About this episode

Stephen Jenkinson discusses the deeper meanings and forgotten rituals surrounding marriage and weddings.

Get instant access to Kelly's Beauty Backroom event here . Matrimony and weddings are not what society made us believe. Stephen Jenkinson is a Harvard-trained theologian, author, and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, whose work has spanned dying, elderhood, storytelling, and now matrimony. Most modern weddings last fifteen minutes. He spent close to a year preparing each one he officiated, and the ceremony itself ran six to eight hours. He didn't set out to study marriage. Young people came to him asking for something they couldn't name… nothing that sounded like a top-40 song or looked like a fairy tale. He started paying attention to the strange shards still left in the standard wedding: the aisle no one sits in, the procession, the throwing of food, the giving away. What he found changes the conversation. Matrimony, he argues, has nothing to do with celebrating love between two people. It's about mothering culture, and patrimony is its structural counterpart. One builds the house, the other moves in and makes it a home for the wider world. This episode goes into what a real wedding looks like when guests become witnesses, why the personal vow may be the weakest part of the…

People in this episode

Host: Kelly Brogan

Guest: Stephen Jenkinson

Topics covered

• marriage
• rituals
• cultural traditions
• weddings
• patriarchy
• storytelling

Keywords

• marriage
• weddings
• rituals
• patriarchy
• cultural traditions
• storytelling
• ceremony

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Orphan Wisdom School, Harvard

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