Wedding TikTok is having a massive moment, "2026 brides" is an enormous search category right now, all the planning content and dress content and venue content and DIY content, and I've been watching it because I love weddings, I genuinely do. I love love. I cry at almost every wedding I've been to, not because I'm a romantic cliché but because watching two people choose each other in front of everyone they care about is genuinely moving to me every single time. I'm not cynical about marriage. I'm not cynical about commitment. I'm not here to tell you not to get married or that weddings are bad.
What I am here to tell you is that some very specific elements of the traditional wedding ceremony, elements that are still showing up constantly in 2026 bridal content as if they're just neutral aesthetic choices, are not neutral at all. They're the residue of a legal and theological framework that treated women as property, and they've been laundered through sentimentality until they feel like tradition rather than what they actually are. And you are allowed to choose them WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE of what they are. What you should not do is choose them without knowing. Because the church didn't give me that choice, and I think you deserve better than that.
Let me be specific. I have three things I want to talk about: the white dress, the father "giving away" the bride, and obedience vows. Let's go.
The White Dress
The white wedding dress is a Victorian innovation popularized by Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding and subsequently adopted by the Western world as a symbol of purity, meaning specifically, virginity. It was not always white. For most of history, brides wore their best dress in whatever color that happened to be. The white = purity connection is roughly 180 years old, from a culture that was aggressively invested in policing women's sexual history, and it was specifically adopted by American evangelical purity culture in the 20th century as a visual shorthand for "untouched."
I've been to purity-culture-adjacent weddings where the entire ceremony's emotional architecture was built around the idea that the bride was presenting herself "pure" to her new husband and to God. Where the white dress was not a fashion choice but a theological statement. Where the bride's status before the wedding, specifically her sexual history, was treated as the most significant thing about her, more significant than her personhood, her individual qualities, anything she'd done or become or accomplished. The dress was evidence. The dress was testimony. The dress said: she was kept.
Wear white if you want. Wear white because you love how it photographs, because it's elegant, because your grandmother wore white and you want to honor that, because you just like it. Those are all real reasons and you don't owe anyone a justification. But if you're wearing white specifically because you've been trained to think it signals something about your sexual history to guests who are expecting that signal, I want you to know that your sexual history is your business and it is not the most interesting thing about you and no piece of clothing can accurately represent the complexity of who you are. You are more than what you have or haven't done. You always were.
The Father Giving Away the Bride
This one I need to be careful with because it genuinely hits people in the feelings, so I want to distinguish between the emotional content and the legal/historical content. The emotional content: fathers and daughters often have deep, important relationships, and the desire to honor that relationship at a wedding is real and lovely and I'm not dismissing it. If you want your dad at your side walking down the aisle because you love each other and you want him there for that moment, that is beautiful and you should do it.
The historical content of "giving away" the bride is, however, specifically about property transfer. In English common law, from which American wedding law descends, a woman passed from her father's legal custodianship to her husband's. She could not own property, could not enter contracts, could not maintain legal identity separate from her husband. The "giving away" ritual was the ceremony through which a father transferred his legal interest in his daughter to her new husband. The question "who gives this woman to be married?" (still said in traditional ceremonies) is asking who holds the property rights being transferred. The answer was always the father or a male guardian. Women were not parties to this transaction. They were the transaction.
I grew up watching this in church and nobody mentioned the property transfer element. It was presented purely as a tender father-daughter moment, beautiful and sacred, this man who raised you delivering you to the man who will care for you now. And I understand why it felt that way because the love between fathers and daughters is real, and that love can inhabit a ritual even when the ritual has rotten roots. But the roots are what they are. And in 2026, with women having legal personhood and property rights and the ability to marry on their own recognizance without a male guardian's permission, we're still asking the question. That's worth knowing as you make your choices.
There are alternatives. Walking yourself. Being accompanied by both parents. Being accompanied by your whole family or chosen family as a statement about the community that raised you. Having your partner meet you partway down the aisle so you finish the walk together. A hundred weddings I've seen on TikTok this year have done beautiful creative variations on this moment. Your choices are not limited to "be given away" or "offend your father."
Obedience Vows
Some traditional wedding vows include a promise from the wife to "love, honor, and obey" her husband. Many couples have moved away from this. Many haven't. And in the evangelical communities I grew up in, it was theologically defended with reference to Ephesians 5:22-24, which says wives should submit to their husbands as to the Lord, as the church submits to Christ. Serious people have built serious theological frameworks around this text, and I'm not going to pretend that complementarianism is uniformly held by bad people with bad intentions. Some people hold it genuinely and in good faith.
What I am going to say is: promising to obey your partner is not what love is. Two adults choosing to share their lives can design those lives around mutual respect, mutual decision-making, genuine partnership. The framing of one person as the authority to whom the other promises compliance is a hierarchy, not a partnership. And in a religious context specifically, it ties a woman's obedience to her husband to her obedience to God, which means any assertion of her own agency or disagreement with her husband's decisions can be framed as spiritual failure. That framing has been used to keep women in bad situations. I've seen it. I've known the people it happened to. The theological weight placed on that promise was used to trap them in situations that were hurting them, because leaving would mean disobeying and disobeying meant sinning.
You can promise to love, honor, support, encourage, be honest with, be present for, grow alongside, and choose every day, and none of those things require the word "obey." The word carries too much history. Know what you're saying before you say it.
Because I Do Love Love
I want to end here because I mean it: I am genuinely pro-wedding. I am genuinely pro-love. I think commitment is one of the bravest things humans do, choosing a person and building a life and showing up through the hard stuff, that is extraordinary and I hold it with real reverence. Some of the people closest to me are married and their marriages are beautiful and I celebrate them absolutely.
My problem has never been with the love. My problem is with the ownership structures that have historically been draped over the love and presented as inseparable from it. They are not inseparable. You can have the whole of the love, all of it, as much love as exists, without the ownership rituals. You can design a ceremony that reflects who you actually are and how you actually see each other and what you're actually promising. You can make it exactly what you want it to be.
The wedding industry is going to try to sell you the traditional package because it's easier and because tradition moves product. The church tradition is going to try to sell you certain rituals as sacred that are, in fact, historical and revisable. You are allowed to look at the menu and order something different. The love is what matters. The ceremonies are ours to design.
For all the 2026 brides out there: I hope you get everything you want. I hope the day is everything. I hope the marriage is long and honest and full. And I hope whatever choices you make, you make them with your eyes open and your whole self present. That's all I've got. I love you.