My Big, Fat, Italian-American Wedding

Stop sending me mob wife pitches.

The thing to know about Ben and me is that we knew pretty early on that we wanted to be together. We met for a first date on a Thursday, and by the following Monday I was already certain that my single days were behind me. That was made even more clear when, on one of our earliest dates, I laid out what I expected to be a deal-breaker: “If we do this,” I told him, “I need you to be prepared for the fact that our wedding is going to be a spectacle.” (“Go big or go home,” he figures. I can’t wait to marry him.)

My fate was sealed from the moment I was born, the doctor announcing that I was a girl before placing me in my father’s arms. As the daughter of two proud Italian-Americans, it went without saying that I would have a big wedding — a fact that became even more apparent after the two siblings who followed me turned out to be boys. I don’t know if my father was calculating the price of floral arrangements as I blew out the candles on my third birthday, or if my mother considered what my wedding gown would look like as we picked out the white dress and veil I’d wear for my First Communion. But since I was conscious, my eventual wedding day was stuck in the back of my mind, like a mile marker that approximated the course my future would take.

Anyone who has seen The Godfather may think that they have an idea of how important weddings are in Italian culture, but it goes beyond a Sicilian never being able to refuse a request. (A standard I don’t know that my father will adhere to, but anyone coming to my wedding who has a favor to ask should try their luck.) There’s so much tradition steeped in our weddings, from dancing La Tarantella to handing out five bomboniera for the five blessings of marriage — and that’s not even mentioning the Jewish traditions we’ll be incorporating from Ben’s side. Weddings in Italian culture are the culmination of all of the things we hold sacred, from family to food to riotous dancing.

So why was it that, as soon as Ben got down on one knee and proposed, I felt I needed to constantly apologize and explain my wedding to the non-Italian-Americans in my life? Why have I internalized such shame and embarrassment around this day that is, in many ways, meant to be one of the biggest celebrations of love a family can share?

I was thinking about this on my walk a few days ago, considering why my big wedding felt like some kind of scarlet mark on my chest I needed to explain away whenever this got brought up. A lot of it is self-inflicted, of course. Because I work in an industry that is so image-focused, and because I have lived a small part of my life online, I am really wrapped up in the way things look externally.

Because I present myself in a certain way to the outside world, I have made up an expectation in my mind that my wedding should be a cool, unique, anti-bride event. I joke constantly that if my parents weren’t funding this wedding, Ben and I would have gotten married by an Elvis impersonator during our trip to Las Vegas last May. When I tell people about my wedding dress, the first assumption is that it is vintage, because 80% of my closet is vintage. (Honestly, my 34-year-old hips and ass were not made for the vintage wedding dresses that were worn by and tailored to the 26-year-olds trying to be Twiggy in the 1960s.)

Don’t get me wrong — there are huge parts of this wedding that we have snatched back to be more about us. Case-in-point: We’re not having a wedding party, even though bridesmaids are a *huge* tradition in Italian-American weddings, because we’re older, and because I’ve *hated* being a bridesmaid. There are, however, moments when I start to question the spectacle, and become embarrassed by it. But am I actually embarrassed, or am I just reacting to how I expect the world to react?

To be fair, planning a huge cultural wedding can be tough, and when I find my head swimming in the details of planning, the advice that echoes back from non-Italians tends to be along the lines of “Well, can’t you just skip [insert detail here]?” And that can feel incredibly frustrating and often leads to me feeling defensive, because if I were of another culture that also put a lot of emphasis on large weddings, would there even be a question as to whether or not all of this was necessary?

My parents and their wedding party. See what I mean?

I posed this question to my dear friend Rocco, who aside from being the best professor I ever had at Manhattan College, is an incredibly brilliant mind and has published multiple scholarly articles on Italian-American culture. (He also will be the man waiting at the end of the altar to marry Ben and me in June.) “If you ask me, an Italian wedding is a similar spectacular ritual to other cultural weddings. Is it wrong to think ‘why don’t Italian-American weddings come with the same cultural expectations from outsiders?’” I typed.

“You’re totally tapping an immigrant/ethnic class status thing that particularly affects Italian-Americans,” he wrote back. If you’ll allow me a little history lesson: Italian-Americans occupy an interesting place in American immigration culture. We were sandwiched somewhere between groups like the Irish, who came first and thus had cultural status before us, and Jewish immigrants, who were more likely to be educated and pursue professional status. Italians, on the other hand, were routinely marked working class, a status that sprouted from an inherited class dynamic from Italy, as pretty much *all* Italian immigrants came from the impoverished south, which has always been considered the trash of Italy. Therefore, a lower-class association just kind of hangs over everything we do.

Now I don’t think that the people in my life are associating my wedding with trashiness whenever I tell them about the spectacle of the ritual we’re putting on. But I myself have witnessed a habitual reaction to not take our traditions or culture as seriously, because it’s “just what those crazy Italians do.” (A line of thought that, in the moments where I was trying to separate myself from a culture I found embarrassing because I was looking at it through society’s warped view, I have parroted myself.) When I mentioned this to Ben, he also pointed out the tendency by white people to fetishize the rituals of other cultures. People who are part of the dominant white culture may see those weddings as “exotic,” which may not be judgmental, but does flatten the rich and varied traditions associated with them (case-in-point: wedding tourism). I don’t consider myself non-white, of course, and I am aware of how my whiteness grants me privilege in our society. But I have witnessed the “othering” of Italian-American traditions when they fall out of line with what is traditionally seen as “white,” and that is a confusing dynamic to parse.

This inherent cheapening of Italian-American culture, and the lower-class association that has followed us around for decades, is also why I’ve started to sour on the Internet’s current obsession with the mob wife aesthetic — a trend I initially found so interesting and exciting that I created a styling video explaining it. How great! I thought to myself when I first saw images of Carmela Soprano and Adriana La Cerva being heralded as fashion icons. Finally people are seeing this style for the incredible fashion it actually is! Did I love that it was being associated with organized crime, the way practically *all* of Italian-American culture has been similarly flattened to fit into that box? Of course not. But these women are some of the ONLY representation we have as Italian-American women in popular culture. So if we needed a visual, that was fine, right?

But that feeling has rapidly changed as I’ve watched the trend morph into something celebratory into something that’s bordering on mocking. The creator Blakely Neiman Thorton, in a video where he breaks down Lauren Sanchez’s outfit at her fiancé Jeff Bezos’ 60th birthday, described her look as “the most visceral example of the mob wife aesthetic in existence.” Thorton followed quickly by saying, “It’s all bold moves and bad taste down to the Dolce & Gabbana logo print.” A quick scan of the comments found a lot of people echoing this sentiment, with former Real Housewives of New York cast member Carole Radziwill throwing out the dig that “money really can’t buy you class” — a reference to her fellow housewife LuAnn de Lesseps’s banger of a song that I would typically love, but really made my stomach turn here.

I’m not defending Lauren Sanchez or her evil fiancé, but to hear that style be described to trashy and classless — and then to see the costume-y ways that people have continued to wear outfits that could have been pulled from my own closet — has been really destabilizing.

I, of course, know what cultural appropriation is and understand the exploitation that occurs when other cultures experience it. But to witness something adjacent to that in terms of my own culture has, naturally, added a depth to that understanding — especially, for me, the brutal cognitive dissonance that occurs when seeing a part of your culture that people mocked on *you* be raised up as trendy on other people. The privilege of not really experiencing it personally until now is not lost on me, either.

I was texting with my friend Hannah a week or so ago in the mix of all of this mob wife aesthetic mania, as she had been hired to write a story about it and, as the Midwesterner of our friend group, needed a little guidance from me, the resident Italian-American broad from New Jersey. In trying to explain the phenomenon to her, I texted her this:

I had messaged her this right around the time that my feelings on the matter had started to change, and before my conversation with Rocco, but I still stand by a lot of what I wrote here. I think something like the mob wife aesthetic really does underscore the Italian-American experience, which is marked by a history of working class immigrants who escaped their status as second-class citizens in Italy to come to American to build a better life. The American Dream. Once success had been achieved, the external showiness of that success — with the furs, and the conspicuous logos, and the gold jewelry — were all an attempt to visually separate themselves from the unassimilated, low-class rung that society had relegated them to. It’s why we show off our Murano glass on special occasions. It’s why we are so loud about the fact that it actually was Antonio Meucci who invented the telephone. It’s why we will remind you for the 50th time that Romans invented *literal* concrete.

It’s why we have huge weddings.

In a lot of ways, my wedding day is less about me and Ben and more about the family that we exist within. It’s why Italian weddings are huge, with all of our extended family on the invite list, and lots of celebratory dancing. It’s why parents start saving for them the second they know they’re having a daughter. My father has often told me during the planning process, when I worry about how huge this one-day event is, that he’s been working for this his whole life. He means it, and there’s pride in that, and who am I to take that away?

My wedding day, it turns out, isn’t just a mile marker that approximated the course of *my* future life when I was a little girl. It is a mile marker that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with other mile markers, before and after it, the length of them extending all the way back to my great-grandparents who came to America, and back even further to the hilly villages in Sicily that their families settled in. It’s a celebration of the families that my grandparents built, and worked so hard for, and probably understood that they wouldn’t be around to revel in. It’s a way for those of us who are still around to get together and drink and eat and celebrate the fact that we are still here, and that our family is still here, and that there’s hope that our family will continue on and on and on, branching out in many different ways but always, always having the core of who we are at the center.

There is no greater show of success to an Italian-American than that, which is why I think I have finally made peace with my big, fat, Italian-American wedding. And I can’t wait for that day, when Ben and his family will officially become a part of our family, and we can gather with all of the people in our life to celebrate and say, “Look at what we’ve all built together.”