Weird Things We've Encountered 5: Western Wedding Games

Continuing on from my previous post about Chinese door games, which take place the morning of the wedding and involve only the bridal party (and in particular, the wanton humiliation of the groomsmen), the Western side of things traditionally involves games played after you're married. As you likely know, these take place during the reception and seem to try to involve as many single people at your wedding as possible.

We hadn't really considering either Chinese or Western games at our wedding, purely because it sounded like way too much additional planning and/or thinking. Surprisingly, it was our wedding DJs who first mentioned the Western games to us, providing us with a long, long list of games to play at our wedding. With the lone exception of the bouquet toss (which we aren't doing), every single one of the games listed is horrifyingly awkward.

The one that Blake finds the funniest is to get people paired off (single or otherwise) in a slow-dance and wedge a balloon between them. The first pair to pop their balloon wins, where the awkward part is that you can only pop the balloon by applying pressure with your bodies. And unless one of you has a pin hidden in your belt, it generally involves lots and lots of hilarious-looking wiggling.

The one that I find the most awkward and the absolute worst is perhaps one of the most popular - the garter. I've only seen it in movies (as of the time of this post), never in person, and I remember wondering what on earth was going on. It seemed a lot weird to me that the single ladies at the reception get to catch a flying bunch of flowers while the single guys get to catch something that I'd been wearing on my thigh! I shudder at the thought, really. Not for me, noooooooope.

Most of the games seem to focus on just unmarried singles or just married couples, which is another thing that bothers me. A lot of the games seem to be about pairing people up if you're not paired up already, or the expectation that you will be paired up in the future and won't you be lucky then? I'm all about potentially embarrassing people for a good-natured laugh when appropriate, but I don't like perpetuating the stereotype that everyone has to be with someone to be happy. Ironic given that we're talking about our wedding, but just because it works for us doesn't mean it works (or should work) for anyone else. I could be reading too much into this but it really does make me uncomfortable, probably because I know a lot of people are made to feel like shit just because they're single, even if they might want to be.

As it is, Blake and I find it pretty weird that the DJ is the one suggesting these wedding games to us, and all the games strike us as archaic or perpetuating traditions with which we don't relate. We get that they'll be funny and that's cool and all, but we still don't want to do them. We will set up other things to keep people entertained, but at the end of the day there will be music and alcohol. What else do you really need?

Weird Things We've Encountered 4: Chinese Door Games

Most of the other posts I've made in the WTWE series have been relatively interesting and about certain things you wouldn't necessarily know if you weren't also planning a civil ceremony in Australia in place of your original plan to do it in Singapore. This one, though, does kind of shine the spotlight on the utter weirdness of traditional wedding "games", with which I'm sure most of you have had some experience.

Let me touch briefly on Chinese wedding games. They're called "door games", which are typically played between the bridesmaids and the groomsmen when the groom comes to pick up the bride to whisk her off to the ceremony. It's a lot of teasing and silliness where the bridesmaids try to prevent the groom from entering the bride's home, where the bride, fully dressed and ready to go, is stashed away in a room somewhere.

It's a way for the groom to demonstrate how committed he and his groomsmen are to getting past the "trials" and "tests" set forth by the bridesmaids to be able to take the bride. It's also a way for the bridesmaids to demonstrate how much they love their bride by not letting her go without requiring the suitor prove his worthiness to them.

The games themselves are anything from doing x number of push-ups to waxing the groomsmen's legs. A pretty common game is to make the groom eat something super sweet, something super spicy, super sour, and super bitter; this is meant to represent how a marriage can be all 4 of those things and to see if the groom can stomach them. An acquaintance's bridesmaids had set up the front lawn of her house as the set of a quiz show, where the final prize was the bride.

That game they play with the business card on Clueless? Suck and blow? Where you have to pass a business card from one person to the next using only your mouth? Another popular one.

And of course there's always bringing a hoard of hongbao (the Chinese red envelopes) stuffed with cash and just buying the bride off the bridesmaids. Lazier and a bit more capitalist, sure, but efficient.

Things can get overboard really easily, and you're only limited by the imagination and commitment of each member of the bridal party. It's essentially the Chinese version of the hens' or bucks' party, just on a smaller and (usually) less debauched scale. I do think it's a cool way for the bridal party to spend some time together before the wedding and to alleviate the anxieties of the day, but I do also think that because it only involves your bridal party, it can be a bit exclusive.

While this sounds really fun, logistically it's just not going to pan out for us, not least because it's a bit much for just my sister to plan and do on her own when she's not even in the same country! More importantly, there's a lot of commentary to be had about gender and culture and the way these are represented in the games. I get that the games are meant to be in good fun, but that doesn't mean I have to want them or like them if I don't approve of the more subversive message the whole tradition sends.