. Since most people changed into informal hot weather gear straight after the ceremony, I ended up wearing an old dress that I’ve had for about almost a decade for most of the night.
Recycling and Minimising Waste: For the decorating, we used, as much as possible, existing things that we borrowed or repurposed (my parents have a stock of old linen that we used for all the tables, jam containers for tealights, Amandine’s medicinal vases for the flowers, a large collection of wine glasses borrowed from various people, napkins borrowed from Fred and Eveline and ironed and folded with much love by my mum, etc.). We had a compost that the caterers took care of, and a process to separate waste as much as possible in the Belgian waste disposal system. We did not use any plastic or throwaway stuff. Invites were paperless and we used a recycled cardboard thank you card that we made with Moo to thank people for their donations and cards (something that we are very grateful for and that happens a lot when you get married in a small country like Luxembourg). We did not want gifts (we do not need more stuff), and our friends and family respected this very much. Thank you!
Social sustainability: Please read below under social aspects, and consider that this is also a big part of the true meaning of ‘beyond sustainability’ and ‘genuine regenerative culture’.
SOCIAL (ANARCHIST AND FEMINIST) ASPECTS
We put the Welcome sign at the entrance, so people would know they were in for a bit of a different experience right from their arrival (for those knowing us well, they might have suspected something before, and the questionnaire for participation and dietary choices might also also have been a bit of a giveaway :-)). The squirrel was a coincidental, but appropriate totem animal that was a part of the youth centre’s visual information.
The Sign at the Entrance
Participation: When I organise events, it’s important to me to involve people. You need to tell them how they can be helpful, because all of them want to be just that: of service. We set up CELL’s graphic wall at the entrance, and I spent quite a bit of time Friday morning to draw something intelligible on it.
This way people could largely self-organise into the rooms, and get a sense of what they could help out with and/or get involved in. We devised two Masters of Ceremony for Saturday night (Master Luis and Queen Tania), a Master of Catering (Loïc) and a Game Master (Rodrigo). We also had two Masters of the Hike (Eric and Anne), but due to the heat and raised ozone levels, we did not actually end up walking a great deal. There was also a Give-Need board, where people could ask for rides or borrow toothpaste if they needed. Finally we had a thing on Safety, as there was an increased fire hazard due to the drought conditions.
Getting an Overview
Solidarity: It was important to us that the usual behind-the-scenes labour that goes on at large events, often done by largely invisible, quite badly paid workers, was, as much as possible, shared by the guests. We found an amazing help in Loïc, our Breton strongman, a stellar Capricorn organiser, who ended up supporting the caters, recruiting quite a lot of people to help with dishes, and even coordinating details with the local concierge. Loïc even came up with a short ‘game’ to get everyone to help clear the table before dessert.
More generally, organising the wedding has reminded me about the incredible amount of labour that needs to go into a standard evening banquet, from setting the table and putting all the decoration, to getting the food and transforming it into deliciousness, to counting and cross-checking inter alia the glasses, guests and forks (I am still very bad at counting), to clearing the whole mess up when it’s all over. The way in which everyone kept in mind the wellbeing of everyone was visible to all present, and even some of the most radical individualists present commented on the fact that there was a great deal of solidarity between everyone there. We are deeply grateful that this was indeed so. Our friends are truly amazing.
The Most Smile-Inducing Form of Community Might Be Dance
Community: It was important for us to make a space for a slow community (contrasting with the fastness of our usual lives) to emerge, even between people who might not have known each other before. For us, this was the anarchist part of the wedding, since anarchism, contrary to common misperceptions about it, is about organising community in a non-hierarchical way so that there will be no oppression possible, and all participation will be truly voluntary and from the heart, not originating from force or other types of compelling power. We chose the symbol of the bird both for decorating our ceremonial space and the entrance because birds embody that lightness, freedom and yet embeddedness into their ecosystem that we wanted to emulate in some form. There is a piece here about atmosphere, which we wanted to be as laid-back as possible so this could actually happen. Another piece here is about event design (which our explicit take on participation went some way to accomplish, alongside the way in which we set up the activities and spaces), so that people would feel part of it.
We had one particularly moving moment in our ceremony, where we got everyone to partake in weaving a multi-coloured cloth of love in a ritual accompanied by beautiful piano music (thank you so much, Paul!). The primary materials were leftovers of wool that we recycled afterwards for our cats to play with. I am happy to report that both kids and adults loved the ritual, which went some way in getting the point across about dyads such as couples are only as strong as the community (we talked about the village) that supports them. We attribute the success of the games after the ceremony to the community feeling that arises from them. And the need for more games in our oh so serious and overly organised lives, perhaps!
Weaving the Cloth of Community Love
Feminism: T and I talk a lot about feminism and work on embodying a feminist relationship in our everyday life, and how to pass on feminist ideals and practices to our children. At the wedding, we made our feminism most visible in our ceremony, for which we conjointly chose texts that portray love not as possession, but as communion, that make space for love as both closeness and autonomy, and that speak of love and its relationship to acceptance and individual growth, etc. In the ceremony, we also brought up broader topics such as competition between women as a direct result of the patriarchy (Anne Sylvestre’s Frangines), and classism (Oiseaux de Passage by Georges Brassens), which is another form of oppression that intersectional feminism has sought to address. We intended our ceremony to be a minimalist (in the sense of dépouillé) journey of walking in the forest, together, close to nature, with our community. After a number of texts read by our friends, we arrived at a tree decorated with birds, where we read to one another, with a great deal of emotion, the vows we had written ourselves. Here are the texts we chose as well as our vows for you to get inspired by!
Ryan Gosling Knows.
The least feminist aspect of our wedding probably stemmed from my strange pride and a last-minute organisational craze to have my hair, makeup and fingernails done professionally. My love pointed out to me that this was a strange thing, but I was sort of enthralled with the process of spending a few hours in a beauty parlour becoming a princess (though I knew that the varnish would never be compatible with my love of gardening and handicraft more generally). I am not sure why, because it was extremely hot and it bored me to death, but I found the process of selecting a ‘natural nail colour’ (soft pink) anthropologically compelling. Yeah.
I am still on my way towards a world beyond the patriarchy, it would appear. T was pleased when I removed the semi-permanent varnish a few days after the celebration because my nails were just getting too long and creepy.
THANK YOU SO MUCH
We want to thank everyone who was an active part of this beautiful wedding celebration: you are incredibly precious to us in so many ways.
With particularly special thanks to:
All the people who agreed to read one of the texts at the ceremony movingly and beautifully.
Marko, Paul, Rodrigo and ceilidh-olics anonymous for the various musical delights.
Paul for splendid tech assistance during the ceremony and a moment of playing beatboxing with the mic in anticipation, which I really enjoyed.
Strong woman Laurence and adventure alpinists Sophie and Martl for getting things and people to the right place.
Loïc for his indefatigable work all weekend long. You’re incredible.
Eric and Anne for being similarly indefatigable too, all weekend long. Love.
Luis and Tania for staying the course despite some turbulence with regards to the Masters of Ceremony role for Saturday night.
Monique and Laury for holding the animal fort at home so lovingly.
And finally, Léon and Mariechen for all their logistical, emotional and financial assistance for getting it all over and done with smoothly.
Wowwww! So many blessings and shared love! To many upcoming adventures! <3
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