By Editor Bob Terry
There is a beautiful moment in a wedding ceremony that symbolizes one of the most important changes facing the bride and groom. It is the moment when the minister asks, “Who presents this woman to be married to this man?”
A few ministers still use the term “gives,” as if the bride were a possession to be handed from one party to another. The word “gives” can also imply something like an arranged marriage in which the bride had no choice. The family, usually represented by the father, agrees to “give” its daughter to another.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The bride is a person who has decided that she desires to spend the rest of her life with the man waiting to receive her hand. She is a person to be cherished and loved. She is not a possession.
But the poignant moment is not in the question, no matter its wording, or in the answer from the family.
The symbolic moment is when the father places his daughter’s hand in the hand of her soon-to-be husband and steps back to allow the couple to take the first step toward becoming one.
The family representative standing with the bride at the beginning of the service depicts the importance of her family. The family birthed her, reared her, guided her, helped shape her values, helped make her whom she is. The family relationship has been the most important and most influential relationship in her life.
In the symbolic act of removing the father’s hand, the family provides room for a new relationship to emerge, a relationship that will take priority even over the parent-child relationship.
In no way does the parent-child relationship become unimportant. God’s command to “honor your father and mother” has never been repealed. Honor includes love and that necessitates an ongoing relationship. The relationship between parents and their married child should be vital and vibrant. But the relationship is different. Now the married child’s primary relationship is to be with his or her spouse.
Jesus Himself said it: “For this cause a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife” (Mark 10:7). While the verse speaks of the groom, the same principle applies to the bride. And while the symbol of the wedding ceremony is from the bride’s family, the principle is equally applicable to the groom’s family.
Both families step back from the parent-child relationship being primary in order to encourage a new relationship — the husband-wife relationship — to become dominant in the lives of their children. Both spouses “leave” their father and mother and are united with each other.
Few are the families that do not struggle with the changing nature of these relationships. Symbolically representing the new relationship and how it impacts the overall family in a wedding ceremony is easier than actually living it out. Just consider the tensions that emerge around holidays. What family has not asked with whose parents they will spend Christmas? What parents have not felt the tinge of sadness that first holiday when their child was with the in-laws instead of them?
Most families work through these problems in healthy ways that maintain vital and vibrant relationships. Some do not. Some families struggle for a lifetime over the dominance of the husband-wife or parent-child relationship. In such cases, the issue is not about whom to visit on holidays. It is about the controlling influences of life.
Clinging, domineering parents can create such problems. These are parents who continue to control their child even after marriage. Tools of control may range from sheer force of personality to use of guilt to supposed medical conditions and more.
But the bottom line is the goal of the parent-child relationship being the dominant relationship.
The cause may not be the parents but rather dependent children. Sometimes adult children never break their need for parents to be their problem solvers. For whatever reason, these adult children instinctively turn to their parents for answers or for protection instead of turning to their spouse. They are never able to emotionally “leave their father and mother.”
The child may lack emotional strength and is simply unable to bring himself or herself to say “no” to parents and “yes” to spouse. Consequently the needs and desires of the spouse end up being set aside in favor of the desires of the parents.
None of us want to see ourselves in the examples above, but we all know situations in which long-married friends continue to struggle with in-law relationships. That should alert us to the nature and extent of the problem. It also should prompt us to re-examine our own relationships.
Parent-child relationships are important no matter the age of the parent or child. The relationships are always to be honored, as the Bible teaches. But the relationship also is to become secondary to the husband-wife relationship, just as the Bible teaches.
Wise parents help make that possible. That is why the moment of presenting the bride’s hand to the groom is so important. It is a pledge of a lifetime to love both members of the new couple and to allow their love for each other to become the new dominant relationship in their lives.
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