Should Marriage Traditions Stay, Or Be A Thing Of The Past?

    My wife Dani, and I got married in October of 2021. Best decision of my life! I am so grateful to be married to my best friend. After we dated for a while, we started talking about marriage and I quickly learned that while we shared the same opinions on most aspects of marriage, there were definitely a few things that I never even thought of. I learned that marital traditions vary between families and generations. Here's my story:

    Let me begin with how we started talking about marriage. Just from dating her, I knew that Dani would make a wonderful wife. We shared the same views on religion and politics. I knew she had great integrity, she was kind, fun, playful, and loved being with her family and my family. For her, she was definitely paying attention to who I was, but she didn't want to talk about getting married until she had prayed about it first. So here is the first tradition to be put into question: should you pray about who you should marry, or if the person you're dating is "the one"? I personally have mixed feelings, I don't think anyone is "the one". Out of billions of people on the earth, at least a couple hundred thousand would be just as good of a spouse as the next person. As far as seeking Heavenly Father's approval, I think He trusts us enough to do our research and come up with our own answer, but it's never a bad idea to ask Him to confirm the feelings you are getting.

    When I proposed, Dani and I did not have a lot of money but I wanted to propose with some sort of a ring. So we went to JC Penny's and shopped around and settled on a $20 ring. When we got married, we only spent $1,000 on our actual wedding ring. I can feel the women reading this right now gasp. Another tradition I feel we should question as a society is wedding rings. It is not uncommon for people to spend upwards of $20,000 on a ring. In my opinion, a rock is not worth that much. How many people do you know that have lost their wedding ring and then suddenly 20K is gone. If this is what people value, then go for it. In my opinion, and Dani agrees with me, a memory is much more valuable than a rock. So we decided to put most of our money on a nice honeymoon to Florida. We had a great time playing on the beach, going out to dinners, and doing fun things like seeing movies, etc.

    One wedding tradition that I actually like is sending out wedding invitations. It's nice being the receiver of the invitations because it means that the bride and groom actually took time to consider who they want at their wedding. I would make one change to this tradition though. Electronic invitations! Dani and I did this and it was so much fun making our invitations. You can write about how you met your spouse, post pictures, and have some fun graphics. It was also so much cheaper to just send people a link to our invitations rather than spending money to send a hundred letters in the mail that people are going to throw away after you get married.

    I've saved the worst tradition for last. Saving the wedding cake to eat on your one year anniversary. I didn't even know this was a thing until about a week before our reception. The average wedding cake costs about $350. Some people spend up to $1,000! I'm not going to focus on the price, that's for another time. Dani's sister does amazing cakes and could realistically charge upwards of $350, but she was nice enough to do it for free for us. Dani really wanted to save the cake for our one year anniversary so I reluctantly agreed. About 9 months in, I really just wanted to try my wedding cake. Everyone was telling me how good it was on our wedding day, so I just wanted a little taste. I eventually caved in and asked Dani if I could have a slice and she said yes. The cake wasn't that great... It wasn't because the cake itself wasn't good, but after a year in the freezer, nothing is going to taste the way it was initially. So anyways, that's my rant. Don't save the cake, it's a dumb tradition.