A recent piece of research showed that people are very very conservative when it comes to weddings and notably wedding proposals. I would have found this surprising were I not married myself, but as I am, I am only too aware of the fairly rigid ideas a surprising number of people hold on the whole process.
Firstly there was the fact that Ms P proposed to me. This, according to the survey and the reactions of many people is incomprehensible. "But it's not a leap year," people would say, baffled as to how else this could happen. To be honest, until we started telling people, I hadn't thought that there was anything odd about this apparently transgressive flouting of tradition. Much more was to come: there is always someone who is going to be flabbergasted that you have failed to incorporate into your wedding some apparently indispensable custom. I don't think our wedding was particularly 'whacky', but it managed to confuse many people with its myriad breaks with perceived tradition.
I have been careful to say 'perceived', as tradition is really not as rigid as people like to think. Christmas is a very good example of this. Almost every single aspect of what is popularly defined as Christmas tradition is usually less than 100 years old and largely no older than 150 years. Everyone knows that the Christmas tree was brought to Britain by Prince Albert in the 19th century, but that is a long established tradition compared to eating turkey, which no one would have considered doing before the 1950s. Neither are these things universal: ask any child anywhere how their Christmas presents arrive and you will find a startling amount of variation. This just serves to highlight the purpose of most traditions: they are personal or family habits that we find it comforting to repeat at certain times. Such 'family' habits are often repeated at national level, probably because they help us get comfortable with our rulers, but even national traditions are easily changed. Modern British Christmas tradition includes the queen's speech, but this has only been on television as long as the telly has been around, granted before then it was on the radio, but only for about 30 years.
I'm a big fan of some traditions: I think wearing a tie with a suit is a good tradition based on the fact that not doing so looks a bit shit*; I'm all for Speaker's Corner and Black Rod and MPs not addressing each other directly, because such traditions preserve the conceptual framework of our democracy; I'm quite into pageantry in general, as it gives a framework to national community and is generally harmless. Many of the things associated with the official duties of the royal family have both a high amount pageantry and a large amount of tradition associated with them, mainly because if they didn't we'd all be wondering what the point of the royal family is. However, just because the royal family follow many arcane traditions doesn't mean the rest of us should. In the 19th century, the king of Thailand decided he wanted to take mistresses openly, and being the king, he just got on with it. Men in the Thai aristocracy thought that this was rather a smart idea and copied him. Middle class Thai men decided they wanted in on the act, but they couldn't afford to keep mistresses, so they just took prostitutes. Thus prostitution became normalised in Thailand, allowing thousands of creepy European men to justify their exploitation of Thai women because "it's tradition."
Tradition is not and never should be an excuse for unacceptable behaviour: no one ever says they're racist because it's tradition, but they might defend racist traditions. Traditions do not have to have a rationale, they do not have to be rational, but they should be essentially harmless. Most importantly in my view, traditions should never be compulsory and they are certainly not universal. What I find most astonishing is that a number of 'traditions' persist well into the 21st century, long after we would assume they'd have passed into obscurity. Turn on the television at this time of year and you'll see loads of mildly offensive adverts in which some poor woman works herself to the bone whilst her ungrateful family sit around watching shit on the telly. I get angry at the lazy assumptions of the creatives who came up with these adverts, but maybe once again it's me who's the oddball. Maybe most families do consider such massive gender stereotyping to be the norm, or tradition. I do not deny that 'traditionally' it was the case that women did all of the domestic work in households, but that is only because 'traditionally' men were working down the mines for twelve hours a day. Given that one of those traditions is well and truly dead, I would expect the corresponding one to be as dead.
Of course now I'm drifting into tradition as societal norms, but unfortunately the two are deeply intertwined and often get confused. A lot of this comes back to image making, and the ideas we present to each other as a society. If we reinforce bad stereotypes and feed them back to ourselves as tradition, then we allow ourselves lazy and thoughtless excuses for poor behaviour. Equally, if we actively question the stereotypes we are presented with, we might arrive at a better set of traditions. Maybe if we saw more Christmas adverts where the family prepare Christmas dinner together, we might not find it so odd. Maybe if we saw any adverts/films/TV programs where a woman proposing was not presented as hilariously freakish, we might not get quite so hung up on some of the ridiculous wedding 'traditions' that people seem to care so much about.
* at least that is my opinion. You might be perfectly happy dressing like a used car salesman.
