Love And Marriage Essay

889 Words2 Pages

If a museum was to open an exhibit entitled Love & Sex they would need different artifacts to cover concepts like gender, relationships, sexuality, traditions, identity, etc. Under the topic of love and & sex there are many different traditions and/or rituals that are very present in western society, if not others as well. One specific traditional ritual is usually once someone has found the person they love and want to spend their life with they get married, specifically during a wedding ceremony. The artifact for submission to the Love & Sex exhibit is rice that is ceremonially tossed at newlywed couples. Throwing rice at newlyweds is one of the oldest wedding traditions. After the couple says, “I do”, the guest typically line up outside …show more content…

Many people consider weddings to be the start of their “happily ever after”. They are a strong idea that once you found the one you love then you have then wedding of your dreams and then everything goes great. Especially in the US majority of people tie together the idea of love with the ceremony of a wedding. Weddings tend to signify the love of two people, beyond just a sexual connection, and the thought of wanting a wedding spans across genders, abilities, race, and other categories. Rice gives a symbol of that ritual and what it stands for. In Andrew Sullivan’s article My Big Fat Straight Wedding, he talks about how weddings do not differ simply because of one’s sexuality. Sullivan writes, “The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends…Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding… this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage. (Sullivan)” He is claiming that there is no difference in the tradition of marriage for straight couples than for gay couples. If someone has a traditional wedding they will most likely throw rice at their wedding. It will not matter whether they are a heterosexual couple or a homosexual one. The symbolism of throwing rice remains the

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