Is It Our Day or the Bride’s Day? The Division of Wedding Labor and Its Meaning for Couples

Based on qualitative interviews with southern California heterosexual engaged couples, I examine how wedding planning work is divided between the bride and the groom and how couple’s meaningfully interpret the division of labor. I find that couple’s wedding planning work disproportionately falls to women, especially that labor that is invisible. Wedding work, in many respects, is another form of unpaid and unappreciated women’s work, not that unlike housework. Yet, couples do not understand wedding work as an unequal pursuit. Couples use an assortment of interactional strategies to interpret wedding work as a joint and equal enterprise. KEY WORDS: wedding; planning; gender; couple; interaction; relationship equality. The image of a man being dragged to the wedding alter and a woman, in contrast, ever eager to wed is a common one in U.S. popular culture. Children’s toy makers offer young girls wedding dolls and wedding accessories, suggesting that wedding is an important and desirable part of being a woman. The commer-cial wedding industry targets women almost exclusively. There is, for example, no equivalent of “Brides Magazine ” for the groom. Despite the continued an