Florence Maillochon

WHO CHOOSES THE WEDDING GUESTS, THE COUPLE OR THE FAMILY?

ABSTRACT Marriage has become an individual choice in most European countries. In this article we study entry into marriage, i.e., weddings, which in the contemporary research literature are often presented with an emphasis on modernity: consumerism, celebration of romance, and the experience of a unique and individual occasion. The wedding guests are an important part in the making of ‘the perfect day’ but the topic has largely been neglected in the literature. In this study we analyse the selection of wedding guests in 12 weddings (six French and six Finnish) to investigate the dynamics of the interplay between individual preferences and the determinants that are more relational in origin. Three empirical questions are presented: first, who is responsible for choosing the guests? Second, what is the distribution of wedding guests between kin and non-kin? And third, who are the non-kin guests: are they friends first met by the couple alone, or also by the wider family? The results show that despite the predominantly individualistic discourse expressed by the couples, a wedding is still a familial affair: the configurations of family ties are influential in constraining as well as enabling the choices available to the couple.

Making Family at a Wedding: Bilateral Kinship and Equality

In this chapter we study weddings as family gatherings, as get-togethers of people who are important in the lives of young couples. A wedding is no longer a rite of passage in the sense of being the first step into adulthood and getting married is no longer correlated to leaving the parental home, living in a couple relationship or even having children. Many people live independently, disconnected from their parents’ everyday life, and have a family of their own prior to marriage or even totally outside marriage. However, a wedding can still be considered as a rite of passage for the young couple; it reconfigures the social bond between the partners and, for many couples, a wedding offers a means to obtain social recognition of their relationship from their parents (Maillochon, 2008).