We were lounging in my daughter Rose’s shared house in Halifax watching that reality show about women choosing their wedding dresses when one of the young college girls turned to me and asked me directly, “Did you cry when you chose your wedding dress”?

I looked to my daughter with a query in my eyes –  is it OK to tell your house mates my story? Oh yeah, she answered, knowing the tale all too well.

Joe and I were married at the old City Hall in Toronto when I was hugely pregnant with Rose. We had already been together about 8 years. We invited his parents to be witnesses because Joe’s mom had cried when we told her I was pregnant, so it was an attempt to mollify her. Besides, there was also a financial reward (a tax break) that made the whole deal more attractive to my husband.

The wedding ceremony was quite funny because the man on duty at the time was being kind and conscientious and tried to make an appropriate speech based on the information he saw before him. Joe’s passport states his birth city as Jerusalem so the Justice of the Peace, or whatever he was, intoned on the beauty of Canada at the beginning of the speech, not knowing that Joe had been a Canadian since he was 4 years old.

He saw that I was pregnant and assumed it was a shotgun wedding, so he then reminded us that marriages take time and we would know each other better in a few years (not knowing that we had already been together for so many years). Finally, when Joe put the ring on my finger (I bought a cheap silver ring with three coils wrapped together just in case we needed one) he said, “Will you Joseph take Mary”?

I guess the mention of Jerusalem and the sight of the pregnant bride created this Freudian slip, and all of a sudden he had changed my name from Margaret to Mary! I couldn’t help laughing out loud, and then the ceremony was over, and we were married.

I do remember a thought I had as I took the oath, that it was good that I was not lying. Because even though the ceremony did not mean anything to me, it meant something to me that I was being honest with my mind and heart. I was content to make this vow to this particular man with no misgivings.

We did not have a party, we broke no dishes, we did not cross hands and drink out of wine glasses. There were no speeches or feasts. We did not force our families to share a hall and dinner or the cost of the event. You’d think they would have been relieved. Maybe they were.

Very few people believe me but I did not have wedding fantasies when I was a child.  I never dreamed about wearing the white dress and walking down the aisle, and I think for Joe, who hated his bar mitzvah, the idea of a wedding party was a nightmare.

But most of all, Joe and I were in agreement that we did not want our two families forced together for a ritualistic event. We knew at the time that the prejudice in both of our families would have been evident. I think we could both hear the snooty comments made behind each other’s backs, from our respective families, and could not see why we would want to host that particular event.

Joe’s family saw my family as the epitome of what was wrong with WASPs, and to be honest we pretty much live up to the worst of it. In my family and for many generations back you can find insanity, alcohol and/or drug addiction, affairs/divorce, bad housekeeping and mediocre cooking. And to top it off, we think very highly of ourselves for no apparent reason.

Both families would have put on their best hats and behaved well if we had insisted on a wedding party, but there was just no need for the charade. However, I do enjoy other people’s weddings!  It is generally a fun celebration with food, drink and dancing and I always partake with enthusiasm. I really enjoyed my eldest brother Rhys’ wedding last weekend in which he married the lovely Carmen.

The sermon at the Catholic Church was wonderful, all about love. The priest said love is forever, sometimes marriages don’t last, but love lasts forever. Some criticized this statement later but I liked it. And as he was marrying an older couple who had both been married before, he was not out of line.

The philosophy of love as the guiding force of our lives makes sense to me. I am a very spiritual and unmaterialistic person. I don’t happen to follow any Church or love any one figure that stands in for love, I just believe in love.

At the recent wedding the two families were keeping fairly separate.  My brother had argued that the tables should be mixed up so people could get to know each other, but his wife had made the good argument that people who had traveled a long distance to see each other would want to sit at each other’s tables. So we sat with our own people.

By the end of the night the two groups had merged on the dance floor. But when the dance music began to sound somehow more Asian, and the dancers had begun group dancing, a lot of the WASPS dropped out.  Not me though, I love to dance. I am a dancing fool.

There were dances in which you had to know steps and I found an older guy who seemed to know the steps and followed him. The next dance was one in which someone grandstands in the middle while everyone dances in a circle until the next person drops into the middle.

When I jumped into the middle I dragged my two nieces in with me and there was a big cheer. Ah ha! I had broken down the two cultures stand off in one happy dance.

I felt proud knowing that I had helped merge the two cultures for a few minutes. And I danced and danced, celebrating love.