The Money-talk Taboo
When the tensions are over money, which they often are - not least because weddings themselves tend to be expensive affairs - the embarrassment factor is doubled. Unlike most other cultures, we persist in the notion that love and marriage have nothing to do with money - and that any mention of money would 'lower the tone' of the event. It is customary, for example, for the male partner to fork out about a month's salary on an engagement ring (in America it can be double that, or even more, as an engagement ring is seen as a more overt symbol of the male's status as a provider) but to ask or talk about how much the ring cost would be offensive. This does not stop everyone making their own private guesses, or asking about the stones and the setting as a roundabout way of estimating the price, but only the groom (and perhaps his bank manager) should know the exact cost, and only a very crass, vulgar groom would either boast or complain about it.
The cost of the wedding itself is traditionally borne by the bride's parents, but in these days of late marriages is now often met or at least shared by the couple themselves and/or grandparents or other relatives. But whoever has footed the lion's share of the bill, the groom will usually, in his speech, politely thank the bride's parents for 'this wonderful party' or some such euphemism - the words 'money' or 'paid' are not used. If the groom's parents, grandparents or uncle have contributed by paying for, say, the champagne or the honeymoon, they may be thanked for 'providing' or 'giving' these items - to use the words 'paying for' would imply that money was involved. We all know perfectly well that money is involved, but it would be bad manners to draw attention to the fact. The usual English hypocrisies. These polite euphemisms may conceal many petty financial squabbles, and in some cases much seething resentment over who paid for what or how unnecessarily extravagant the whole thing was. If you are hard-up, there is very little point in beggaring yourself to provide a lavishly expensive wedding for your daughter: other cultures might be impressed, but the English will only find it ostentatious, and wonder why you did not 'just do something simple and unpretentious'.
Humour Rules
Quite apart from the difficulties caused by money, or by the money-talk taboo, there is nowadays endless potential for tension in the composition of the two families involved in the rituaclass="underline" it is highly likely that at least one set of parents will be divorced, and possibly remarried or cohabiting with new partners, perhaps with children from second or even third pair-bondings.
And even if nobody makes a drunken exhibition of themselves, and nobody is offended by the seating plan or the transport arrangements or the best man's speech, someone is bound to do or say something that will cause embarrassment. At the first English wedding I ever attended, I was that someone, although I was only about five years old. My parents had decided that my sisters and I should have some understanding of the important rite of passage we were about to witness. My father told us all about pair-bonding, described the wedding customs and practices of different cultures, and explained the intricacies of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. My mother took it upon herself to explain the 'facts of life' - sex, where babies come from and so on. My sisters, aged about three and four, were perhaps a little too young to take much interest in this, but I was riveted. At the church the next day, I found the ceremony equally fascinating, and during a moment's silent pause (possible after 'speak now, or forever hold your peace'), I turned to my mother and asked, in a loud, piercing whisper, 'Is he going to put the seed in now?'
I was not taken to any weddings for quite a few years after that, which seems a bit unfair, as I had clearly grasped the essential points, and only got the chronological order of things slightly mixed up. The next one I remember was in America, my father's second marriage. I was about eight or nine - old enough this time for a lecture on bifurcate merging kinship terminology and virilocal versus uxorilocal postmarital residence patterns, with diagrams. This did not stop me suffering an attack of (mercifully quiet) giggles during the most solemn part of the ceremony. At the time, I felt rather ashamed of myself for being so childish (my father was always telling me to 'stop being childish'), but I now realize that my urge to laugh was a very English response. We find solemnity discomforting, and somehow faintly ridiculous; the most serious, formal, earnest bits of important ceremonies have an unfortunate tendency to make us want to laugh. This is an uneasy, nervous sort of laughter, a close relation of our knee-jerk humour reflex. Humour is our favourite coping mechanism, and laughter is our standard way of dealing with our social dis-ease.
English wedding receptions - and most other rites of passage - ring with laughter: virtually every conversational exchange is either overtly or subtly humorous. This is not, however, necessarily an indication that everyone is having a happy, jolly time. Some may well be feeling genuinely cheerful, but even they are also simply obeying the unwritten English humour rules - rules so deeply ingrained they have become an unthinking, involuntary impulse.
Dispatching Rites
Which is one of the reasons why we have a big problem with funerals. There are few rites of passage on Earth as stilted, uncomfortable and excruciatingly awkward as a typical English funeral.65
The Humour-vivisection Rule
At funerals we are deprived of our primary social coping mechanism - our usual levels of humour and laughter being deemed inappropriate on such an officially sad occasion. At other times, we joke constantly about death, as we do about anything that frightens or disturbs us, but funerals are the one time when humour - or at least any humour beyond that which raises a wry, sad smile - would be disrespectful and out of place. Without it, we are left naked, unprotected, our social inadequacies exposed for all to see.
This is fascinating but painful to watch, like some cruel vivisectionist's animal-behaviour experiment: observing the English at funerals feels like watching turtles deprived of their shells. Denied the use of our humour reflex, we seem horribly vulnerable, as though some vital social organ has been removed - which in effect it has. Humour is such an essential, hard-wired element of the English character that forbidding (or severely restricting) its use is the psychological equivalent of amputating our toes - we simply cannot function socially without humour. The English humour rules are 'rules' principally in the fourth sense of the term allowed by the Oxford English Dictionary: 'the normal or usual state of things'. Like having toes. Or breathing. At funerals we are left bereft and helpless. No irony! No mockery! No teasing! No banter! No humorous understatement! No jokey wordplay or double entendres! How the hell are we supposed to communicate?
Earnestness-taboo Suspension and Tear-quotas
Not only are we not allowed to relieve tensions, break ice and generally self-medicate our chronic social dis-ease by making a joke out of everything, but we are expected to be solemn. Not only is humour drastically restricted, but earnestness, normally tabooed, is actively prescribed. We are supposed to say solemn, earnest, heartfelt things to the bereaved relatives, or respond to these things in a solemn, earnest, heartfelt way if we are the bereaved.
But not too heartfelt. This is only a limited, qualified suspension of the normal taboo on earnestness and sentimentality. Even those family and friends who are genuinely sad are not allowed to indulge in any cathartic weeping and wailing. Tears are permitted; a bit of quiet, unobtrusive sobbing and sniffing is acceptable, but the sort of anguished howling that is considered normal, and indeed expected, at funerals in many other cultures, would here be regarded as undignified and inappropriate.