Josiah and Lauren Part 10: First Look at the Wedding

[TatiFish9]

I'm not seeing what others are seeing with these two. Lauren put too much effort into that gown to be dead inside. Josiah did fake those tears, though. And it does make me wonder what the heck is going through his mind. I just think he's caring too much about what others are saying. He also wiped off her gloss which to me was a terrible move. You don't kiss your bride then wipe your mouth on your wedding day at all. For any reason. Ever. Goodbye. Rofl!

I gotta watch that again to make sure I didn't read into it wrong. I can only hope and pray he is not mean to this girl or vice versa. Other than that, I think theyll be just fine. I will say I found the mention of *if we should have children* part to be oddly placed.  I suppose it could have been a modest gesture acknowledging that God determines if they have children or not.

I do think Josiah felt pressured and nervous. They know Duggar scrunity is real and awaiting. And, for whatever reason they seem to be rebranding him as serious/mature. I wonder if he got a verbal whooping for that stunt at Joe's wedding.

[Rio]

What is with Lana Swanson being so pretty? Kendra’s mom the same. No reason at all for these women to be so naturally gorgeous. If I was a fundie wife with a whole bunch of kids I would let myself go and not give a ****, not to put too fine a point on it.  Then again I have never had looks like these two, so who knows what that would be like. Lauren and Kendra are pretty enough,  but their moms are seriously model material.

[llg1234]

43 minutes ago, Rio said:

What is with Lana Swanson being so pretty? Kendra’s mom the same. No reason at all for these women to be so naturally gorgeous. If I was a fundie wife with a whole bunch of kids I would let myself go and not give a ****, not to put too fine a point on it.  Then again I have never had looks like these two, so who knows what that would be like. Lauren and Kendra are pretty enough,  but their moms are seriously model material.

If they "let themselves go" and don't try to make sure they look their best, then their husbands might cheat on them and it will be all their fault. /s

Really though, I don't know how they do it either. I do know that a lot of the fundie women that we talk about are under quite a bit of pressure to look good, though.

(I know there are certain factions of fundamentalism don't approve of makeup or spending a lot of time on appearances, but they aren't discussed nearly as much...probably because social media isn't as much as thing in those circles.) 

[JemimaPuddle-Duck]

7 hours ago, Rio said:

What is with Lana Swanson being so pretty? Kendra’s mom the same. No reason at all for these women to be so naturally gorgeous. If I was a fundie wife with a whole bunch of kids I would let myself go and not give a ****, not to put too fine a point on it.  Then again I have never had looks like these two, so who knows what that would be like. Lauren and Kendra are pretty enough,  but their moms are seriously model material.

No reason at all for these women to be so naturally gorgeous? What does that even mean!?

[nickelodeon]

13 hours ago, TatiFish9 said:

Josiah did fake those tears, though. And it does make me wonder what the heck is going through his mind. I just think he's caring too much about what others are saying

Probably yeah. Even outside of fundie-world, the expectation that grooms simply must weep with joy/gasp dramatically/perform some sort of Pepe Le Pew spectacle of awe during "Here Comes The Bride" can generate a lot of awkwardness. I've known guys who felt unwanted pressure to stage their reaction just right for the wedding photographers and guests. So I'm not surprised that the guy whose wedding is being filmed as a testimony of the love and Republican values of Christ is super awkward.

[TatiFish9]

2 hours ago, nickelodeon said:

Probably yeah. Even outside of fundie-world, the expectation that grooms simply must weep with joy/gasp dramatically/perform some sort of Pepe Le Pew spectacle of awe during "Here Comes The Bride" can generate a lot of awkwardness. I've known guys who felt unwanted pressure to stage their reaction just right for the wedding photographers and guests. So I'm not surprised that the guy whose wedding is being filmed as a testimony of the love and Republican values of Christ is super awkward.

I literally screamed out laughing at Pepe le Pew spectacle. Listen, him wiping away non existing tears in now in my top 5 fraudulent Duggar moments. You just can't make this stuff up. I literally imagine Jim Bob and Jchelle coaching him on this. But he may have come up with it all by his lonesome. lol Dude, we can see there are no tears. When your wife watches it back, she will see the same. He would have been better off doing a lip tremble, pretending he barely managed to hold it back.

[seraaa]

32 minutes ago, TatiFish9 said:

I literally screamed out laughing at Pepe le Pew spectacle. Listen, him wiping away non existing tears in now in my top 5 fraudulent Duggar moments. You just can't make this stuff up. I literally imagine Jim Bob and Jchelle coaching him on this. But he may have come up with it all by his lonesome. lol Dude, we can see there are no tears. When your wife watches it back, she will see the same. He would have been better off doing a lip tremble, pretending he barely managed to hold it back.

The worst thing about weddings is a pressure to display outward emotions - and not just any emotions, but specific emotions.

Massively stressful if you're a person who has to sort of emotionally disengage or keep emotion at bay for a bit in order to get through a big event, or if you're somebody that tends to internally process things first before reacting to them.

And that's not all weddings, but I get the feeling it's expected at these weddings

 

[TatiFish9]

Yes. I agree with this. I think some personalities are more natural with being the center of focus. I'm still not letting him get away with that fake tear wipe. No. Just. No! lol

[feministxtian]

On 7/26/2018 at 9:10 AM, Kaylo said:

In regards to “Salvation City,” Vegas is in the top 20 of churches per capita in the US. A big chunk of my very baptist, maybe even fundie light side of the family lives there. They’ve got some super mega mega churches!

Once you go about a mile to the east or west of the strip (which is only about 4 miles long), you're back in typical SW suburbia. I live on the southwest side of town. There's churches on every corner, at least 2 megachurches (that I know of) on the west side, one south and one north. There's a ton of storefront churches, slightly larger churches, damn near any denomination you can think of here. 

I HATE when people confuse the strip with the rest of the city. 

[scoutsadie]

19 hours ago, 3KidsAndStopped said:

when I married (and I am a strict Atheist!) I took the vows very seriously-even keeping "obey" in (we were not married in church either) because of my very chaotic upbringing

@3KidsAndStopped, I am very curious about this, so if you are comfortable doing so, will you say more about why you would retain the "obey" in your vows, as an atheist? It strikes me as such a religious element that I really don't get why you would keep it.

(FYI, I am also an atheist, and mean no disrespect or judgement; and if you don't want to answer and/or find the question offensive, please ignore it.)

[3KidsAndStopped]

1 hour ago, scoutsadie said:

@3KidsAndStopped, I am very curious about this, so if you are comfortable doing so, will you say more about why you would retain the "obey" in your vows, as an atheist? It strikes me as such a religious element that I really don't get why you would keep it.

(FYI, I am also an atheist, and mean no disrespect or judgement; and if you don't want to answer and/or find the question offensive, please ignore it.)

No offence taken at all! I wanted something so traditional as a complete antithesis to what I had seen marriage to be. The obey element was about commiting myself to what seemed to me to be a very old fashioned "for life" marriage & not a "for now" marriage or "get married and still do whatever/whoever" which is what I had seen. I wanted it to make a statement that I was breaking away from what can only be described as a Jeremy Kyle style disaster of a home life and taking it back to basics-that was my reasoning. 

 

It might seem a little odd and certainly raised a few eyebrows; but we are 12 years in so I did something right

 

Hope that explains a bit but not at all offended so happy to explain more if it doesnt make sense

[GuineaPigCourtship]

@3KidsAndStopped, I think it's interesting to hear you say how seriously you took your vows.  I've never been a very sentimental or a serious person - my husband is much more given to expressions of love than I am and I'm usually the one cracking a joke.  We wrote our own vows, and I put in something about promising to love him even when it's hard... and damned if it hasn't been the sticking point through all our rough patches.  He's gone through periods of unemployment which are VERY rough on us due to his anxiety and my depression (winning combo for our future kids) and no matter how stressed and unhappy I can get with the situation and with him, I just remember saying it and push on.

There is something to him laughing at all my jokes, though, so that may be part of it.

[fluffernutter]

We were 20, not at all religious, and also took our vows quite seriously. We didn't want the dysfunction we saw and lived through, and "married for life." (That's what our 20 year-old selves called it at the time). 25 years in and all is well. I look at our current 20 year old daughter and can't believe we were that... mature? naive? committed? at that age but here we are, still happy and in love. 

[scoutsadie]

7 hours ago, 3KidsAndStopped said:

No offence taken at all! I wanted something so traditional as a complete antithesis to what I had seen marriage to be. The obey element was about commiting myself to what seemed to me to be a very old fashioned "for life" marriage & not a "for now" marriage or "get married and still do whatever/whoever" which is what I had seen. I wanted it to make a statement that I was breaking away from what can only be described as a Jeremy Kyle style disaster of a home life and taking it back to basics-that was my reasoning. 

 

It might seem a little odd and certainly raised a few eyebrows; but we are 12 years in so I did something right

 

Hope that explains a bit but not at all offended so happy to explain more if it doesnt make sense

@3KidsAndStopped, thank you for your response, and for taking the question as I meant it! I'm so glad things have worked well for you.

[kiwi]

So so cringy!!!

her voice, helpmeet, jimboobs tears of relief? the kiss - yikes! 

The if we have kids is a new line, is that them both resigning the fact that neither is that attracted to each other and sex is clearly off the table?? 

 

[Stormy]

42 minutes ago, kiwi said:

The if we have kids is a new line, is that them both resigning the fact that neither is that attracted to each other and sex is clearly off the table?? 

 

Take this with a grain of salt, but I have a weird, sickly feeling that Si and Lauren might have problems concieving. I hope I’m wrong and they very well could make a honeymoon pregnancy announcement tomorrow (to which I hope that’s what they want), but I can’t shake the feeling.

[BullyJBG]

Likely that was triggered by wishes from Brandon and Michaela, or knowing someone else struggling with infertility. And that question is in some pre-marital counselling workbooks; it was in mine. Both, how would we deal with an unplanned pregnancy, and what would we do if we can't conceive.

[louisa05]

11 hours ago, GuineaPigCourtship said:

@3KidsAndStopped, I think it's interesting to hear you say how seriously you took your vows.  I've never been a very sentimental or a serious person - my husband is much more given to expressions of love than I am and I'm usually the one cracking a joke.  We wrote our own vows, and I put in something about promising to love him even when it's hard... and damned if it hasn't been the sticking point through all our rough patches.  He's gone through periods of unemployment which are VERY rough on us due to his anxiety and my depression (winning combo for our future kids) and no matter how stressed and unhappy I can get with the situation and with him, I just remember saying it and push on.

There is something to him laughing at all my jokes, though, so that may be part of it.

This reminds me of an incident after a wedding that I attended with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law. The wedding was basically one big theatrical production that took place in a literal theatre. And the vows were written by the couple. They included things like "be your partner in mischief" and "companion in adventure". And there is nothing wrong with either of those things (so don't come after me to tell me that your spouse is your "companion in adventure"). But that was all the vows were. Just a series of cute sounding references to fun stuff like mischief and adventure. 

On the way home, my sister-in-law went on and on and on about how those were the best wedding vows she had ever heard. She loved how they "didn't have all that negative stuff about hard times" because "why would you be negative at your wedding?". She wanted a copy of those vows in case she ever got married. Mind you, she was nearly 40 years old. 

Her brother and I had been married not quite four years at that point. He wasn't at the wedding because he was working second shift seven days a week for the second straight month with no days off. In that short time of marriage, he and I had lost four jobs between us (all impacted by the recession). My dad had cancer and I was barely working in order to help my parents. I was watching my mother be a caregiver 24/7. So those happy vows did not resonate with me at all. I finally lost it a little on sister-in-law and asked her where those vows would leave them when they couldn't make ends meet or one of them was seriously ill or when they lost parents or others close to them or miscarried or had a seriously ill child or just didn't see each other because one of them was forced to work non-stop mandatory overtime for months on end? Because hard times come whether we like them or not. Marriage isn't just for the fun times. Those are great, but they are actually easy. Sticking together through the hard part isn't so much. 

Of course, my idiot sister-in-law didn't get it.

[KelseyAnn]

2 hours ago, Stormy said:

Take this with a grain of salt, but I have a weird, sickly feeling that Si and Lauren might have problems concieving. I hope I’m wrong and they very well could make a honeymoon pregnancy announcement tomorrow (to which I hope that’s what they want), but I can’t shake the feeling.

I'm gay and if I could somehow hold my breathe and power through it, I have no doubt Josiah could as well - especially with his brainwashing religion encouraging him to do just that. 

[eveandadam]

3 minutes ago, KelseyAnn said:

I'm gay and if I could somehow hold my breathe and power through it, I have no doubt Josiah could as well - especially with his brainwashing religion encouraging him to do just that. 

Why do so many people think that he is gay? Honestly, why? That first kiss of them...didn't look gay at all!

[KelseyAnn]

5 minutes ago, eveandadam said:

Why do so many people think that he is gay? Honestly, why? That first kiss of them...didn't look gay at all!

I guess to me he just looks the way I did whenever a man would try and get close/kiss me - almost repulsed and barely able to seem amused/interested. 

[singsingsing]

I actually think the 'if the Lord blesses up with children' thing is a fairly standard fundie/quiverfull line, we just haven't heard it in wedding vows until now. You're supposed to be open to whatever God chooses for you, and if God chooses that you won't have any children at all, so be it. If he gives you 20, so be it. (Obviously most of them want as many as possible to show off how #blessed they are, but they're not really supposed to actually say that.)

That said, add this to the list of reasons Josiah reminds me of Josh. Josh was always talking about how he and Anna were open to however many children God chose to bless them with, and if that turned out to only be one or two, that was TOTALLY FINE! (Whereas Anna was constantly going on about wanting as many kids as possible.)

[xenobia]

2 hours ago, BullyJBG said:

Likely that was triggered by wishes from Brandon and Michaela, or knowing someone else struggling with infertility. And that question is in some pre-marital counselling workbooks; it was in mine. Both, how would we deal with an unplanned pregnancy, and what would we do if we can't conceive.

My first thought was also that the "if we have children"-thing comes from knowing about B&M Bates having fertility issues. And no matter where it came from, I liked it. Not everyone can have children, and it's a good thing to keep that in mind. 

[SapphireSlytherin]

34 minutes ago, eveandadam said:

That first kiss of them...didn't look gay at all!

To me, it looked like someone WAY over-compensating for... something.

[louisa05]

On 7/29/2018 at 12:01 AM, llg1234 said:

If they "let themselves go" and don't try to make sure they look their best, then their husbands might cheat on them and it will be all their fault. /s

Really though, I don't know how they do it either. I do know that a lot of the fundie women that we talk about are under quite a bit of pressure to look good, though.

(I know there are certain factions of fundamentalism don't approve of makeup or spending a lot of time on appearances, but they aren't discussed nearly as much...probably because social media isn't as much as thing in those circles.) 

At the Christian school I taught at, they were super obsessed with women looking as good as possible. I think it may have been a Charismatic (pentecostal) thing. They would go on about Christian women being prettier than non-Christian women. Because Jesus makes you more attractive. Or, you know, Lancome does.