Swimming Upstream Part 1 (Nerds getting married)
On New Year’s Eve, my girlfriend Rachael asked me to sit down and play through a video game she’d put together. She works as a digital effects artist in the video game industry, and yes, you almost certainly have seen some of her work. We’d been playing around with making a silly flying game, and she wanted me to look at some of the art assets she’d produced. I sat down at around 11:30 to play the game, and at around 11:33 it finished with a big picture of her face floating in and asking me to marry her.
Pretty much everyone ooh’d and aah’d the way you’d expect when we posted the news to Facebook. They ooh’d and aah’d MORE when they found out that Rachael pretty much just beat me to the punch, because the very same day I’d started making arrangements to set up a proposal Larp for her, of which a video game was the first portion (I was about halfway finished with the game when I played hers). The response people gave was nearly always the same – “Aw, you guys are perfect for each other.” We are, but that’s not really the takeaway from this story. The takeaway is this: we’re huge nerds.
My engagement ring is a d20.
It’s been a month or so since the proposal, and now we’re getting into the wedding planning stage of things. We’ve been discovering that planning a wedding is actually as fucking hard as all of the stupid movies and TV shows make it out to be. There are a million things to consider, and a million and one to pay for. Even the very first question you need to answer (after the whole “Will you marry me?” party, anyway) is difficult – What kind of wedding do we want to have?
Clearly from our proposals, we want to involve some aspects of our nerdery in our wedding. But we DON’T want to dress up like Link and Zelda, or Wesley and Buttercup, or any of the other online tropes that you see. We’re not embarrassed to be nerds, or embarrassed for liking nerdy things, but we really don’t want to be posted on a website in 10 years for the 2015 version of having a wedding picture with a giant bleached mullet, or wearing hammer pants. I generally spend a few minutes each day thanking fate that I never snapped a picture of myself brandishing a sword over my head as a teenager.
Not bad enough dudes to save the President.
So, we’re left trying to figure out exactly how we want to express our love for each other by displaying our love for the things that brought us together, without looking like regular nerds dressed up in bad Han Solo costumes. We have no idea what we’re going to do yet, but the subject kicked up an even deeper discussion that we’re trying to settle. Both Rachael and I are very progressive in our politics, and neither of us feel bound by the tenets of any particular religion (we’re both on the Jewish side of things, but don’t really practice at all). How much of the traditional trappings of weddings do we want to include in our ceremony?
Rachael tends to lean more on the traditional side, while I tend to lean on the non-traditional. When I look at the traditions of a wedding, I see the terrible circumstances under which they originated. Women as property, bawdy possibly non-consensual sex scenarios, and land deals are the seed of a lot of the things we practice at weddings these days. Things started off kind of rapey, and while we’ve progressed a lot since then, everyone I’ve told about being engaged still makes the assumption that I asked her. When she looks at the traditions of a wedding, she sees classic romance brought to life for a day. She wants to create a memorable event that we can look back on like a favorite movie. To her, a lot of the traditions are no longer associated with their unfortunate origins – the meanings have changed and evolved, and now mean different and less misogynistic things. The problem we run into is that both of our interpretations are correct, they just depend on the point of view from which you approach the situation.
Weddings are hard, and not just because of the money and planning that goes into them. They’re hard because they’re an encapsulated expression of the philosophies and beliefs of those involved. And when you’re two nerds trying to live well intentioned lives in the modern world, shit gets complicated fast. We still haven’t figured out what we’re going to do, but we will, and I’ll write about. So stay tuned over the next year and a half, and I’ll keep you updated on how well we manage to hadouken this shit.
