Something old, something new

Seeing myself as a modern young adult who's more 'banana' (yellow outside, white inside) than not, I thought I would never succumb when the elders force me to comply with traditions, or at the very least, I'll put up a good, long fight. A wedding being more a communal than personal event, well, the 'rules and regulations' start coming in..

To my surprise, I find myself meekly complying and quite eager to please, in the process learning about why certain things are the way they are.

Take the saga of my wedding date, for example. Originally, we wanted to get married in September, but the venue we want to book is full. So we moved the date to August, which also means that coincidentally a few mutual friends & relatives will be in town to attend. Awesome, problem solved.

The moment we present the August date to my side of the family though, several relatives protested. "It's the Chinese ghost month!"they say. "People won't attend your party, or they will think bad about your marriage." Now, one side of me feels, "Oh screw that, my family and I are Christian, we don't care about those superstitious Chinese beliefs."(Surprisingly, though, my mom is also vehement about not having it in the ghost month.. even being a devout Christian, it's difficult to shake off cultural beliefs huh..)

What made me change my mind was when one auntie said, "You know, we also want it to be convenient for you, and frankly we will still attend and rejoice be it ghost month or not.. but think about it, every year you're going to celebrate your wedding anniversary in that ghost month atmosphere that people associate with negativity... once off it might be okay, but year in and year out? why give people something negative to talk about?"

Hufh.. I saw the logic of the argument there and then.. To have the perception of 'inauspicious' and 'rebellious' attached to my marriage year in and year out, long after the wedding has passed, is just not worth it. A marriage should not, cannot, stand alone and the more positively people look at your marriage, the better it is for you. Not sure how to explain it.. but after all, we are what we believe, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, so why waste willpower battling people's negative beliefs? Better to have them believe positive things along with us.

Maybe it's a bit like the experiment where teachers were told certain members of the class have higher IQ than the rest of the class (though this is actually not true). The teachers believed it and started treating those supposedly 'high IQ' students differently, and at the end of the year, those students got tested and indeed had higher improvements in IQ!
(Read the article here )

Oh well, good thing we got a new date fixed (much earlier than original ><) that everyone's happy about. Interestingly, dear fiance also just got told by his army friend, not to hold the wedding in august, so these perceptions don't just affect the elderly, after all.