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- Title
Wedding paradoxes: individualized conformity and the 'perfect day'.
- Authors
Carter, Julia; Duncan, Simon
- Abstract
Marriage rates in twenty-first-century Britain are historically low, divorce and separation are historically high, and marriage is no longer generally seen as necessary for legitimate sexual relationships, long-term partnership or even parenting. Yet at the same time weddings have become more prominent, both as social aspiration and as popular culture. But why have a wedding, especially an ornate, expensive and time-consuming wedding, when there appears to be little social need to do so? Similarly, weddings have never been more free from cultural norms and official control - so why do these supposedly unique and deeply personal events usually replay the same assumed traditions? We draw from a small qualitative sample of 15 interviews with white, heterosexual celebrants to address these questions. While existing accounts posit weddings as a social display of success, emphasizing distinction, and manipulation by a powerful wedding industry, we argue that weddings involve celebrants necessarily adapting from, and re-serving, tradition as a process of bricolage. This shapes the four major discourses interviewees used to give meanings to their weddings: the project of the couple, relationality, re-traditionalization and romanticized consumption. At the same time many couples did not want to be distinctively unique, but rather distinctively normal. This is what we call 'individualized conformity'.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; WEDDINGS; MARRIAGE annulment; MARITAL satisfaction; DIVORCE; POPULAR culture; HISTORY
- Publication
Sociological Review, 2017, Vol 65, Issue 1, p3
- ISSN
0038-0261
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-954X.12366