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i thee dread
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i thee dread
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i thee dread
Blushing Bride
It's like rain on your wedding day…or the moon, anyway. An unfortunate woman in Chiavari, Italy is suing the dressmaker who made her wedding gown, claiming that faulty workmanship led to the gown literally falling apart at the altar during her 2006 wedding. Said her lawyer, "She was left extremely embarrassed because the stitching of her dress came apart at the altar, slid down and revealed her bottom to the whole congregation." The bride (incidentally, now separated) is seeking forty grand in "moral and financial" damages. [UPI]
i thee dread
The Modern Wedding Ceremony: Full Of Patriarchal Pitfalls!
Perhaps diamond rings are "profoundly anti-feminist," but what about those other deeply entrenched wedding traditions? Where did those come from and are they secretly evil? Mental Floss has done a round-up of 8 common rites of marriage and boy, is it informative. Apparently brides didn't start wearing white until the sassy Queen Victoria "wore a pale gown trimmed in orange blossoms for her 1840 wedding to her first cousin, Prince Albert." After that, the adoring commoners copied her, and thus a tradition was born. But beyond that, most of the old school ceremonial stuff does have profoundly anti-feminist origins. Particularly patriarchal: your father giving you away. More »
i thee dread
Can't Afford Your Dream Wedding? Take Out A Bridal Loan!
April marks the fourth straight month of job losses in the United States, so what better way to cheer yourself up than to take out a massive wedding loan to finance the princess fantasy of your dreams! Those fuddy-duddy finance nerds at The Street want to rain on your wedding parade, though; they point out that taking out a wedding loan is a fucking terrible idea. "While getting a wedding loan may seem like a good way to bridge any shortfall a couple has, it's one of the biggest financial mistakes they can make," says writer Jeffery Strain. "There is nothing worse than starting off married life tens of thousands of dollars in debt, especially if student loans and other debt is also being brought into the marriage." More »
i thee dread
Divorce Via Chanting? Not In Maryland!
The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled this week that the Islamic practice of talaq violates a woman's right to due process in the state. Talaq is the practice (and in Pakistan, the law) that allows men to divorce their wives by saying "I divorce thee" three times. Maryland resident Irfan Aleem had moved to the D.C. area in 1985 with his wife, Farah, to work for the World Bank and raise a family. When she filed for divorce in Maryland in 2003, he one-upped her by heading to the Pakistani embassy and performing talaq, thereby divorcing her under Pakistani law, under which she had signed a marriage contract agreeing to a $2,500 divorce settlement in 1980 when she was 18. Since his divorce, he moved back to Pakistan and has been denying his wife financial support. The Maryland court said: More »
i thee dread
Maybe A Pregnant Bride Is A Symbol Of Hope
Dear Jamie Lynn Spears, Angelina Jolie and other unmarried moms-to-be: Tracey Wilkinson feels your pain. According to today's Telegraph, the 31-year-old opened a store in Chiswik, west London called Expectant Bride. There, one can find a full range of wedding dresses designed to accommodate the growing belly of a pregnant woman. Wilkinson, mother of two, explains: "I got married when I was seven months pregnant and found it very difficult getting a maternity bridal dress to fit. You can't just wear a large sized normal dress as you look like you're wearing a tent. The dresses I sell look like a normal bridal gown but they are discreetly made to fit a bump." Plus, she claims her business is "doing really well." But Anne Widdecombe, a Member of Parliament, says: "I think this shop is an extremely sad sign of the times." But isn't a knocked up bride a symbol of hope? Because at least she's getting married? Something about a pregnant bride says, "We're going to try and make this work." More »
till dementia do us part
What Do You Do When Your Spouse Becomes A Vegetable?
Readers, it's been a trying few blogdays. Mike Cherico, Eliot Spitzer, Ben Karlin...if anyone needs douchetoxification, it is we. Good thing there are still at least, like, at least four decent males in this world, one of whom was profiled in Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, so gather around and take heart in the story of Dave Kendall. Many years ago, Dave married a woman with a rare genetic disorder. For the first two decades of married life she was normal, when in her late forties she began slipping irrevocably into advanced vegetablehood. He now feeds her, moves her everywhere, and takes her to the bathroom, keeping close watch on her shits. Her mind is lodged deeply in dementia, but he keeps it as healthy and active as he can, quizzing her on basic arithmetic and forcing her to play Bingo with him. The better he treats her, the longer she lives. "On a computer bulletin board recently, Dave heard of a woman who lived 30 years with Huntington's," the story writes. "By the end, she weighed 44 pounds." More »
i thee dread
What Does The 'Perfect' Bride Look Like?
A story on Newsweek may make those uninitiated with the "Bridezilla" phenomenon a bit, well, flabbergasted and dismayed. Take Noelle Nicolai. Nicolai, 24, got engaged in early January and says that no one has asked her about her future plans or honeymoon; everyone just wants to know what she'll look like on her wedding day. She has caved into the pressure of "aesthetic obsession" and now has a to-do list that includes teeth whitening, facials, waxings, hair treatments, tanning, creams and cleaners for her skin and a retainer to realign her teeth. She also plans to lose 12 pounds, even though she is thin and has a BMI of 20. There are, Pat Wingert and Sarah Elkins write, 1,350 wedding books for brides in print. (On TV, there are shows like Bridezillas, Platinum Weddings, Rich Bride, Poor Bride, Buff Brides, Bulging Brides and My Big Fat Fabulous Wedding.) The "standard" for weddings these days? "Red carpet-worthy good looks." Except! Guess what, ladies? You're not on the red carpet. A wedding is not an awards show. A bride is not a celebrity. More »
I Thee Dread
Subversive artist Tobias Wong, who's made 24K gold pills "so your shit will sparkle" and mittens for smokers, has now designed a "Killer Engagement Ring." The diamond is mounted upside down, so that the sharp edge is pointing out. The point can cut skin down to the bone or be used to scratch a message on hard surfaces like cars and windows. In a word: Want. [BoingBoing]
Subversive artist Tobias Wong, who's made 24K gold pills "so your shit will sparkle" and mittens for smokers, has now designed a "Killer Engagement Ring." The diamond is mounted upside down, so that the sharp edge is pointing out. The point can cut skin down to the bone or be used to scratch a message on hard surfaces like cars and windows. In a word: Want. [BoingBoing]
i thee dread
Smug, Long-Married Couples Sound Boring As Shit
This New York Times article about reinventing "date night" for old marrieds reminds me of a scene in the Tom Perrotta book Little Children. One of the peripheral characters, a painfully high strung and judgmental helicopter mom named Mary Ann, brags to the other mothers at the playground that she and her husband have sex once a week like clockwork, and always on Tuesdays. And what a shocker, the Times thinks this kind of super-regimented romance is bad for your union! Instead of giving the obvious emotional reasons why this is bad, they drop some science instead: trying new things revs up your brain chemistry. More »
hells bells
Settle For Mr. "Just OK" -- While Your "Marital Value Is Still At Its Peak!"
Why It's OK To Settle For Mr. Good Enough. Sounds like the sorta assertion that might get the readers talking/chatting/generating the old ad revenue, eh? Well that's a story in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly by a single mom (Lori Gottlieb, pictured) who dares to advance the iconoclastic argument that Rachel would have been better if she'd just married the orthodontist. I'm not kidding! She ACTUALLY POSES THE QUESTION: "Do we feel confident that she'll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames." Oh, and forget searching for Mr. Big; as Gottleib points out, "Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?) More »
i thee dread
The Older The Love Affair, The More Annoying The Man
When your man sings along to Rihanna during car rides do you seriously consider dumping him?* If so, you're totally normal, according a new study out of the University of Michigan. Apparently (and not surprisingly), the longer a couple are together, the more "irritating and demanding" they seem to become. The study, which focused on more than 800 subjects, not only found that partners perceive one another more negatively as time goes on, but that children and friends become less irksome. (People weed out more demanding friends over the years, and kids, of course, eventually fly the coop.) But the group reporting the most negative relationships overall? People in their 20s and 30s. More »
i thee dread
Marriage Is The New Prozac, Unless You're Not Getting Laid
More from that Time magazine cover package about modern love: Being married is awesome. Just ask Miriam Kamin: Kamin went through some tough experiences: endometriosis, a divorce, single parenting. Then last year she got married, and now everything is A-OK! "I've struggled with depression for most of my life," she says. "Yet... I'm not on medication right now. I had no idea marriage was supposed to be this much fun." Is marriage the new Prozac? For some. For others, it's like joining a convent. Carrie Jones tells the Daily Mail she hasn't had sex with her husband in four years, and she doesn't want to. "It's a sort of 'Frigid Jones' Diary'," she says. More »
i thee dread
Will Your Marriage Last? Vintage Chart Tells All!
An Associate Professor of Social Economy at Bryn Mawr named Hornell Hart, created a chart — printed in the October 1927 issue of Popular Science — which predicts one's chances for marital happiness using "a new scientific method." The chart (pictured after the jump) is based on the age of the groom and the age of the bride. Hart used "four authoritative investigations" — a study of 100 divorce cases; confidential statements from 1000 women, 116 of whom said their marriages were unhappy; an investigation of "child marriages"; and lastly, an analysis of 1000 marriages done by Hart himself — 500 of which "had reached such difficulties that they had appealed to the Domestic Relations Court." From all of this information, Hart made a graph that predicts the outcome of a marriage based on the ages of the bride and groom. More »
i thee dread
