Lena Dunham’s Thoughts on Marriage Will Make You Think Beyond White Dresses
Ever since we saw Lena Dunham eating cupcakes in the bathtub we just knew she got us. She’s body positive, has killer style and she hired the freaking President’s daughter to be her intern. If that’s not a baller move we don’t know what is!
According to her article, he didn’t respond the way she expected which lead her to rethink her big thoughts about the big day.
Here are some highlights from the thoughtful article that you just might able to relate to
Our thoughts about weddings change over time: Like a lot of us, Lena used to pretend to be a bride as a little kid as proven by the drawing posted with her article/on her Instagram. This makes sense when you think about it, fancy dress+crown = kind of a natural extension of playing princess. But she says this rosy ideal changed when she went to a wedding and was appalled to see the bride “being handed off from father to husband like a doll at a yard sale,” which made her feel like the whole thing was “patriarchal, outdated, and terrifying.”
Men think about weddings differently, if they think about them at all: While Lena assumed that Jack would be stoked when he realized they could get engaged she soon realized that marriage wasn’t even on his radar. “His entire life has not been shaped by the desire for or the rejection of the fluffy white dress” she writes. Women are socialized to make marriage more of a priority than men are (thanks, Patriarchy!) so that might explain why some dudes give it little to no thought most of the time. Communication in your relationship is important and if you want to get married you should discuss it openly so you always know where your partner stands.
Marriage isn’t the main event: Lena hypothesizes that little girls fantasize about getting married because it is the first event they can fathom where they’ll be the center of attention. “My desire for a wedding predated my ability to imagine any other kind of positive attention for myself,” she says and then mentions that now as an adult she has lots of positive events that aren’t related to her getting married. It’s important to take time and celebrate your accomplishments that don’t involve a ring so that marriage seems less like a main event of your life.
You can change your mind: Lena closes the article by saying “I like admitting that my feminism and femininity are not fully formed or in perfect harmony.” She says that thinking about marriage made her realize that “it’s nearly impossible to detangle personal preference from social conditioning,” meaning that some of us wrestle between what we want to do and what we think we should be doing. The moral of this whole story is you don’t have to know exactly how you feel about marriage but you’d do yourself a favor if you kept the conversation open.
Is marriage outdated or just right? Tell us in the comments!
(Photos via Jamie McCarthy/Getty + @lenadunham, )
