16th Apr 2008
Modern kids and their modern engagements
Yesterday’s For Better or For Worse annoyed me. Not because it’s really offensive or something like that; it’s just sort of vapidly stupid.
Elizabeth and Anthony haven’t declared a date yet? What modern fiddle-faddle! These young people with their indefinite declarations of commitment — bah!
Uh, how old are you, neighbor lady? Thirty-ish years ago when you got married, there were plenty of engaged people who didn’t finalize their wedding plans the instant a ring went on their finger. Back a hundred years ago, “engaged” was not synonymous with “our invitation is in the mail, please save the date”. There has always been a great deal of leeway given to an engaged couple, because people’s circumstances (both financial and emotional) vary widely and it’s not always feasible to declare definite milestones. It’s not like they’re going to forget to get married, especially with you asking every day, “So when’s the big day?”
Maybe in 8,000,000 B.C.E., Caveboy and Cavegirl went to their respective caveparents, announced their engagement, showed off the engagement rock (literally, of course, a rock), and informed them the date was already set. I mean, according to Clan of the Cave Bear, everyone just shacked up and had lots of sex whenever they felt like it, but since Clan of the Cave Bear is a terrible book, I’m pretty sure that our hypothetical cavecouple would have done The Right Thing and scheduled their caveceremony promptly.
This is just more nostalgia about something that never existed. In the Anglo-American tradition, engagement has always been something that two people could keep secret between themselves, or announce at any time and stage prior to their getting married. Writers from the Venerable Bede to Jane Austin (to name just two who wrote a fair amount about engagement and marriage) have expressed this opinion.
Not that there wasn’t a sentiment back in the middle of the twentieth century that things shouldn’t be different. There’s a MST3K short that ends with the young man and woman deciding that they’ll be “engaged to be engaged” for a while. But the whole point of that movie was an attempt to counteract the then supposedly newfangled notion that you could be engaged without a whole formal ado involving a ring and a set wedding date. And unto this day, blowhards like Laura Schlesinger claim that you’re not really engaged unless you have “a ring and date.” (That seems to fly in the face of the fact that you can get married without ever having an engagement ring, or even wedding rings for that matter.)
“Hey, where’d it go?”