I Do but I Don’t: Why the Way We Marry Matters (review)

This sassy, surprising book belongs to several genres: part memoir, part advice book, part social analysis; its author aims high and imaginatively to accomplish several goals. As I read it, Wicoff, a professional writer and editor currently balancing those responsibilities with the duties of raising two young children, shares quite a bit about her own engagement and wedding in order to help other couples have a more positive experience of legally becoming wife and husband. She argues that the way we marry matters and aims to help individuals set the most equitable, satisfying tone for their future life together. Toward those dual purposes, Wicoff dissects the contemporary pattern of middle- to upper-middle-class American weddings and offers proposals for how certain rituals might be modified.

The book’s chapters proceed from “The Proposal” to “The Ring,” “The Dress,” “The W.C. [Wedding Consumer],” “Beauty Day,” and of course “The Wedding,” recounting in a humorous, sometimes even hilarious, and almost always brutally honest fashion Wicoff’s own march from happily coupled woman to fiancée to bride. In addition to detailing the author’s emotions in various situations and things she wishes she had and had not done along the way, Wicoff often anchors the anecdotes she has gathered from women like herself with statistics about the frightening explosion of the “one-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year” (!) wedding industry (xvi). She also reports about the proliferation of wedding advice books, magazines, and web sites and their lists of things to do; at weddingchannel.com, there are 124 items, for instance.

In response to the knowledge Wicoff acquires through her own experience and her research, she puts forth various concrete suggestions for how individuals might make different choices, choices that the author implies would be more feminist or, more accurately, more postfeminist. One such concrete proposal arises out of Wicoff’s embarrassment and indeed frustration that, after several years of cohabiting with her partner and feeling certain about her own and his desire to spend the rest of their lives together, she finds herself waiting, craving, pining, even whining for him to propose to her. “Feminism might have taught me that as a woman I didn’t need marriage,” but it never taught that marriage “was mine to bestow upon a man” (19). A new procedure should exist in a postfeminist world: “when a couple is ready to get married they agree on a month during which each will propose to the other. During Proposal Month, both partners have the chance to propose and be proposed to” (56).

At this point, I am assuming that many WSQ readers of this review are developing concerns, perhaps protests. Two that I’m anticipating and that I have space to address involve whether I Do but I Don’t is a feminist book and what it has to do with the topic of this special issue, Witness. I feel more certain about this second question, so I’ll take it up first.

In my view, this book effectively and poignantly witnesses to a contemporary U.S. American woman’s participation in a ritual that for various reasons—many of which Wicoff includes in her analysis—has achieved an economic and social prominence in recent years that it simply did not have in decades prior, perhaps ever. The dimensions of this prominence in financial terms and in the psyches of a large swath of my co-citizens, especially co-citizens who might consider themselves feminists or postfeminists, were mainly unknown to me. While I found the general phenomenon of how “one” marries these days and many of its individual ritualistic steps shocking and often regrettable—does the author truly believe that “bachelorette” is an important sign of progress? (265)—I feel genuinely grateful to Wicoff for making me aware of them. For one thing, she’s schooled me about topics I’ll need to add to my Sex, Gender, and Society course.

Let me...