Planting Liberally

If you've ever seen Bridezilla, Father of the Bride, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or nearly any other tv show or movie about throwing a wedding, you know how stressful weddings can be. They involve a thousand little details, complex project management responsibilities, and superb personal negotiation skills. They tend to bring all sorts of long-buried thorny personal and family dynamics to the surface. Moreover, any couple trying to plan a wedding has any number of family traditions, social norms and mores, and expectations breathing down their collective necks; if they don't live up to expectation, they may feel, they will have "failed" to successfully plan one of the most important days of their lives. Nevertheless, most weddings go smoothly, and everyone leaves happy. Months of stress and agony and expense pay off, and they all live happily ever after. Right? Maybe, maybe not. For all the focus and celebration of the wedding process in pop culture, there's very little focus on the weeks, months and years of married life which follow the big event. (Actually, that is starting to change, and it is almost all focused on marriages which go horribly awry shortly after the wedding day; see for example, Imagine Me and You, or from a different angle, In Good Company.) However, these first few steps in a young couple's life are incredibly important, both for the couple and society. Family life is an incredibly important part of most people's lives, and it shapes their worldviews in ways which no one fully understands. It's not entirely clear how that happens; there is some evidence, for example, that conservatism is not inheritable from parent to child. But liberalism might also not be inheritable, or the question could be considerably more complex. Regardless of the effect of liberal family life on children, I am particularly interested on the effects of liberal family life on spouses (and here I'm discussing families headed by married couples, or couples joined by civil unions). I don't know for certain, but I will wager a bet that liberal family life tends to make spouses more liberal. What do I mean by liberal family life? Primarily, I'm talking about a family life governed by equality and mutual respect among the spouses, and a family where liberal values are dominant; these values include diversity, connectedness as opposed to materialism, the value of individual potential and the nurturing power of education. This idea is not unlike George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent superframe, but it is an actual family dynamic, not a metaphor for understanding the nation as a recognizable social unit. Obviously, there is a chicken-and-egg problem within my proposition. Are liberal spouses more likely to sustain a liberal family life? Or does liberal family life create liberal spouses? It could go either way, however, I'll suggest that it is true in at least the second sense, i.e., liberal family life does indeed make spouses more liberal. For progressives who are serious about molding the political ideological landscape so that more people are liberal, the problem is, how do we create more liberal families? One event that critically affects the shape of a marriage is the structure and format of the wedding. On a practical level, the wedding is, for most couples, the first time when they have to make a series of complex decisions, and the first time when they have to negotiate their shared traditions and customs. The wedding is also an meaningful day whose messages and values are, for most couples, an important part of their joint identity. The decision-making skills which couples learn during the wedding planning process, as well as the kinds of values communicated through the ceremony and the reception, are the "raw materials" from which the values of the new family are created. To consider the extreme case, Anne Kingston's book The Meaning of Wife argues (among a variety of other things) that the modern wave of super-weddings lays the foundation for a new generation of stay-at-home wives. (My wife gave me some good insights on these points, and also pointed me to the book.) Because wedding planning is stressful and difficult, many couples (as many as 19% of all marrying couples, according to The Wedding Report) turn to a wedding planner. Wedding planning is a lucrative business, with some planners charging as much as 10% of the budget of the wedding, or anywhere between $50 - 150 per hour. With the average planned wedding costing around $15,000, a typical wedding planner can earn $1,500 and upwards from a single engagement. For a liberal entrepreneur who's been keeping score so far, starting a progressive wedding planning agency is both a good way to help shape the course of a couple's marriage, and a way to make a good deal of money. It should be no surprise that wedding planners can have a big impact on a wedding, and consequently, on the marriage. Wedding planners are not simply project managers in the classic sense. The wedding planner guides a couple through the dozens of questions which they must answer in the course of the planning process. These are usually depicted in the movies as mundane ("should we go with carnations or daffadils?"), but in fact they can be quite profound ("Is it ok if I don't want to wear a veil?"). The wedding planner helps the couple negotiate the boundary between tradition ("well, you could go without a veil, but what will your Aunt Louise think?") and modern values ("it's your wedding, wear what you want"). There is a fine line to draw - respect for tradition is fine in some cases, and certainly might not be toxic to marital equality. But a progressive wedding planner will help give the couple perspective on the trade-offs involved, since that planner will have seen the same problems in other weddings. Wedding planners also manage some of the more complex problems which crop up during the course of a wedding, including venue acquisition. Venue acquisition sounds innocent enough, but it is anything but innocent for couples who come from different religious traditions or cultural backgrounds. The venue literally sets the stage for the wedding, and the choice of venue (as well as the process of choosing) can have a powerful impact on the values inherent in the wedding. A progressive wedding planner will attempt to give both spouses a meaningful say in the choice of the venue, or will guide the partners through a compromise on the venue. (There are a variety of ways to compromise on the venue; for example, while the ceremony might be held in one partner's chosen venue, the other partner might have a choice in the decorations, or might get a chance to determine who the officiant will be, or how the ceremony will go, and so on.) Finally, wedding planners are almost always the first to appear at the scene of conflict during the planning process. Their job, quite often, includes a good dose of couple and family counseling. They can guide couples towards healthy, respectful decision-making processes; they can stand aside and let the couples do what they want; or they can make matters worse. Clearly, a progressive wedding planner's job is to encourage couples to make healthy, joint decisions which respect the wishes of one another's families, without allowing either partner to dominate excessively. There are already a number of progressive wedding planners. Typically, these planners focus on the consumption angle, i.e., they help a couple buy recycled-paper invitations, caterers who buy fair-trade food, etc. For example, consider the kinds of suggestions offered in Organic Weddings, by the founder of OrganicWeddings.com/. Along similar lines, see Green Elegance Weddings. These companies do important work, but more is needed. A progressive wedding planner will incorporate this kind of socially responsible purchasing into a larger framework of progressive values which inform a progressive wedding. Who will enlist the services of a progressive wedding planner? It's a good question. Here are a few potential target audiences:

• Couples where both partners are progressive, or one is very progressive and the other is more or less apolitical.
• Couples where the partners come from very different cultural or religious traditions, who wish to navigate those differences during their wedding planning. Since most planners stress the project management side of wedding planning, a progressive wedding planner can occupy the niche of planning which emphasizes counseling and negotiation of different traditions and thorny family dynamics.
• Same-sex couples. These couples face a starkly unfair hurdle: acquiring a marriage license or other legal document. The laws are frequently changing, yielding even more stress in the same-sex marriage planning process. While this situation is unfair, and will hopefully result in true marriage equality in the near future, for the present time a progressive wedding planner would serve same-sex couples well with sound legal advice on how to obtain a civil union certificate, marriage license, or other legal document. (Such advice could also be coupled with referral to a good tax attorney, who can help a same-sex couple negotiate the dicey waters of federal and state tax law.)

There is a subtle point in this list: progressive wedding planning is a business which inherently distributes progressive values to people who may not already be progressive. Couples where one partner is apolitical, where the partners do not come from the same cultural tradition, or who are same-sex are not necessarily progressive; they may have some latent progressive values, but these might not be fully developed or articulated. The wedding planning process is an opportunity to infuse expressly progressive values into these couples' lives, in a way which is beneficial to both partners. In addition to describing a good idea which a liberal entrepreneur can run with, this post is also meant to describe another kind of revenue stream available to liberal entrepreneurs: the consumer economy. Consumer spending is a large and messy beast, and it's responsible for a pretty large piece of the US economy. It's also the site of extremely important personal events, which taken together shape the larger cultural and political landscape. Progressives should participate fully in this part of the economy, and liberal entrepreneurs should do what they can to distribute progressive values to consumers while making a tidy profit for themselves.