Courtesy of The Frisky
I think I just got away with telling my dad he won’t be giving me away at my wedding — and the world didn’t fall apart.
I’d been putting it off, the telling him, partly because I never know whether my dad is going to care. I know he cares a lot about high-quality French fries and Chevy sport utility vehicles that rolled off the line between 1996 and 1999 (must have tailgate and be black, red or white). But the emotional stuff is a total gamble.
There was the time he tried to keep one of my high school boyfriends from using our upstairs bathroom because “he might have VD,” which I now realize was code for “Andie, you are wasting your time on this guy.” He cried when I tried on my wedding dress for him, but not when he dropped me off at college halfway across the country.
So I had no idea how he would react if I told him that I don’t want to be given away on my wedding day. Maybe he would be fine with it. Or maybe it would genuinely hurt him. But there’s not much that hurts me more than being treated like a piece of property.
Like women taking their husbands’ names, the tradition of being given away is couched in deeply sentimental rhetoric about how sweet it is, and how loving it is, and how beautiful a declaration of intense feeling it is. That all makes it really hard to talk with people on a reasonable level about the fact that both practices are rooted in oppressive patriarchal traditions that have historically had the effect of erasing or at least obscuring women’s agency in their own lives.
Continue reading at The Frisky
[Bouquet image via Shutterstock]