Feminist Wedding?

Here's a link to an article by a feminist who is getting married.

She seems very nice and sensible, but I have a couple of things that I'd like to say to her.

Firstly, I really hate the idea that deciding on how roles are split in a relationship is a 'feminist' idea. Okay, I can see how feminist thinking would need a different split in a relationship to the traditional one. But every relationship is different. Only relationships which aren't very deep are 'traditional'. My wife and I share the housework. I didn't expect her to do more than me. I don't think of this as 'feminist'. It's just how we do things. The point is: it doesn't need a label - it's just you. My wife does think of herself as a feminist. But really this just means that she doesn't want to be a bored housewife.

Secondly, that whole thing about weddings is a bit old-fashioned. It seems to me that the biggest problem you have is not with the notion of marriage but with the notion of a Christian marriage; the answer to which is simple: don't have a Christian wedding.

My wife and I had a humanist wedding. We got to decide exactly what we wanted in the ceremony. There was no 'giving away' of the bride. The structure of the wedding still had some of the traditional aspects: the bride dressed in white coming down the isle; readings, albeit secular ones; but that was what we wanted. We pillaged tradition for the things we liked.

You cannot ignore the fact that one of you is male and one female. To do so would represent an absurd blindness to a biological fact. Men and women are different. That's not to say that either is 'better' on the whole. Men tend to be stronger than women, women tend to be better at remembering and organising than men. It's not universal, but it's not imposed by culture either: it's biological.

What's more, you can never ignore the culture you were brought up in. Without culture, everything is meaningless. Your attitude to cultural aspects will help morph it into something new - and this is where it is important to have an attitude; but don't imagine that you will never be a cultural stereotype. All you can do is create your own idea of a stereotype