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.

Keywords:

• wedding
• wedding guests
• family relations
• relationality

Notes

¹This term refers to a Western type of wedding celebrated usually with a large group of people and marked by a bride wearing a wedding gown (Charsley 1991; Maillochon 2002).

²The birth of the new unit is often marked by a change of name, for example.

³The French cases are part of a larger data set consisting of 25 couples (Maillochon 2002, 2008, forthcoming). The six cases have been chosen to match the Finnish cases.

⁴The French data have been collected and studied by F. Maillochon. The Finnish data were collected by a group of sociology students lead by A.-M. Castrén.

⁵People are getting married at older ages (28 for women and 30.5 for men in both countries; Eurostat 2008) and cohabitation has become very common (Kiernan 2004).