Weddings: It's All About the Sexual Tension?

Does it matter whether a couple getting married have had sex before or not? Does it matter if they have been living together? For some it does. It seems that there are people who only find enjoyment at weddings and wedding receptions if they know that the couple is choosing to spend time with guests rather than running off and having sex for the first time.

Ann Althouse writes:

It seems to me that the idea of a big wedding ought to be about the beginning of the couple's life together. In fact, the really cool thing about a wedding back in the old days or for traditionalists these days is that the couple has not yet consummated the relationship. When that is the situation, there is an excitement and the reception takes on a wonderful glow: look, they're finally able to have sex and yet they are hanging out, dancing here with us!

I've attended quite a few weddings and I can say that such thoughts have never crossed my mind. Why would they? Even if the newly-married couple hadn't been living together, there's no particular reason to think that they had never had sex before. What about weddings where one person is, for whatever reason, incapable of having sex — is that really not something to celebrate?

If this is not the case, how can the couple imagine they're putting on a show that justifies everyone watching and celebrating them for hours?

I can think of quite a few things, but the most important of which lies in the fact that a marriage isn't about creating an opportunity to have sex, it's about creating kinship bonds:

When two people marry, they become kin — they are now related to each other. Furthermore, they also establish kinship ties with one another’s families. This is makes marriage fairly unique among all other sorts of contracts that can exist in society — only adoption is at all similar. In fact, this is the one characteristic of marriage which seems to be common to all forms of marriage in all cultures and societies through time. The only natural kinship ties are biological, and the only obvious biological kinship which exists is that between a mother and her children. All other kinship ties are established through culture — even fatherhood, which is often as much a matter of social convention as it is assumed biological paternity.

Kinship and familial relationships create the smallest social units of any society. The importance of kinship as a means for structuring relationships and behavior is evinced in the way societies have had so many systems (formal and informal) for establishing pseudo-kinship between people who have no biological relationship and for whom there are no means for creating traditional kinship ties. Common examples of this are the informal ways people refer to one another as “uncle” or “son” regardless of actual familial ties, the prevalence of “blood brotherhood” ceremonies in various groups, and ritual kinship bonds created by different social groups.

Kinship is an important thread in the social fabric. It isn’t an “institution” like marriage because there are generally no specific legal, religious, or social rules regulating it. Kinship is, instead, an amorphous creation of many other institutions which help people structure their relationships with one another.

If you know that someone is your kin, you know that you have different legal, social, and moral obligations to them than you do to total strangers. If you know that two people are kin, you know that they not only have different obligations to each other than they do to you, but also that you have different obligations to them as a group then you would to them as individuals if they weren’t kin.

Marriage establishes a relationship which does not and cannot exist for people who are simply living together. However much a cohabiting couple may love each other and however long they may have been together, their relationship is not such that it can be described as “kin” and, as a consequence, they cannot make any legal, social, or moral claims on others to treat them individually and jointly as if they were kin.

Majikthise comments on Ann Althouse's post:

So, when cohabitators tie the knot, they should slink off discreetly so as not to burden the larger community with tiresome celebrations of their debased pact? Please.

Ann seems to think that a wedding doesn't really count for a couple who's already fucking in their own bed (as opposed to their respective dorm rooms, the back seats of their parents' cars, or other more "traditional" venues).

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I believe that promises matter. As far as I'm concerned, the day you promise to spend the rest of your life with someone is a significant occasion, regardless of how much time you've already spent together. Not everyone wants to mark that milestone with a public ceremony or a party, but it's churlish to demean other people's celebrations.

Also, maybe it's a generational thing, but Ann's ideal of the wedding as vicarious Tantric sexplay strikes me as weird.

Personally, I think that Majikthise is being too generous. Ann Althouse's opinion about the nature of marriage and weddings strikes me as incredibly and unnecessarily narrow. If "traditionalism" involves being entertained by the fact that people aren't having sex when they could be, then I don't want to be a "traditionalist" and would furthermore say that "traditionalism" deserves to die. Quickly. Such obsession with others' sex lives isn't healthy.

Ann Althouse's narrow vision of marriage isn't healthy, either. Treating a wedding and wedding reception as if sex (or not having sex) is the most important thing causes one to ignore what's really important about marriage in the first place. It isn't sex and those who think it is — those who sit through the ceremony and reception thinking "Gee, now they'll finally be able to have sex!" — aren't likely to have good marriages over the long haul.

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