My mom called tonight to voice her concern at the potential thought that we may decide to have a church wedding. It took some time to calm her down and confirm with her that no, we would not be having a church wedding. She launched into a repeated, angry rant (I’ve heard this rant at least 50 times in the last seven years) regarding my second oldest cousin, who married a woman who was born Catholic, barely practiced it, yet insisted that my cousin convert to Catholicism so that she could have her dream Catholic church wedding. What this ultimately meant for my cousin’s mom and my own mom was that neither of them could watch my cousin get married since they are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and apparently JWs cannot enter another religion’s house of worship. They sat in a car outside the church for the entire three-hour ceremony in the summer of 2007.

At the time, I wasn’t that happy about the situation. No where in the JW version of the Bible does it explicitly state that you cannot enter another religion’s church, yet the “elders” at the congregation advised both my aunt and my mom not to do it. But what annoyed me even more than this was that my cousin’s now wife completely disregarded her future mother-in-law. She didn’t care that her husband’s mother wouldn’t see them get married. It was her wedding, so she wanted it the way she wanted it (my cousin has no balls or opinion, so clearly he did not speak at all during this). At the time I thought, wow, this is just going to pave the way for a very unpleasant future relationship between my aunt and her first daughter-in-law. In the end, I predicted correctly — it’s been terrible ever since.

I can see both sides to the situation, but at the end of the day, I would never do something explicitly against what my future in-laws wanted, especially if it were something as significant as our wedding. It wouldn’t speak well to how I feel about them and “consider” their feelings, and it also doesn’t set a good precedent for future relations. Yet at the same time in this situation, I don’t have a strong feeling about a church wedding; in fact, I am more opposed to it than for it. Neither of us is particularly religious. He was baptized Christian and does nothing Christian anymore, and I believe in God and practice nothing. Having a church wedding in our case would just seem like we were being phony or trying to please his parents or grandmothers. It would certainly not please anyone on my side.