The OurWeddingDay Blog

Elizabeth Gilbert's sequel to her blockbuster book Eat, Pray, Love is out this month: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage.

This latest memoir is the story of Gilbet marrying Felipe (the Brazilian-born Australian lover she met in Eat, Pray, Love) for legal reasons -- both had gone through a divorce, and neither wanted to get married again, but if they wanted to be together in the same country, it was necessary.

For us, who obsess about the pageantry and romanticism of wedding planning every day, it's interesting to read the perspective of a woman who seems immune to all that -- she's marrying the man she loves, but not just because she loves him.

So it's not the swooning, romantic page-turner that we'd recommend to many brides-to-be, but it is well written and thought provoking.

Are national or state laws affecting your wedding planning?

Do you think differently about couples who choose not to get married?

Last month a Buenos Aires judgde ruled that marriage laws forbidding same -sex unions were unconstitutional.  But two Buenos Aires men who who wanted to marry still found it difficult to find a city official to marry them, so they traveled to the far south to Argentina and got married, historically becoming the first married same-sex couple in Latin America.

The grooms are Alejandro Freyre and Jose Maria Di Bello, and you can check out the story along with a video here.

Congratulations Alejandro and Jose!

"We want the government to provide employment and health care to the families of single women, and scholarships to their children," says one of the many Nepalese women fighting a government incentive that offers a $650 incentive to marry.

Check it out: Hundreds of single women, defined in Nepal as widows, divorcees, women whose husbands are missing, and unmarried women above the age of 35, marched on the streets of Kathmandu protesting the "government- sponsored dowry" that they say has treated them as commodities.

Emotions can run high for all involved throughout the wedding planning stages, right through the ceremony and reception.  That not news, but more and more lately we hear about brides who are pressured in all sorts of ways from friends and family on the "political implications" of their wedding.

Here is a post from the popular lefty blog Jezebel, about how conservatives supposedly don't even want heterosexual feminists to get married.  Included in it is a cached post from right-wing blog NRO that "mysteriously disappeared" shortly after being uploaded, which attacks feminist blogger Jessica Valenti for getting married because she is a feminist activist.

Right now marriage laws are changing all over the country to be either more or less inclusive, as you and your guests are fully aware.  Jezebel is known to over-react and over-simplify things, and NRO is known to be judgemental and nasty, so we're just using this as an imperfect example.  But it begs the questions: Should politics affect your wedding planning decisions at all?  Do your guests have the right to discuss them with you?  Is anyone owed an explanation?

Has politics become part of your wedding?