WHO CHOOSES THE WEDDING GUESTS, THE COUPLE OR THE FAMILY?: Individual preferences and relational constraints in France and Finland

With the rise of non-marital cohabitation and increased acceptance of same-sex relationships and singlehood, marriage has become an individual choice in many European countries. Europeans are to a large extent in favour of marriage, but they are not explicitly promarriage, as stated by Kathleen Kiernan (2004: 980). Still, getting married has not lost its attractiveness, and in France and Finland, the two countries presenting the social and cultural contexts for this article, the number of new marriages in the beginning of this century reached the highest level in almost 20 years (Doisneau 2002; Statistics Finland 2005). It is taken for granted that marriage is no longer an arrangement of convenience, but something one engages in through love rather than for any instrumental reason.

Marriage has transformed from an axiomatic institution into an individual choice, but the structures and meanings attached to the entry into marital life, weddings, have also changed. As a ritual, a wedding is composed of elements that can be seen as traditional, including symbols and gender-specific roles. As a display of romantic love, commitment and identity of the couple, wedding ceremonies can also be seen as modern, realising individual preferences. Indeed, Dawn Currie has referred to contemporary weddings as ‘modern traditional’. The notion, more than a literary oxymoron, expresses ‘the contradictory outcome of establishing “modern” relationships in the name of “tradition”’ (Currie 1993: 415).

Most recent empirical research on weddings focuses on modernity and the pursuit of a unique and individual occasion. The aspects related to various choices made by the couple in preparing the wedding celebrations are well represented. Contemporary weddings as cultural events or performances are claimed to generate their meaning primarily through consumerism and romance (Boden 2003: 19). Especially the brides, as the ‘managers’ of the wedding preparations, are central in deciding how the couple and their personalities, identities or life style are displayed (e.g., Sniezek 2005). French studies on the transformation of wedding ceremonies during the past decades (Bozon 1992; Segalen 1997, 1998) have observed the invention of new ‘rituals’. People do not reproduce a single model but choose between several kinds of ceremonies or even create new ones (as in the case of inter-cultural weddings: Leeds-Hurwitz 2002).

Even though marriage is increasingly perceived as a choice, it remains, by nature, a social and familial institution. The fact that people can independently choose their partner and can choose whether to marry or not, or even the way they do so, does not mean that they are free from social and familial influence. With the concept of habitus, Pierre Bourdieu (1979) showed how people do what they are socially expected to do even if they think they act as individuals. According to him, marriage is a social, and in a sense, also a familial affair not because of the direct influence of family but through socialisation and transmission of habitus (Bourdieu 1972). We want to explore the extent to which weddings also continue to be such a social and familial event even if they have increasingly been presented with a strong emphasis on individualistic aspects. Individual choices are embedded in social constraints that are worth examining in order to understand how the individualisation of personal and intimate life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995) is compatible with social order.

In this article, we study weddings as significant events in which the intentions of young couples to celebrate their love and happiness are intertwined with the aims and aspirations of a wider circle of people, especially the parents of the couple. We focus on ‘white weddings’¹ and particularly on the guests participating in the festivities, an aspect that has largely been neglected in the research literature on weddings. Indeed, most of the studies emphasising the modernity of the ritual and its idiosyncratic grounding deal with the material aspects of the event, such as time schedule of the ceremony, the meal, type of dances, songs and the influence of movies. They pay little attention to the relational dimension of the ritual including the wedding guests.

A wedding marks a crossroads in life history: a new social unit starts to evolve (a couple as ‘us’ and a family² ) and two formerly separate networks become intertwined producing a shared marital network (Rands 1988). In addition to the couple, a larger group of people, especially the parents and other members of the immediate families, gets involved. How do they reconcile their different expectations? The organisation of a wedding provides an opportunity to analyse the balance between the interests of the couple versus those of their families. The composition of the guest list, the people who eventually get invited, is the product of negotiations encompassing social, financial, relational and familial constraints that we are interested to uncover.

The analysis of guests connects our study to the wider discussion on relationality in family sociology (Smart 2007a). This topical discussion emphasises the importance of the ties and relations in which people are embedded, in understanding family behaviour (Finch and Mason 2000; Mason 2004). The relational dimension of weddings studied through guests can be understood in the framework of the discussion recently advanced by Janet Finch (2007) on displaying family relationships. Displaying emphasises the fundamentally social nature of family practices: ‘the meaning of one's actions has to be both conveyed to and understood by relevant others if those actions are to be effective as constituting “family” practices’ (Finch 2007: 66). Finch argues that family and family relationships need to be continually displayed since they are subject to change over the life course. Children grow up, start an independent life, and the relationships between adult children and their parents, for example, need to be ‘re-established’.

The aim is to investigate the dynamics of the selection of wedding guests as relevant others, the negotiations involved, and to highlight the interplay between individual preferences and determinants that are more relational in origin. Young couples are very eager to choose the guests ‘by themselves’ in order to organise ‘their own’ wedding without any pressure from their families. However, very few couples want to celebrate their wedding without family members. Instead, their presence is taken for granted, as is their assistance in the preparations. The question, then, concerns the extent to which the families’ presence and contributions are required. By analysing guest selection – who young couples and parents want to invite and who eventually gets invited – we aim to explore the tension between couples’ desires and familial constraints, as the ones between individual choices and their social structuration. We investigate the outcome of negotiations and examine aspects related to social status and the respective socio-economic positions of the couples and their parents.

According to Currie (1993), wedding ceremonies communicate the meanings young couples give to marriage. A successful display of commitment is dependent on the attendance of the people significant to the couple. But who are these people? To whom do couples ‘communicate’ their commitment, display their personalities and identities and prepare a unique occasion? Not many answers are given in the research literature. According to Currie, they are mainly extended family members. In one French study, it is stated very generally that couple's friends have a growing importance in contemporary weddings but there is no quantification presented (Segalen 1997, 1998). The only case study of a wedding that deals with the issue in more detail (Delsaut 1976) describes the general social structure of the guest list but does not go further in the negotiation process.

Guest lists have not been studied with the attention they deserve. Our purpose is to develop and apply new methodological tools to study the lists systematically. To face the challenge of generalisation raised by qualitative methodology, we decided to explore a particular population that would allow comparison. Our study is restricted to heterosexual couples with mainstream cultural and ethnic backgrounds in France and Finland. The couples are in the same stage of life cycle, close to their 30s, which is the mean age at first marriage in France and Finland (see Appendix for respondent information). They live in urban localities (metropolitan Paris and Helsinki) and are marrying for the first time. All have lived together prior to the wedding (from 6 months to 6 years) and none of the couples have children. This ensures that they are comparable in terms of family status. Certain differences have been kept in the construction of the sample: national origin (six Finnish and six French³ ), different socioeconomic groups, although most of the respondents have a college or a higher education and only one French woman had no education after high school. The respondents were found⁴ through self-recruitment by various channels: internet discussion groups, religious functions, wedding boutiques, commercial exhibitions and snowballing.

The study is based on two kinds of data collected from 12 couples: comprehensive interviews carried out with bride and groom, and exhaustive information about the invited guests. The couple interviews (Allan 1980) focused on the wedding but other issues were also discussed, like the history of the couple's relationship and their reasons for getting married. The wedding preparations with respect to material and relational matters were covered, as well. For every topic the couple was asked who decides and with whom this particular issue has been discussed. The couples’ hesitations regarding the guest list, as well as their obligations, were discussed in detail. For the themes related to family members in particular, the fact that the couples were interviewed together proved highly advantageous. For example, some of the difficulties confronted would certainly have been left out in individual interviews without the presence of a partner who could bring up an incident or a quarrel in a casual way. All the interviews took place at the couple's home, and they lasted from 1.5 to 4 hours.

After the interviews, the couples filled in detailed questionnaires about themselves including personal and family background and the guests invited to the wedding. The questionnaires systematically include personal information (name, age, place of birth and residence, occupation and marital status), as well as relational information such as responses to the following questions: who invited this person, who met this person first, when and in what context, what is his/her relationship to the bride/groom and how often is this person met face to face or otherwise.

The 12 interviews and guest lists were analysed on the grounds of a relational (Smart 2007a) and configurational (Elias 1978 [1970]; Gribaudi 1998) perspective on social phenomena. In the context of weddings and marriage this means that instead of focusing solely on a specific dyad, couple relationship, we take into consideration the larger network of relationships in which the particular dyad is embedded (Widmer et al. 2008). We develop a relational approach that conflates sociological analysis grounded on personal interview data – where people talk about their relations – with a systematic investigation of those relations.

The interviews were analysed thematically by type and content of answers. The guest lists were analysed from several angles, the most central being each guest's relationship to the couple. The two lines of analysis – interviews and guest lists – reveal two perspectives on weddings which we set against each other. The dynamics of negotiations between the two spouses, as well as between the couple and their parents, become apparent in the differences in, on the one hand, the representation given by the couples about guest selection, and, on the other, the factual outcome revealed in exhaustive examination of the guest lists. The information collected with the questionnaires allows us to compare the said to the actualized selection of guests. A detailed analysis of the gap between the two, the possible disparity, offers an insight into the social constraints that delimit individual choices. This does not signify structural determinism, but rather an attempt to consider the agency of the individual couples in the configurational context of their social networks.

France and Finland make a good pair of countries to be studied, because they share significant similarities in the demographic trends related to couple formation and marriage.⁵ Despite the two locations and the cultural differences, our main goal is not to perform cross-national comparison or to detect differences between societies. The analysis has proceeded from case to case and in this sense the material has been treated as one data corpus. The main purpose of the article is to describe the micro-level dynamics concerning the relational aspects of weddings. In this respect the points of convergence are more salient than the differences. However, the cultural and national differences are acknowledged in the interpretation of results.

Weddings are composed of contradictory elements. On the one hand, a wedding day is a very personal, intimate matter that is supposed to fulfil a large variety of expectations associated with ‘the perfect day’ as an almost magical experience (Boden 2003; Otnes and Pleck 2003). This was apparent when the couples talked about their preferences concerning the various details of the celebrations. They sought to organise a wedding that ‘looked like them’, or as it was expressed in French ‘un mariage qui nous ressemble’ (Leeds-Hurwitz 2002; Otnes and Pleck 2003: 263; Maillochon 2009). It was clearly expressed that the couple claimed ‘ownership’ of the occasion; it is their wedding, not their parents’, for example. On the other hand, a wedding is also a celebration arranged for the guests. This found expression in many remarks showing concern for the tiniest detail that would make the wedding guests truly enjoy the party. The couples took notice of various details in order to ensure that everything would go smoothly. Bride and groom were eager to solve potential conflicts and acted as mediators between the two families. In order to understand the balance between these contradicting elements, it is worthwhile to investigate the process of inviting in detail.

In the questionnaires the couples were asked to report every guest, and the person who had invited the guest. The alternatives were: the bride, the groom, the bride's family, the groom's family, or a combination of these. The French and Finnish couples were quite unanimous on this matter: it is primarily the couple who invites most of the guests and only a minority of them were reported to have been invited by the families. This is in line with the impression given in the interviews that it is ‘our wedding’ and that they do not let anybody else decide on their behalf. For example, Arja, a Finnish nurse, talks about the discussions with her mother who actively sought to influence the guest list. The couple did not agree to include all her proposed guests because ‘it's our wedding not hers’. Eventually Arja and her groom Joonatan (a PhD student and entrepreneur) assented to her mother's wishes and invited six guests ‘as a compromise’, people whom they only invited ‘because mom so wanted it’.

The French couples were slightly more inclined to name certain guests to be invited by their families than the Finnish. Though most of them declared that they invited everybody, even the parents’ friends or acquaintances, some of the couples reported that certain guests were invited solely by their parents. The different role of family in the guest selection in France and Finland could be related to the tradition of the French ‘faire-part’. A traditional ‘faire-part’ is a formal printed card in which the parents and the grandparents of both the bride and the groom announce the wedding of their son or daughter and indicate the date and place of the religious ceremony. This type of ‘faire-part’ is still in use among the higher social classes whereas others modify the design and the content to suit their personal taste and style.

Also in traditional Finnish weddings, the couple's parents, especially those of the bride, had a central position in arrangements: they paid for the party and acted as the hosts. The parents of the bride, or of both partners, may still be marked in the cards as those making the invitation. This, however, is often a mere formality. A variety of practices are nowadays in use, and young couples are increasingly replacing the parents as focal actors.

This brings us to the question of financial dependencies between the couples and their parents. According to a recent British study (Jones et al.2006) parents nowadays have more power to influence their adult children's lives due to the fact that partnership and household formation often occur before young adults have achieved economic independence. There were no signs of this type of pressure in our data, since all the couples were economically independent. However, the wedding expenses were often shared with the parents. In the Finnish data set, there is only one case where all the expenses were covered by the bride's parents, which is the most traditional way. One Finnish couple (Kirsi and Timo) paid for everything by themselves: Timo, a business consultant, used an extra bonus from his employer to pay for their wedding. In four Finnish cases the expenses were shared between the couple and the two sets of parents. The bride's family used to be responsible for the expenses in France too, but today it is customary for the bride's and groom's parents to pay for their respective family members and for the couple to pay for their friends. There are exceptions to this pattern in our data: the parents of Veronique and Brice (a technician and an IT professional) did not have the financial resources needed, so the couple took a loan to pay for the whole party and to be able to do what they really wanted.

The fact that parents were contributing financially was often noted in the interviews. The way expenses were shared did not, however, influence the negotiations about guests or the arrangements in a uniform way. Only in those cases where the couple did not pay anything or their share of expenses was notably smaller than that of their parents did the bride and groom bring up the money issue as an explanation or as a legitimate reason for parents to have a say in the arrangements’ details. Moreover, many of the parents also paid for their children's friends without having much more influence in their choice (Maillochon 2002). Tensions related to the selection of guests cannot be traced to the financial ‘contract’, because they emerge also when the couple takes care of all or most of the expenses, like in the French case of Veronique and Brice and the Finnish case of Kirsi and Timo.

One of the central questions dealing with guest selection has to do with the share of kin versus non-kin in guest lists. In the rest of the analysis section we will concentrate on this matter and analyse the guest selection from two perspectives. First, we focus on family members and relatives versus non-kin, such as friends, acquaintances and colleagues etc, and second, we analyse the origin of the relationships in the non-kin category of guests.

The young couples had ambiguous views about family. On the one hand they presented families as a constraint in organising the wedding, while on the other hand it was taken for granted that close family members should be present. The invited family members and relatives were the members of the couple's childhood families, the spouses and children of siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and sometimes even more distant relatives such as second cousins. It is important to note that there was considerable tension attached to inviting kin.

When the wedding guests were discussed on a general level in the interviews, some couples referred to relatives, especially those outside their childhood family, with expressions that indicated a lack of interest. It was as if – in some cases – there existed some kind of resentment towards relatives as a category, more impersonal than personal, which threatened to ‘invade’ something that was conceived by the couple as their ‘own’. It is important to note that this resentment or guardedness rarely targeted any specific kin. When this attitude was expressed, the respondents often used the plural form and spoke in very general terms stressing the width and almost uncontrollable size of the group. For example, a Finnish bride, Kirsi, spoke about ‘all the aunts and uncles’ which in Finnish – as well as in French and Anglo-American – kinship terminology includes a wide group of people.

Tension was particularly clear in those cases where the couple had a large circle of friends that they would have liked to invite instead of many relatives. All the Finnish couples expressed how important it was for everyone they considered close and significant to attend the wedding, be it friends or family. However, especially the wider kin have in this sense lost ground in favour of friends, and many couples talked about their desire to invite friends rather than relatives. For example, the above quoted bride Kirsi mentioned that the one thing she would absolutely not tolerate in her wedding was a guest list that included no friends but only ‘relatives that are total strangers’. Kirsi and her groom Timo, a business consultant, did not invite all the aunts and uncles but only those whom they ‘liked’. A French couple, Claire and Thomas (a biologist and an information officer), were also careful to invite only those relatives they felt close to in the context of a very large and quite complicated family. In this family configuration, both the bride's grandparents and parents had been divorced and had children from several unions.

In order to avoid the invasion of the family that threatens the couple's autonomy, bride and groom had to be selective in their choice. This kind of orientation ran through the interview with Kirsi and Timo, for example, who conveyed a very strong sense of the couple's individual preferences and autonomy. They were preparing a wedding which – to their mind – differed considerably from those ‘family reunion’ types of weddings that bring together people from different generations. Kirsi and Timo's impression of their future wedding, shared with many other couples, was that there should be ‘only really few’ relatives.

The comparison between the social representations of the family given in the interviews and the actual guest lists highlights the conflicting choices faced by these couples, between what they wanted to do and what the social or familial traditions expected of them. For example, Kirsi and Timo said there would be only very few relatives, whereas in fact 43 percent of their guests were family members and kin (see Table 1). Marja (a Finnish producer in marketing) and her groom Aleksi (sales agent) mentioned that they would have ‘quite a lot more friends than relatives in the wedding’ (Marja), whereas in fact 49 percent of their actual guests were family and kin and 51 percent others. Likewise French couples like Claire and Thomas (a biologist and an information officer) and Veronique and Brice (a technician and an IT professional) showed great discrepancies between the number of kin invited and what they said in the interviews.

In the sample, kin members represented no less than one in three guests and no more than two in three (Table 1). Contrary to the impression given in the interviews, family members and relatives were quite important wedding participants. They composed a significant proportion of the wedding guests.

Couples’ attitudes towards family as well as the family structure may explain part of the variation. For example, Sara and Jouni, a Finnish university student and a priest, seemed to take it for granted that all the aunts and uncles as well as cousins were to be invited and they set the limit there: ‘the cousins, that's where the fun ends’ (Jouni; 73 percent kin). Fabienne, a French secretary, who came from a traditional, catholic and rural family in which a wedding was still conceived primarily as a family festivity, invited no less than 60 relatives (i.e., 74 percent of guests). In these cases the large number of family members (immediate or extended) was seen neither as a threat nor as a financial problem; the wedding offered an opportunity for the family to realize itself.

The data suggest that the threat of a family invasion felt by the couple is not linked to the actual family size. In some cases large traditional families are cut off and limited sized kin groups included. For example, despite the expectations of both their families from the traditional French bourgeoisie, Marie and Christophe (a PhD student and a sales representative) decided to arrange a rather small wedding and invited only 29 relatives (45 percent of guests) out of a very large family configuration. On the other hand, Diane, a French bride and a legal advisor, who had no close family because of the recent death of her parents and who appeared quite family-resistant in the interview, had a considerable proportion of kin guests (52 percent) at her wedding. This is because the couple invited the parents and other relatives of her brother-in-law as a ‘famille de remplacement’ (substitute family).

The proportion of kin guests cannot be explained only by value orientations or size of family. It also has to do with the couples’ opportunities to invite other guests. The social position of the family and of the couple may offer another explanation. It has been observed that class positions are characterised by different types of social orientation favouring interaction either with kin or with friends (e.g., Allan 1998; Melkas 2003): kin play a more significant role in working-class life than amongst the middle class, for whom friendship with non-kin seems important (Allan 1998: 73). In a French study it was found out that the intertwining of kin and non-kin relations is greater among people who remain in the same social ‘milieu’ as their parents, whereas the kin and non-kin circles were much more separate in the networks of people who had experienced upward social mobility (Gribaudi 1998). In our sample, people who had the same (usually high) social position as their parents invited proportionally more non-kin guests than kin (see Figure 1). Respectively, the couples who had been socially mobile and had a higher socio-economic status than their parents, invited more kin than non-kin guests, possibly because they shared less friend relationships with their parents (Maillochon 2002, forthcoming).

In addition to explicit reservations towards family members and relatives there were also opposite perspectives in the data, reflecting the difficulties involved with getting the whole family together. Preparations for a wedding may revive an old quarrel or a division in the family. Even if Claire and Thomas were very selective among their large restructured family, Thomas (a French information officer) was quite disappointed because he could not invite his grandmother and his sister from whom his mother was estranged. Thomas had to choose between his mother and them. Finally, he accepted that ‘he should be happy if his mother agreed to attend the wedding’. Even if another French couple, Veronique and Brice, were very eager to limit the number of family guests, Brice complained about failing to revive the relationship with his father he had not seen for 20 years and who refused to come. In addition, some French couples talked about the difficulties in having both of their divorced parents at the wedding, especially if they had remarried (Maillochon 2009).

Ambivalence towards relatives is apparent. What makes family members and relatives threatening as a category, or on the contrary, as desirable at the wedding, is the fact that these people are indeed meaningful to the couple's parents. The parents, sometimes grandparents and the mothers of the bride and groom in particular were the people the couple needed to negotiate with. Women, as mothers, wives, and grandmothers, have a central role in Western kinship systems as kin keepers taking charge of social activities and ties (Bott 1971 [1957]; Di Leonardo 1987). They can act as gatekeepers, as in the above example of Claire and Thomas. Their case illustrates very clearly the relational constraint that affected the selection of guests: Thomas could not choose guests freely, the relationship between him and his mother dictated the selection of guests instead. A less strained case was presented by Jaakko (a Finnish manager), who was in disagreement with his mother about whether or not his cousin should be invited. It was evident in the interview that acting against one's mother's will was by no means simple; Jaakko was convinced that he was entitled to leave the cousin out, but at the same time he acknowledged his mother's opposite view. In fact it was left open in the interview whether the cousin would be invited after all.

It is important to note that certain family ties are more influential than others (Castrén 2008) in the invitation process. Couples did not act in a vacuum but were embedded in configurations of relationships that constrained action (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994). In addition to a logic deriving from individual preferences, there was a configurational logic affecting the guest selection process. The most important relationships mediate the selection of guests. Typically parents hold such a position.

In all cases, friends and acquaintances of the couples constituted the majority of the non-kin guests (from 57 to 100 percent; see Table 2). However, it is important to note that nearly all weddings included at least a few guests linked to the childhood family of the bride or groom, and who were in principle more the parents’ than the couple's friends. There was a lot of variation in this matter, but only two couples (one Finnish and one French) did not invite any family friends. Nevertheless, this group of wedding guests is highly interesting, because their presence is in conflict with the couple's strong emphasis on ‘our wedding’.

For the bride and groom, the friends of their parents, whom they have known since childhood, are more given than chosen in the same sense as kin ties (Carsten 2004). As such, they compose a category of quasi-kin which reinforces the character of the wedding as a familial occasion but with some modifications in France and Finland. The boundaries between kin and non-kin were not always clear. This group of wedding guests appeared to be proportionally more important in the French cases. The group composition was quite different too.

The Finnish couple with the highest proportion of family friends, Sara and Jouni (a university student and a priest) invited 11 persons linked to Jouni's family since his childhood. This group was composed of two families, the families of Jouni's godparents, whom he had known all his life. Jouni did not consider his godparents as emotionally very close; nevertheless he would meet them in family gatherings approximately once a year. The children of the godparents were met more often.

Also in the Finnish cases of Suvi and Jaakko (a waitress and a manager), Arja and Joonatan (a nurse and a PhD student/entrepreneur) and Minna and Toni (a HR coach and a marketing director) the godparents and their families were among the non-kin guests who, from the point of view of the bride and groom, were more given than chosen. The presence of godparents in weddings is very typical in Finland. The parents choose godparents to their children among kin or friends, and even in the latter case they get integrated to the family circle (Castrén and Lonkila 2004). Such a category of people can be characterised with a term proposed by Spencer and Pahl (2006: 112), ‘chosen-as-given’, which refers to friendship that has become family-like in the sense that, first, there exists a sense of obligation, second, the relationship is of importance and third, it is long-lasting. From the couple's point of view, however, there has been no choice; their parents made the decision on godparents.

The importance of godparents did not appear as clear in the French cases. This may be because they were often family members (parents’ siblings in most cases) and thus present in the other category of wedding guests (as was also the case with two Finnish couples, Marja and Aleksi, and Kirsi and Timo). In the French sample, the number of family friends had more to do with the parents’ social status with respect to their children's. Parents’ friends or acquaintances seemed to be particularly welcome when they represented the higher social class, but in other cases their number was reduced. There were a few exceptions, however, in the cases of rural middle or working class. If the wedding took place in a small town where the parents had a large local network of contacts and ties, the proportion of family friends was higher (Maillochon 2002). Nevertheless, most of the couples tried to restrict the proportion of family acquaintances in their wedding in order to control the selection of guests and the image they had of their wedding. Veronique and Brice (technician and IT professional), for example, did not accept any family friends to the party, which they wanted to be very ‘chic’ despite their modest background: her mother did not work and her father was a manual worker, while his mother was a school teacher and father did not have a current job or profession. All the French interviews gave examples of tensions between couples and their parents whenever the two no longer represented the same social class. The couples talked about their efforts to reduce their parents’ guests.

However, in certain circumstances family friends were warmly welcomed; for example, Guilaine and Paul, a sales person and an engineer, whose wedding was attended by many friends of the bride's parents (43 percent of non-kin guests). The bride's parents invited more friends than the groom's mother (his parents were separated) because of the local setting of the wedding, in the home town of the bride's parents. But as Guilaine's accounts made clear, the presence of these non-kin guests was important also for distinction purposes (Bourdieu 1979): her parents’ friends represented the local intellectual bourgeoisie with whom she wanted to maintain contact since her own social position was not that secure.

The different ways of negotiating familial friends in France and Finland may be related to the particularities of the stratification system in the two societies. As Alapuro (1998) has noted, Finnish society is characterised by a considerable degree of upward social mobility and class boundaries which are not tightly crystallised, while the social layers in French society are more separate as well as culturally more distinct. In this respect French society can be characterised by stability whereas Finnish society has undergone several transitions during the past century (ibid.). When there is a high degree of social mobility in society, family background diminishes in importance and the achieved educational and economical status become more important. This may partly explain why the social class of parents seems more important in defining social status in France than in Finland. It is also visible in the selection of wedding guests whose social class gains more importance in France than in Finland.

In this article we have analysed weddings and the selection of wedding guests from a relational perspective and investigated the extent to which contemporary weddings can still be conceived as a familial affair. When discussing their future weddings, French and Finnish couples alike developed a highly individualistic discourse that emphasised their individual choice as a couple in organising their own wedding. This celebration was expected to display their lifestyle and individual identity: the couples aimed to hold a wedding that truly resembled them.

Despite this clearly stated ambition to display the individual preferences of the couple, weddings turned out to be a fundamentally familial event. The couples’ choices were embedded in family networks which could not be ignored in a ritual that essentially builds on ideas of commitment, love and on the centrality of the family as one of the most important sanctuaries in the contemporary world (Gillies 1996). A wedding is culturally such a meaningful moment that the presence of at least some kin seems almost unavoidable (Smart 2007b: 693).

These somewhat diverging elements – a wedding as an expression of the couple's individuality and as a social event that the couple wants to share with others – can be understood in relation to the importance of displaying family relationships (Finch 2007). What is of relevance here is Finch's claim that relationships need to be displayed in order to have social reality (ibid.: 73). At their wedding bride and groom present their relationship and their identity as two people committed to each other. But as Finch notes, the meaning of one's actions must also be understood by relevant others (ibid.: 66). Thus, only a wedding that is attended by the people who are significant to the couple offers the circumstances for this realisation. Only people close to the couple, family members, friends and acquaintances, who have known bride and groom previously including the earlier developments of their relationship, ‘qualify’, because they are the people who can acknowledge the commitment as a new step taken. By organising a wedding and inviting friends and family to participate, the couple ensures that their reconfigured relationship is recognised. This also explains the fervour in defence of ‘their wedding’: the young couple aims to define their relevant others independently.

The empirical analysis of the guest lists compared with the interviews revealed that despite the strong emphasis expressed by couples on their own choices and preferences, they had to negotiate with other people, especially with their parents. A considerable proportion of wedding guests were members of the extended family and some even parents’ friends rather than the couple's. This leads us to the interpretation that despite the contemporary and individualistic meanings attached to weddings, they are still – to a considerable extent – familial celebrations.

The couples hold highly ambivalent views concerning family. The cases in which they had difficulties in bringing together all significant family members, and those in which the couple had to negotiate the selection of guests with a key person, like the bride's or groom's mother, revealed that in addition to individual preferences, there is a configurational logic influencing the relational outcome of weddings. This logic is modulated by different orientations held by the couples towards family as well as by the importance of social class, distinction and social mobility.

Weddings are unique occasions whereby the choices made by a particular couple with regards to their relationship are condensed into a single event. A lot of information collapses into a brief occurrence and the decisions made for a wedding often foreshadow the decisions to be made for the marriage (Leeds-Hurwitz 2002: 10). Our impression is that the individual and the familial (or social) are not alternatives in the lives of young couples, whether regarding a wedding or marriage, but rather real life ‘injunctions’ composing one of the paradoxes people are forced to live with. The particular injunction or paradox incarnated in the configuration of relations in which young couples are embedded can be understood as fateful; it is something difficult to escape from. Contemporary weddings express the transformation of family. They are less traditional and more elective. This does not, however, mean that the couples are free to choose whatever wedding they like. Constraints do not disappear, they are reconfigured.

Anna-Maija Castrén is Research Fellow (Ph.D. in sociology) at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki. Her research themes include social networks, friendship, family transition and post-divorce family configurations.

Florence Maillochon is a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS – Centre Maurice Halbwachs – ERIS) in Paris. She studies different topics from a relational perspective (using social network concepts), such as youth sexuality and risk behaviours as well as French wedding ceremonies. She also works in gender studies with production of statistics on violence against women.