While stress and wedding preparation tend to go hand in hand, same-sex couples desiring a traditional wedding often encounter planning hurdles that couples who align with a gender binary—female bride, male groom—don’t, says Amber Epp, the Wilbur Dickson-Bascom Professor in Business and an associate professor of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business.
Even though the number of same-sex couples choosing to legally wed continues to grow, same-sex couples find a void in the current traditional wedding marketplace, because “the wedding industry never had them in mind,” says Epp, whose research focuses on what happens when fields are disrupted.
“The wedding market has these gender ideals engrained into it, but it’s a gender binary,” Epp says. “When that gender binary is challenged, there’s a sense of disorientation about what’s coming next—what will be valued, what will be accepted, what will be legitimate. As consumers move through that space, they sometimes do feel out of sync, like their bodies, their gender roles, their gender expression just do not fit with the script. So, our study looks at the ways they try and resolve that and seek alignment for themselves and a positive experience of acceptance and fit.”
“The wedding market has these gender ideals engrained into it, but it’s a gender binary. When that gender binary is challenged, there’s a sense of disorientation about what’s coming next—what will be valued, what will be accepted, what will be legitimate.”
—Amber Epp
Epp and her study co-author Sunaina R. Velagaleti noted that while there’s no shortage of niche LGBTQ wedding resources and planners, the participants they spoke with “didn’t want to be in separate spaces,” says Epp. “It was very important to them that this was seen by the mainstream as a legitimate wedding in the mainstream space.”
Over a two-year period, Epp and Velagaleti conducted individual interviews with 30 same-sex couples across different areas of the U.S., as well as observed the wedding industry market itself, such as bridal expos, publications, and event planning businesses. Based on what they uncovered in the data, Epp and Velagaleti created a four-strategy framework that reflected how same-sex couples navigated the disrupted traditional wedding marketplace.
Here are the four strategies with excerpted (and de-identified) participant insights:
1. Confronting
Participants using a confronting strategy took advantage of a “teachable moment” to educate the wedding provider and/or address the lack of understanding by advocating for themselves on what they envisioned for their wedding.
Engaged couple Paul and Nick attended one of the premier bridal shows in a major U.S. city and were dismayed at how much it was still geared toward a gender binary.
Paul: “I actually filled out a form where in the notes section I said, ‘Do not ever call either of us the bride.’ I probably had more attitude about it than was necessary, but it was something that we had been dealing with so much…the guy responded, ‘I totally get it, I’ll never call either of you the bride, I should probably update my website.’ So I was really happy that I was able to call someone out on it and really hopefully get someone to realize that they could change their way of looking at their business.”
2. Masking
The polar opposite of confronting, participants employing a masking strategy chose to conceal their identity as a couple, often because they anticipated confusion or a negative reaction.
Frequently, masking took the form of couples shopping separately or shopping together as if they were friends instead of disclosing their relationship.
Lisa and Demi’s wedding fittings went on for months without ever revealing to the vendor that they were in fact marrying each other.
Lisa: “We had to get our dresses fitted. We went to the same place.”
Demi: “Oh, yeah! But we never.”
Lisa: “But we never told her that we were [a couple]—”
Demi: “You’re right. And we must’ve been going there for two months…she never said anything. She never asked, and we never said anything. And we didn’t go get fitted together. I said, ‘Oh, I’m sending somebody to you to get fitted.’…I don’t know why I didn’t say anything. I don’t know…It was the weirdest thing. Why didn’t I say anything? I don’t know.”
“I actually filled out a form where in the notes section I said, ‘Do not ever call either of us the bride.’ I probably had more attitude about it than was necessary, but it was something that we had been dealing with so much…”
—Paul, study participant
3. Collaborating
Participants who chose a collaborating strategy tried to work together with vendors and planners while simultaneously “discovering their desired gendered expressions,” the study noted.
Jake and Bruce worked with a jeweler to create their own rings; it was new territory for all, given there was no precedent for male engagement bands.
Bruce: “When you think about traditions, it’s always typically like the guy who proposes to his girlfriend, right? And then, you know, she gets an engagement ring…So when I was proposing to Jake, I thought it was really important though that I get a little sentiment on my finger, too. So, talk about being able to write your own rules…he [Jake] got a bling ring…[and] I always wanted a diamond.”
4. Experimenting
Participants employing an experimenting strategy both adhered to the traditional wedding script but felt free to depart from it, trying conventional wedding elements on for size and discarding them if they didn’t feel right.
Jocelyn was unsure about whether she really wanted to wear a dress in her wedding to Violet, and if so, what it might mean.
Jocelyn: “I think that there’s clearly an affirmation of fitting the norm in society… my guess would be on a subconscious level that we wanted to have that same affirmation of normalcy, of the process that everybody else probably does. I mean, any bride in a heterosexual marriage has certain things they go through and get into – bridal magazines and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah…I think that those decisions are…an operational thing going on behind my brain, but I would hope that I was not feeling that I needed, your, uh
[Violet: “Approval.”]
Jocelyn: “Yeah. Approval. But at the same time, everybody kind of wants to fit in. You know, have some normalcy of things that you feel are legitimate.”