Customer Reviews

I Do but I Don't: Why the Way We Marry Matters

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I have conflicting feelings about this book in the vein that Wicoff feels conflicted (very much in retrospect) about the rituals of American marriage today.

On the one hand, she is a good scholar and an engaging writer when it comes to dissecting the status quo through a 21st century feminist lens. I found the chapter about engagements invaluable! She helped me to understand my own ambivalent feelings about the whole process. I've since found myself sharing several insights from the book with friends, including the notion that: as modern career women we are taught that to speak up and take charge is to assert our independence--in every arena except when it comes to getting engaged. In this realm, we exhibit independence by keeping silent and are thereby robbed of our power.

Yet as a memoir I found the story trite and I had to struggle to get through sacharine descriptions of her family, hubby Andrew, and friendships. To me, these sections were actually very status quo and whitebread, with a fair share of cloying yuppie elitism thrown in for good measure.

Wicoff would have strengthened her book by trimming much, if not all, of the memoir. I understand what she was trying to accomplish by discussing her own experience as it clashed with her feminist ideals; but since so many of her revellations are in retrospect, she is asking the reader to think outside the box in ways that she herself was unwilling to even try. She comes off as hypocritical.

The author wants to have her (wedding) cake and eat it too. She manages to boast about her more than two carat VVS emerald cut diamond platinum engagement ring (in a long chapter on why engagement rings are bad, that ends with her ceasing to wear said ring -- but getting a ruby-studded ring to wear instead), about her Vera Wang dress,letting us know that it cost more than $1700, while whining on and on about how wedding dresses are bad, about--but you get the point. She continually says 'we' feel conflicted about this and conflicted about that, while describing the feelings of a very elite group of women, who can afford to get married in a certain way (and to live in a certain way afterwards) but have been taught in college feminist classes to be feel bad about it. There were no interesting insights here about anything, much less informed discussion--just a rehashing of the view that traditional marriage is bad and must be changed (while describing her EXPENSIVE traditional marriage). I ended the book feeling very sorry for Andrew, her then fiance and now husband, but not otherwise enlightened about anything at all. And very glad that I got married (twenty-five happy years now) back in the days when you were happy to be engaged to the guy you loved, happy to get a ring (size of diamond did not matter) and happy to celebrate the day with the people you loved without spending big $$$ and thinking that "how the wedding day turned out was symbolic of your worth as a woman". (Yes, she really writes that she felt that.)

P.S. Wicoff has very strange ideas about people her parents' age, as well. I'm her mother's age and I proposed to my husband before he proposed to me, and was shocked that she makes a big deal of having to wait for the man to propose, and how unfair society is to women because the woman 'always' has to do this. I also never heard that planning the wedding was solely the bride's job-- I did't do much of my wedding planning (and did none of it alone) as my husband had older siblings who had married before and was much more into having a 'wedding' than me. I think she should be careful before she stereotypes.