Gori Girl

OK, we're keeping it quiet from most people in our lives, so I need someone else to tell — We got married last Thursday!!!!!!

Wedding planning has been rocky, and it's not really what we would have wanted, so we've been planning to do a "registered marriage" at the local courthouse before going to NJ for our wedding on July 4th. We've gone back and forth about whether to do it right before we left or earlier…but we decided about two weeks ago to do it May 20th. :)

All of our parents knew we were doing it, but most people don't know. We're not planning to outright lie, but I won't start commonly using my new name until after the "wedding" and we're not going to directly tell most family/friends. We exchanged our own written vows privately on a pedestrian bridge at a park we went to the first time we hung out, then went to the courthouse and took our witnesses for a picnic lunch. We did a two-night honeymoon in a local city (including a visit to the spot he "proposed" after we'd been engaged a few months), and now we're ready to move the rest of my stuff in before my lease is up this month!

I'll link to pictures after our weddings are all finished!

Congrats! Can't wait to see the photos of everything :)

That's awesome! congrats!

Congrats!! I would love to see pictures too! :)

Thanks for all the good wishes! I had a little remorse after, but I do still think it was the best choice for us…we're both so much more comfortable with the wedding now that we've had "our" time. I'm actually more excited about it now than before, because now it just has to be a time to celebrate with everyone (versus wanting to be a perfect reflection of our lives coming together). 

I'm attaching a few pictures of my bouquet and a few charms I tied around it (a locket from my brother with he and his wife on their wedding day and one of our last pictures of our mom, a necklace with my birthstone that had been my mother's on a chain A's parents gave me for our engagement, and a butterfly A gave me out of the blue recently). I'm also attaching a picture of our rings. We went with different golds, and included in our vows that we will use the rings to remind us to honor each other's differences.

Post edited 2:09 pm – July 21, 2010 by sjtp

We're all done!!!!

We are now married in every family/social circle! We did stick to just telling people here at school and a few other close

friends/family members, so most people don't know we had another marriage ceremony. The Indian wedding was fine, I was able to just focus on good things for the weekend, although there were several little things that caught up to me

a few days later. I think part of it was the finality of it — it was never going to be more inclusive of me (us, although he was more included in several ways), and I knew at least some things that would have been worth fighting to have my way and now I could do nothing about it. The wedding was (stunningly) beautiful, as I knew it would be, if chaotic (as I knew it would be). Then we came back and A defended his thesis (no pressure, right?) and we headed off to my

hometown for a relaxed reception in a park in my "hometown." I think that last reception — which we had total planning and execution of — helped bookend the wedding and let me pack it away as what it was.

I am still hurt by things that happened around the planning and the weekend itself, but I also still genuinely like A's parents and family and enjoy being with them, and did enjoy several parts of the wedding weekend. I've talked with A, and he knows that I'm going to be much less flexible in the future on things, because I regret how I handled the wedding. I gave up my voice in hopes of avoiding all conflict, but ended up with nearly a full year of conflict anyway. There are some things I was offered a say in that I declined, and other things I didn't try. In the future, and especially when we have children, I will be MUCH more protective of my voice. The change may be interpreted as my "true colors" and stubbornness/selfishness coming out after the wedding ("she acted so nice at first, but now she just doesn't try anymore"), but it's really that I am not going to go through my life feeling as left out and bowled over as I did with the wedding. It was lovely, the dresses were lovely (if ill-fitting, and my least favorite color in the world for the reception skirt), but I look back and wonder where I am in it.

I think back to what I could have done differently, and I feel helpless. I could have taken control and truly planned

it myself…but his parents were paying, and I know whatever I chose (even if I had the resources to plan everything in Indian style) would not have been "good enough" because our tastes are different. I could have let go and let it be what it was…but that's what I tried, and it failed every time we said we weren't giving any more opinions. I could have held my ground and called the wedding off or started from scratch with half the guests…but that would have caused a difficult rift in the family, and we didn't realize how bad the process would be until we were halfway through the process and had sent save-the-dates to everyone. 

The good news: A and I have had MANY conversations about setting boundaries, how our lives will look, and how we will handle family conflict from here on out. When we have kids, or look for houses, or plan where to live (which means NJ or not NJ), we will start strong to finish strong. We will have private conversations to decide what's important to us FIRST, then figure out what we can make meaningful compromises with on everything else.

The other good news: Now that we're all married, we're less worried (read: paranoid) about small details from our private lives "leaking out" to family. I'll post a link to flickr with LOTS of pictures from the wedding (and some from the marriage!). I put explanations (some my own, some from the program we used) of the wedding steps on my Facebook album (some of them carried over, but most of the longer ones are cut off), so if you want a step-by-step of our Gujarati wedding, PM me. I'm only using Flickr for this forum (I prefer Facebook), so feel free to comment if you wish, as no one else from my life will see.

I think this should work!

Album for GoriGirl forums

they are all so beautiful! congrats!

sjtp – Congratulations! Thanks for sharing your wedding pics.  They are all so pretty.  It’s so fun to see pics from a Hindu wedding in the US.

 I really didn’t have much of an idea as to what our Hindu wedding ceremony was going to be like other than what I had read about.  I also watched my Didi’s (SIL’s) wedding video I don’t know how many times to try to prepare myself.  Nothing could really prepare me for the real thing though.  I really didn’t have to do much in terms of planning for our wedding because it was in Karachi and my in-laws pretty much planned the entire thing.

My husband’s family is Maharashtran and I knew there were some differences in weddings within different regional Hindu groups as well.  I think Gujarati weddings have the varmala (cotton cord) part, but I don’t think Marathis do that (at least I don’t remember it).   I would have liked to have had more knowledge and voice about some of the details of our wedding as well, but I just went with it.  It ended up being a beautiful and extraordinary experience (albeit a little hectic and frenzied). 

I haven’t read through all your experiences, but I think you’ll find that the details you might have been worrying about won’t matter so much later on.  There might always be the thoughts about things you think you could have done differently.  But . . . the MAIN THING you’ll remember is that amazing feeling that you were married to the love of your life. That’s how I see it anyway : )

It’s so nice that you have such a great circle of people to share experiences here.  I got married 10 years ago and there wasn’t much out there in terms of resources like there is now.

Anyway, sorry for rambling. . .

Congratulations again to you both!

I agree that being married to the man I've chosen is something to be extremely glad for. The extraordinarily nice wedding his parents gave us is also something to be grateful for. And what's done is done, and it's best to look forward.

At the same time, it's not so much the "little things" themselves as the loss of my voice, my say, my personhood in all of this. It's looking at the pictures and feeling like it was someone else's wedding. It's feeling left out or out of place during several parts of my own wedding, yet still told over and over that it's "my day." I think these things *are* important to pay attention to, not to sulk or cut off family ties, but to behave differently for future things. To be aware that things may matter more to me than I originally thought they would and that I should not give away my say too quickly. 

It's really not the "product" or wedding itself I'm unsatisfied with, it's the "process" of making decisions and including not just me, but both A and I in how the wedding was planned and created. And my response is to think harder next time to decide what I *really* want, then be confident in my voice. Not to say that I won't listen, too, but I'll need more than "But it's traditional" when I'm not comfortable with something.

Wow, sjtp, thank you so much for generously sharing your photos with us.  It looks like an incredible day.  Your love for each other and the easiness of your own relationship shines through the pictures and is something to really cherish.  I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like your reception outfit, because I think you look amazing in it – for me, the colour combinations give you a really elegant look, which not everyone can carry off!  You look like a princess!  And now it's the beginning of the rest of your lives … enjoy!