The Wedding Days

The couple will wake up on the first day the Grooms Wedding Day. They will be living in their respective mothers houses and they will prepare alone for the day ahead. The couple will in all reality be extremely glad that this day is with them as at last they can see the light at the end of the tunnel. After this day and the next have passed they will be able to escape the clutches of their mothers and get down to trying to forget all the troubles and traumas that have been with them for the last two months of buildup.

The first part to the process is the praying to the gods. This will be done individually or together as again dictated by those in command. As for the Engagement party the prayers for a happy life will be together, either at a temple that lies at the top of one of the mothers house or at a temple suitably brokered by the Matchmaker.

The next and most important step is to attend the local court to sign the wedding forms and complete the official part of getting married. The court chosen will typically be in the residential area of the grooms house as the bride is soon to become part of the grooms immediate family and thus disconnected from hers.

The official part is a simple affair that involves only the couple and two witnesses. The families do not typically attend this part, the witnesses being two close friends chosen for the occasion.

The signing of the forms takes a long time with many duplicates and stampings to be rung up and then a speech made by the Judge in charge. The speech itself is a simpler version of the Western Style Ceremony and is over before one can say, "lets get married". An hour of form filling, a quick speech later and the couple are officially married and in theory could dispense with all the traumas of the days ahead. Could they but take the silence and hatred of the families for the years to come.

Next step and it is time for the bride to go to the Wedding Shop. To collect her dresses and to make-up for the evening. The bride will attend the shop with a close friend who will act like a bridesmaid for the rest of the occasion. The groom meanwhile and depending upon his character will either be biting his fingernails or having a few drinks with his friends.

Three Oclock in the afternoon and the bride will have finished her three-hour make-up session at the photograph shop. The mothers will be away having their own selves made up to the nines and will probably spend longer at it than the bride herself again the "face" of all concerned taking priority.

After make-up the bride will don her previously chosen first wedding dress of white in color and have packed the other two dresses for later use. She will then work her way to the grooms home and go to the chosen waiting room. There she will sweat plentifully and be attended to by family members and people with good wishes. The groom at this moment is most likely continuing the process of drinking his way through the alcohol that is readily available, having himself turned up at the house in his suit.

Sitting in the waiting room in the large, uncomfortable and sticky dress the brides mother will soon appear to place on the bride a large amount of gold jewelry. Gold jewelry is a sign of wealth and status and so the more the bride is wearing when she makes her appearance the better luck that will go with her in the future. Luck or something else similar! But the aim of the game at this point is to try and pile on as much gold as can be possibly imagined and gold that the mother has bought and saved for since her daughter was first born.

The typical bride will exit the house for the party with an approximate twenty bracelets on each arm, ten heavy gold necklaces pulling her neck down and various broaches and ankle bracelets to finish off. If she was not sweating before then she certainly is now. The groom will have his fair share of gold wealth, not to the same extent but heavy and gold items he will have on one hand at least.

When the Bride and Groom sit themselves down at the wedding table not much will be said. No guest or family member will acknowledge their entrance and in essence the prime purpose for the guests will be to eat as much as they possibly can in the time allotted. Eat they will and ignore the couple for the next hour or until it is time for the bride to change her dress. It sounds strange but the bride has to wear three dresses during the evening. The white one to start the proceedings off in and then a change to a slinkier and more casual one to greet the guests in and then somewhere before the end of the party another one will be worn.

To change the dress takes a little time to achieve and allot of effort. It will take a little time to do, as she has to remove all of the bracelets and necklaces, remove the white dress and put on the new one. Maybe in pink or green or some other bright color and then she will have to replace all of the gold before making a silent reappearance at her table one that has supposedly gone unnoticed by the guests. Achieving this without having disturbed one strand of the well laid hair on top of her head or cracked or damaged the heavy layers of make-up that have been piled on previously.

At this point the now merry husband and sweating wife will have to tour around every table and make a little speech of happiness and to share a toast with all guests at that table. The husband in good style: as he sinks from being merry to drunk out of his tree and with the new wife trying not to trip over the dress that drags the road behind her. Thirty tables later and needing the toilet badly they will reseat themselves and continue to pick at the courses that are being thrown at them.

The married couple will, most likely, only pick at the many courses on offer. They will be too nervous and strung up to enjoy all of the delights that are being thrown at them in quick order. The groom will out of nervousness or due to the fact that the other males in the family force him to, be drinking non-stop. If at this stage he is not drunk then he will be well on the way to being so. Regardless, nobody will notice the couples lack of interest in the offerings or the groom sliding under the table. Free food is being offered and so all attention is on the plates around them.

Half an hour later and it is time for the bride to change into the final dress and bid a warm goodbye to the three hundred odd guests and their families. Time to say thank you to all of the food-eaters whom in the last two hours have made up for any and every meal that they ever missed in the last year. The bride now in yet another slinky and stylish dress will prop up her "happy" husband at one end of the marquee, with a plate of candy and cigarettes at her side and one of the large pictures of the couple on a frame on the other. As the guests leave in dribs and drabs they will say words of "good luck" and liberally help themselves to the free sweats and cigarettes that are on offer before disappearing into the night. Full and happy and hopefully with the grooms mothers face having increased in their minds.

And that is the first day over with. The guests gone and the catering company tidying up their side of things, it remains for all concerned to tidy up the Grooms House. The Bride will be actively involved in the clean up process as not only has she to now show her mother in law that she is worthy, but also show her husband that she was the right choice after all. The cleanup process can be a long and lengthy one and includes scraping scraps off plates to cleaning the stairs of split drink.

The husband meanwhile will be helping the clean-up process by keeping the remaining male members of his family entertained and liberally supplied with drinks until they fall off their chairs and have to be shipped home.

Finally, after everything has been cleaned up and the husband is snoring away it is time for the Bride to disappear back to her own house, helped by her friend or bridesmaid. She will return alone and retire to bed exhausted and whilst trying to shut out the thoughts of having to go through an exact replica of the days events at her house the following day.

The brides day is not worth repeating here. It is an exact re-run of the Grooms Day. There will be many guests, singers and fireworks, she will have to change her clothes and wear lots of Gold Jewelry and her husband will most likely spend the whole time trying to keep awake or attempting to stay on his chair. At the end of the party the clean-up process must again be observed.

Of course the couple can not leave early, the husband to sleep and the wife to beat him around the head in shame. No, it is a duty of the newly married couple to help clean up the mess. The wife: to once again do everything from taking out the trash, to cleaning tables and floors. And again it is the husbands responsibility to help the other remaining males to reduce the quantity of alcohol that as been left over from the evening.

It can be another three or so hours before silent permission is given for the bride and groom to leave or withdraw alone to a room! If they have the energy remaining they will both set off for the Grooms House. If they are utterly exhausted and the bride needs a shower after all the hard work of cleaning up then they may stay the night at her parents house.

The next day all is nearly over and apart from returning the wedding dresses, relocating the wedding albums and large frames there is not much else to do. The couple are married and that is that and apart from wishing that they had enough money to go on a honeymoon there life together has started for better or for worse.

Culture still plays a massive part in how they will live their future lives. They should in all reality move in with the husbands family, it being his responsibility and right to live in that house, as he will be paying his parents bills anyway when they no longer earn. If the couple do live in their own house or apartment it could be quite possible that one mother or other will keep one key herself and will visit often on surprise check-ups to make sure that all is as it should be and that "face" is being maintained. It will be expected that the bride will fall pregnant within a very short period of time, otherwise she will have failed in her duty and lose respect within the family circle. Remembering of course that it will be all her fault as the "son" can do not wrong.

Culture and traditional values equals control and although the couple are married and supposedly capable of looking after themselves, it is not typical for them to be allowed to do so. Both sets of parents will keep tight reign on the married couples future and unless they are strong and lack any feelings for the resultant disaster they have no choice but to accept the future chosen for them.

Should the couple decide to break bonds and live there own lives, recrimination and hatred will be with them for a very long time - as given by those insulted. So for the most part couples tend to remain under the tight thumb of the parents and they tend to accept it as "life". They will settle down into the life lived at the grooms parents house, the wife will become an integral part of life in that house and take over many of the functions of cooking and cleaning as dictated by her husbands mother. And slowly with time as the parents get older, the Husbands finances will be directed towards his parents rather than towards himself and his wife.

He will give to his parents as much money as they ask for regardless of the low financial income that he himself will then have for his family.

The couple are though married and in the style and manner that culture has dictated. Regardless of how the Western World may view the process and what others may think about "face", it is tradition that comes into play. It may seem that stress is the inherent player of the process but if that is what tradition suggests, then it is not for the outside world to reason why.

So a happy and fruitful life they will have. That is if the groom has remembered to fulfil some of his filial duties prior to taking his wife to their new home. He must, before they move in have emptied his room out of all furniture and fittings. Before they sleep in their new home all must be knew. Yes, all the furniture from the mattress to the toilet roll holder must be brand spanking new and unused before that day. If he did not know about this before then he better get himself down to that very happy bank manager and get a bigger loan. It is without exception deemed "bad luck", to spend the first night together on an already used bed and to place clothes in a chest of drawers that has a scratch on it.

And finally, he should have prepared the six changes of clothing that tradition once again states that he must prepare. Hopefully before the wedding his mother has helped him to choose six full sets of clothes for his future wife as this he must do! Together and armed with the brides vital dimensions, they should have spent a large amount of money at the most expensive shops is town. The end result being, six pairs of shoes, six tops and six of everything else for the bride to slide into when waking up on the day of her knew and married life.