Marriage and family are notions bonded to tradition and other forms of child development are hard to imag-ine but statistics indicate that the family unit is and has been changing. What is going on with the family as an institution, what are the prognosis and perspectives — our new columnist, the most celebrated wedding pre-senter of Russia, expert, trainer and author of popular editions, Denis Reshetov explains.
The essentials of the family have come to us unchanged from primitive times. The man hunted and provided food, the woman gave birth and nurtured the child while under the man's protection from animal predators and other males.
Homo sapiens flourished through agrarian and technical revolutions and now we're going through hi tech one. Physical strength is less important. Modern man sometimes can't find a reason to make this kind of 'social cell'. In pre-revolutionary Russia the Church and Priesthood had a bigger influence. Batyushka could explain easily to a married couple the necessity of keeping marriage as a sacred blessed by Church and God pleasing thing.
Now the situation in our country is totally different. The only reason keeping many people from divorce is the property division. Woman doesn't need to be protected, she can provide for herself working and growing up children at the same time. I see these women around: they are self-sufficient, competitive and often eager to measure their strength competing with men in work or relationships. Men don't need a new type woman as a wife: all questions can be solved by hiring house assistants and dating.
As a supporter of family in its classic form I moderate around eighty weddings a year and see these unfortunate changes in young people's psychology. New generations of youngsters meet and socialize in internet and it's hard to preview who and why will get married in a close future. What will weddings be like, who will moderate them is hard to say now. Yet there is an old generation and weddings are played for it. But soon the moment might come when the young people won't see any reason for it.
What do we make a wedding dinner and Party for — this is a question I ask every couple I happen to work with. I have a big collection of answers: for parents, because everyone does, because there is no other option, because it is good to invite friends. The most persuasive answer was about the wish to have children and build a family as a social model. No one in my practice said that it was done in respect to tradition, a ritual carrying a serious energetic impulse which connects and fastens and has a great meaning and makes sense. And for already ten years I explain to young couples that the old traditions could be refreshed by something new, by their own rituals but no way it should be left as just a simple eating and dancing party. Mindfulness in preparing to the wedding means further mindfulness in building a new family.
Yet the situation doesn't look absolutely desperate in my thirty years old friends' circle. Wives of my friends can handle making interaction with men balanced and full of compromise. In response men give them attention, gratefulness and do their best to keep the unit. But analyzing my own statistics I still insist: the cult of family dies. Weddings become cheaper and meaningless, young people don't see it as something reasonable and in ten years they will disappear or transform into a totally different format. And not far off is the day when the institution of family itself will disappear. All of this is confirmed by a persuasive fact — in my own business the event-management's share is growing in comparison to the classic wedding one.
As long as parents live and pay for the ritual and see wedding as a classical ceremony and party we still have time and may be chance to save traditions, to pass them to our children on time and with the appropriate notion complex. It happens that couples repeat same words but fill it with different meaning. We can understand each other, compromise, work on strong families only if we speak the same language. Even the intimate life's role in relationships is overestimated and have less importance than people think. One of the couples I know got mar-ried after they agreed in detailed on seven or eight points important for them after one and half months of knowing each other. They came to conclusion that they can agree on anything because they see important life moments the same way and they left intimate relations for the first marriage night.
Traditions are important: they make life better organized filling it with the feeling of stability, peace and trust to the world. To prove it and to show people importance of this notion I start a project "World Weddings" in 2019. We will go to the most picturesque world regions and show national weddings not in event halls but with all national outdoor rituals and specifics in Northern Russia, Caucasus, Ethiopia, Kenya, India. Apart of this I prepare the speech about building the family values on the base of traditional weddings for TED, and I try to teach the young generation of specialists to moderate weddings not as parties but as sincere, happy family fests. I'm sure that tradition should be kept and passed from one genera-tion to another.
