My Big Fat Interfaith Wedding
Baldur's Gate 3, waiting on the edge of a cliff to announce new projects, and the unending misery of wedding planning
Hello readers!
What have I been up to recently? Well, I am getting married in late October and it is taking up simply every single second of my time. But more on that later.
Firstly, the big writing project that I’ve tackled last month was this review of Baldur’s Gate 3, which is also kind of a review of Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Despite my criticisms, I love this game a lot!
The fiddliness of positioning, sightlines, spell slots, and all the other rigmarole that you have to pay attention to in combat lies in stark contrast to the ease and delightfulness of the narrative gameplay. Especially when you’re just chitchatting with the other characters in your party — here, the game is not just fun, but a joyful expression of creativity. It’s here that Baldur’s Gate 3 really embraces what makes D&D so compelling: playing pretend. The characters often comment on the events of the plot, and also ask you, the player, what you think about things. As you react to the world, it fills in around you in your imagination, bolstered by the excellent character writing and voice acting from your companions. Astarion in particular is a delight, a vampire’s spawn that has embraced his newfound freedom so hard that he’s become Hedonism Bot from Futurama.
As I’ve told the story of my enormous, complicated wedding to people, they have had one simple question: why don’t you elope? I’m sure they’re asking me this because when I’m telling these stories, I am in a state of stress that does not feel survivable. Yes, eloping would take a load off my mind. It would also not resolve the problem I am continuously having in my wedding planning, which is everyone being mad at me, all the time.
I have been warned, repeatedly, that weddings are a load of bullshit. You barely remember the day; everything is ridiculously expensive; the emotional baggage of having a wedding makes all your relatives lose their minds. So far, all these things have come true for me. And yet, my husband to be and I see some value in having this celebration, despite the level of grief it’s giving us.
My soon to be husband, David, comes from a religious Jewish family. I come from a distinctly non-religious family, and a mixed family at that. I don’t know that we’ll ever completely gel, once we join our families together. My parents are complicated people, and both my parents and David’s parents made their lives very deliberately. Even though we clash, and keep clashing over almost every detail of the ceremony—the size of it, the level of religiosity, the expense—each new conflict only shows me how much we have in common.
As a kid, I always knew I wanted a Hindu wedding ceremony, and so far the path to getting there has been extremely complicated. My mother identifies as an atheist Hindu, enjoying a kind of secular existence that, to her, does not feel in conflict with celebrating the festivals she remembers from her youth. I wanted a Hindu wedding not because I am particularly religious—even at my most optimistic, the idea of an actual, for real, god seems too idealistic—but because of the way my mother’s face softens when she talks about her brief childhood in India. Religion, to me, is mostly about honoring the history I share with a vast network of blood relations; it’s what connects me to the story of my mother making lanterns for Deepavali out of dough, the scent of it still fresh in her nostrils as she passes out sweets to her American neighbors.
On our last trip to Los Angeles, where we’re having the wedding, I asked David if he believes in God. He told me that Judaism for him isn’t about an exact, specific religious belief. It’s more about being a part of a wave of history, knowing that your family has observed these rituals for many hundreds of years, and that you honor their memory and their sacrifice by completing the same rituals as well. I’m sure to a lot of people, that feels like an undue level of responsibility. For me, it’s a comfort, knowing that my mother, and her mother, and her mother all looked towards the same stories, the same ideas, to give them a lifeline when the world was unfair to them.
In the worst moments of wedding planning, I wish I hadn’t done this at all. I don’t know how anyone survives this: all the people who seem to think that your wedding has to be all about them; the relatives who choose this time to air all their greivances with you; the sheer number of things that have to be done; chasing down addresses for people that are distantly related to you but will be extremely mad if they’re not invited only to discover, a month before the wedding, that you were given the wrong information; the lingering feeling that because you’re getting married, all of this is your fault. My parents got married at the Judge’s house, their only witnesses my aunt and her husband. My grandmother made my mom’s wedding dress, and they don’t wear wedding rings. Doing that would certainly be simpler.
But as my mom showed me the couple of pictures she has from her wedding, she shook her head. “I wish we had gotten married at the court house, at least,” she said. “We could at least visit it, then.”
I want to have wedding pictures to show my children, a wedding ring to wear, the shards from a glass that my husband will step on to keep forever. I want to be in that wave of history, to crest and crash on the shore, envoloping my family but also keeping them afloat.
I will have some things to announce… soon. That’s all I can say at the moment, but I promise that there is a boulder gaining momentum as it rolls downhill and that it will all result in something.
Thank you so much to all my readers, and especially to my paid subscribers. You’re truly keeping the lights on.
Best,
Gita