Ritual as a Time for Reflection

January 11, 2026

We went to a wedding this past weekend where the group of us who sat together collectively asked, “When did we get old enough to go to weddings of friends’ children??!” Naturally such a wedding stimulated a lot of reflection, at least for me.

What was it about this wedding that seemed to carry so much weight? Many of our friends’ children live with significant others and very much act married. The young couple at the altar had done that. Learning about those commitments by our friends’ children doesn’t send me down an intense path of reflection, so why did this wedding?

Was it the fact that somehow a wedding signifies a deeper level of commitment? Maybe, but we all know the divorce statistics. When you’re in the weeds of a relationship, I’m not sure that being married instead of “just” long-term cohabitating can prevent a breakup.

Was it the fact that Mark and I had gotten married (many moons ago) so I felt a kinship with the couple? Maybe. I definitely reached over to squeeze Mark’s hand when I was particularly moved during the ceremony. It did take me back thirty years to moments of our own wedding.

But I don’t think the connection to the ceremony was the whole reason for its weight.

Was it that we’ve been friends with the bride’s parents for a long time? When their daughter was saying her “I dos”, I smiled, remembering of some of the middle school antics that had made her mom want to pull out her hair. That was probably a big part of it. On the way home, Mark and I talked about how the twenties are one of the most challenging and intense decades of life. I’ve read the development from birth to age one is the most concentrated period of growth. I’d add that the development in the twenties is equally intense. And for this particular bride, we’d been witness to a lot of it. So while her life certainly hasn’t culminated at the altar, there was a deep significance in her standing at the altar with her husband-to-be.

That, I think was the nub of this wedding’s weight, that it could be witnessed. The ritual of the wedding ceremony offered a tangible marker. It’s not that I don’t acknowledge the real couple-ness of our friends’ children who have decided to cohabitate; it’s that the public act of the wedding somehow turns a page that I am, at least tangentially, a part of. To be clear, the real work, the real change, takes place privately, but the ritual acknowledges the change more widely. Perhaps that’s why rituals are so deeply ingrained in human culture—graduations, weddings, baptisms or bris, coronations, funerals, and so on—because they allow us to publicly turn a page.

Of course, I’m not going to be a witness to every ritual, but somehow the knowledge that a public acknowledgement, however small, of some kind took place makes the change visceral. Mark and I sat on a staircase in Bryant Park in Manhattan when we'd decided it was time to try to have a baby. It wasn’t public in that no one but us knew about the discussion, but whenever I see those steps, I remember. In an odd way, it was a private ritual of sorts.

Many rituals are private, but somehow bestowing them with the import of the word ritual makes them more intentional, an important change for a person. I happened to have the privilege of witnessing this weekend’s wedding, and that act of witnessing was truly a privilege.