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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Candice Brathwaite

Marriage went against my feminist principles – but the pandemic changed everything

Candice Brathwaite on her wedding day.
‘The last two years had shown us how much we couldn’t control, and this felt like the one thing we could do.’ Candice Brathwaite on her wedding day. Photograph: courtesy of Candice Brathwaite

I wasn’t like most brides. Unlike my school friends, who adored playing kiss-chase and using their blazers as veils and the chalk hopscotch outline as an aisle, I was more interested in reading and making up stories than dreaming about weddings. As I got older, I was able to use countless examples of the unhappy marriages I had seen around me as an excuse for my wannabe Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle. Receiving a Facebook notification about schoolmates getting hitched never moved or bothered me. And when I heard about glamorous six-figure, three-day wedding parties in Greece or Morocco, all I could think was: “Isn’t the bride tired?”

Most importantly, there wasn’t a practical incentive for me to be married. Five decades ago it would have been helpful, as I would have needed a husband to even have a bank account, but thankfully things had changed so much that marriage wasn’t a necessity.

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