Milestones

[liv]

One of the earliest posts I wrote when I joined LJ in 2003 was an account of hatam_soferet's wedding. And it seems like it's one of the things I do with this journal, I write about weddings in my social circle. There's been a good number this past decade, which is perhaps not surprising as I was 24 at the start of it, that's the most popular time of life for weddings.

Anyway on Saturday I was present at the wedding of ewt and hairyears. hairyears mentioned to me and jack that attending our wedding was part of what convinced him that a wedding can be personal and meaningful to the couple and doesn't have to be awful. And this wedding most certainly was personalized.

It was a church wedding, which did all the things well that Anglican weddings do, a beautiful old stone building, resonant words, and music from the best of the English sacred musical tradition. As a church wedding, it was informed throughout by ewt's deep Christian commitment and faith. For one thing this is the stuff she actually believes in, it wasn't just a nice olde worlde ritual, and for another, the church is actually her local community church that she attends regularly and is deeply involved in the community, so the complete opposite of just a charming backdrop for the photos. The ceremonial duties were shared by the priest whose church it is and a different priest who is a very close friend of the bride's. At the same time, everything about the ritual was carefully and tactfully presented in a way that included her atheist groom. A wedding where only one half of the couple is religious can leave the other as just an afterthought, but this was as inclusive as possible without watering down the Christian elements. A minor benefit of this carefully constructed liturgy was that I, as a Jewish guest, felt far more comfortable than I usually do at Christian weddings.

Also, ewt is a professional musician and it really showed. One of the amazing things about English churches is that you often find amateur choirs with no formal musical training making beautiful music with complex harmonies. And this church had one of those, yes, but it was augmented by ewt's own more specialist choir, and much of the music was in the West Gallery style they are expert in. Also some music played by ewt's parents and an organ piece by our own wonderful deborah_c; I felt strangely proud to share a musician with a wedding that set such very high musical standards. There was an anthem composed specially for the wedding with some text from the Song of Songs, which was sublime.

The invitation had specified waistcoats, and waistcoats, well. I don't wear them, habitually, but I've been thinking for a while that I would probably look good in them. And when I mentioned that I was thinking of acquiring some waistcoats for the wedding just about everybody who's ever fancied me commented with some variant of, mm, sexy! So I bought a bunch of waistcoats from eBay, mostly ex-hire stock from wedding companies. It turns out that the waistcoats sold for men are often much nicer and certainly much shinier than those sold for women. So I'm all like, I don't care about gender conventions, I'll get a male-coded waistcoat all shiny and purple and dapper. But in practice it turns out I don't have the physical body to really get away with a waistcoat cut for the shape that clothes marketers assume men to have.

So I had a crisis of gender expression at IRC and they helped me to put together an outfit based on the one waistcoat I'd bought that fits over breasts and hips. Which is a lovely garment but not at all the kind of thing I normally wear, so it doesn't match most of my other clothes. So all the helpful #dreamwidth people sorted me out with a ruffled shirt, a blue-grey skirt, and a hat which made me feel like I was covering my head for shabbat without being in your face JEWISH at a church wedding, and which picks up some of the colours of the waistcoat. And designed me a hairstyle which looked formal but is within my capability to achieve on my own, and kaberett very brilliantly pointed out that the perfect finishing touch would be my Lioness pendant, which is grey-green labradorite with secret hidden purple. So I think that worked, that's a sartorial direction that would bear further experiments, slightly more masculine than I usually go for without looking like drag.

I was in fact slightly disappointed to find how few other people had paid attention to the dress suggestion (to be fair, it wasn't actually a dress code). I think I was the only woman at the wedding wearing a waistcoat and there weren't even that many waistcoated men. But at least jack had the excuse to wear the waistcoat from his wedding outfit, so that was pleasing.

Also, never mind what they were wearing, the wedding was a great opportunity to see lots and lots of people I like, as weddings are. The Enleytonment people, of course, including khalinche whom I hadn't seen in way too long. But also ewt knows loads of other people I like from other social circles, some fandom people and some Cambridge people and the karen2205, whom it was a particularly pleasant surprise to see. And alextiefling and nanaya were there and I finally got to meet their excellent offspring TestSubjectM. So after the very lovely service there was a delightful afternoon of eating lots and lots of food and chatting to a whole bunch of fun and interesting people, so that was about the perfect occasion.

One thing about this wedding is that ewt needs to be married in order to pursue her chosen career (which I find a bit horrifying, honestly, I'm not convinced that employers should get that level of say in people's personal lives), whereas hairyears held strong views against marriage and particularly religious marriage. So for a long time it had seemed like their otherwise wonderful relationship was stuck in an unfixable impasse. I am full of admiration for hairyears for being willing to compromise on this really big deal thing. That's a huge sacrifice to make, even for someone you love very much. I do hope that being married will continue to make the two of them as happy as they visibly were on Saturday!

As it happens, atreic and emperor were also celebrating a life transition on Saturday: they were holding a housewarming party for a house that they have actually bought. So we went straight from the wedding to help them celebrate this momentous occasion. They have acquired a most excellent house, which was duly admired, and they have a really excellent crowd of friends who showed up to help them celebrate this. I think I am maybe getting too old for this continuous twelve-hour long party thing (that's a bit of an exaggeration as there was a break in the middle while jack drove up the M11 from the wedding to the housewarming). But by the time it got to 2 am I was attempting to have a big philosophical debate about machine learning with ptc24 and mister_jack and fanf at a point in the evening where none of us were really forming coherent sentences.

On Sunday I woke up some time in the afternoon, and groggily reached towards jack. By the time I'd completed the slow thought process of, oh, he's not there... I suppose he must have got up already then... jack had reappeared in the doorway with a big cup of hot, delicious tea. Being guests at someone else's wedding had already reminded me how much I like my husband and how glad I am we got married, but bringing me tea like that was a whole other level of romantic.