“Men who get joy out of humiliating their wives under the guise of it being a joke tend to lack respect for women as humans. They don’t care about boundaries and I’ve often seen them diminish anything their wife to be cares about. I only assisted with weddings just to keep a steady cash flow as I was building my PR agency but, I learned so much about relationships and how patriarchy affects them,” she says. “The couples I’ve worked with that are still married are the ones who truly partnered on every decision for their wedding. The men who took interest in the ‘girl’ stuff and respected their wives’ boundaries and prioritised her comfortability, had the smoothest wedding days.”
However, she found that “almost every single couple who had a groom similar to the one in my tweet is divorced. If I had to say it was 20 of them 18 are now no longer together. If a man doesn’t respect your wishes on a day that you view as one of the most important ones in your life, that is only going to get worse on the other side of I do.”
There’s one wedding that Valese will never forget, “the bride actually did not like cake at all but her husband to be’s mom made such a big deal about having the cake and she gave in. During the feeding of the cake he thought it would be funny to shove it in her mouth and did it with so much force that she ended up choking on it. I remember the photographer saying to me ‘that’s not a good sign’.
“A year later I saw that couple on the news because he had taken her life, then his. I know people might think it’s insane to look at things they view as minor from such a serious lens but, the devil is always in the details.”
“Between helping with weddings and volunteering with women’s centres, I’ve learned that a lot of behaviour we chalk up to men just being men, is actually abusive and it starts in subtle ways.”
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There are a lot of videos online, where we witness grooms behaving in downright misogynistic and abusive ways – like throwing cake in their brides’ faces or making vows and speeches that humiliate their spouse- which are often waves off as ‘a bit of fun’. But if, even on your wedding day, your new husband cannot treat you with respect and love, then it shouldn’t just raise some eyebrows but some supersized red flags. As a society, we must stop infantilising grown men and hold them accountable, not doing so has normalised a culture where they can blatantly disrespect simple boundaries and get away with it.
Boundaries are not challenges, and if someone treats them as such…annulment isn’t a bad option.
For more from GLAMOUR’s Contributing Editor, Chloe Laws, follow her @chloegracelaws.