Wedding Skulls

Dear Wedding Skulls

Help! We’re planning an awesomely dark, fun gothic wedding. We’re super excited about it. But my grandmother (who’s born-again Christian uber religious) . She has a problem with the venue (our favourite club downtown), the ceremony, the dress (red corset and black skirt), the music, the invitation, EVERYTHING. She thinks we’re mocking the whole institution of marriage because our cake topper has two skeletons on it, for Cthulhu’s sake! She’s getting to my mother, who wants us to ‘tone down’ all our awesome plans! What can I do?

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Eeek. What CAN you do? It’s nice to think your relatives will be there to love and support you. But I know, just like everyone else who’s ever tried to do something remotely unusal knows, families don’t always show their support in the kindest way.

The first thing to assess when dealing with a situation like this, is to ask yourself if you’re guilty of being insensitive. Please don’t hurt me! I’m not saying you ARE being insensitive.

What I mean is – we forget about the ‘normals’. I’m so guilty of this. I live in a Manowar world; ‘Heavy Metal, or not Metal at All’. I eat, sleep, live, dance, pray, love and breathe heavy metal. I talk to my relatives about the concerts we see and the cool things we buy for our home and they just stare with this blank look of confusion. My parents understand it’s who I am, but they don’t always ‘get it’.

Sometimes we forget – because we live in our own insular world of metal – that to everyone else, WE’RE TOTALLY BONKERS. We’re the kind of people Dr. Phil should be chastising on his show, we’re the kinds of folks who only appear in mainstream media when a school gets shot up or a kid hangs himself.

That’s what your grandmother is exposed to, and she’s probably too old and too stubborn to change. My mother (a very wise woman and a huge LORDI fan, so she totally knows what she’s talking about) always says ‘you can’t force a person to change their actions. You can only change your reactions.’

We’re all guilty of bad-mouthing and picking fights with the devoutly religious and dogmatically charged, becuase many of us (CDH included) find this amusing. But this makes the situation worse – it really does. You’re not going to talk someone out of their beliefs, and you shouldn’t try. People don’t react well this this attitude – they feel attacked. And the result MIGHT be similiar to what you’re going through.

So the next time she brings up her feelings on the wedding, say something like this: “If your God exists, he’s a pretty loving, kind and fun-filled guy. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have created this amazing world just for us, and given us the capacity to love, to enjoy and to celebrate. He also wouldn’t have made us all different, so we could love, enjoy and celebrate different things.”

You could add to this statement by saying “we know we don’t see eye to eye with you on a lot of the wedding plans, grandma, but we’re really excited about our wedding plans and won’t be changing them. Please understand that we want the wedding to be a celebration of our love, and we think God will be happy with that, because he led us to each other and gave us our likes and dislikes for a reason. We’re not doing any of this stuff to deliberately get to you or mock your faith. We love you and we want you to feel comfortable at our wedding, but not at the expense of having the wedding WE want. We understand if you don’t want to come.”

Say this once, and never speak of the matter again. If she brings up the wedding again, say ‘grandma, we talked about this, remember? If any of the wedding plans bother you, we understand if you don’t want to come.” She either wants to feel okey about refusing to go because your wedding makes her uncomfortable (which is a perfectly legitimate reason) or she wants to preach – ie, the attention. Let her know the first option is open to her, but the second option is not.

Can any of my readers weigh in with their thoughts? The issue of religion and weddings and relatives is a thorny one, not easily negotiated. I’m sure our reader appreciates any further insight!