One Size Does Not Fit All: Ogden on Tying the Georgian Knot

OPED

Last week, I married the best person I’ve ever known. A cardiologist who knows everything there is to know about medicine, a classical guitarist who abandoned a musical career in favour of medicine (all this at 26, mark you), with a sense of humour and kindly demeanour...honestly, there are moments when I wonder if I’m plugged into The Matrix. To cap it all, she could try for Vogue this minute or cause a riot in a monastery just by walking past. In short, to quote my step-father, she has the message for the chaps.

My lady wife being of mixed Georgian/Russian/Ukrainian heritage and I being an Englishman whose snobbery would do credit to a penniless Spanish aristocrat, our wedding was not a traditional Georgian affair, bar the church ceremony.

I enjoyed the church rather more than I thought I would do; the ceremony is spooky in a pleasant sort of way, but in truth I liked it mostly because a crown was put over my head at some point, which I thought was most appropriate and about damn time (though they took it away at the end, which irked me). The priest, however, was not on form. While I’m sure the delivery of his prayers was fine as he beseeched the Almighty that Ogden will not make too much of a beast of himself on the honeymoon, and that Ogden’s vouchers for booking.com will still be valid (though he could have been saying “Microsoft laptops for sale!” for all I know), he said something to my wife that angered me later when I was told of it. Apparently, while making sure the crown fit around our heads, he grunted to my wife, ‘Why are all the beautiful Georgian girls marrying foreigners?’

Georgian females marrying foreigners produces a mixed reaction in this country, and both have their roots in the behaviour of Georgian men. I have never been in another country wherein the conduct of the males is openly referred to and derided by females of the same nationality; you will never find English women talking about ‘English men’ or their American cousins complaining about ‘American dudes’. Oh, they’ll moan about men (and who can blame them?), but always men in general, rather than the males of their own country. Georgian women, however, openly talk about ‘Georgian men’ and not only when foreigners are present: they have much the same discussions with other Georgian women in private (or so I’m told). Odder still is that the negative reputation of Georgian men amongst both Georgian and foreign women is so at odds with the boast that Georgian males are the greatest lovers and best husbands of the former Soviet Union and, indeed, the world. It all amounts to a phenomena I’ve never experienced elsewhere. I’d have thought two such drastically different perceptions of the same thing in the same place might have caused one or t’other to die out.

For our wedding, we both vetoed the presence of a tamada in favour of speeches in the Western style. This was viewed as unwise by some of my wife’s family, though the younger members were all for it. I have written elsewhere of my dislike of the tamada’s toasts, which seem to me to be repetitive at best and insincere at worst, a view which is seemingly shared by a large part of Georgia’s youth. Having to stand up, stop eating and listen every ten minutes as the tamada starts to talk again make eating hard and conversation even harder. Besides which, the droning voice makes the whole affair rather sombre and not at all fun, though I fancy this is an inherent problem with the supra as a one-size-fits-all celebration for weddings, funerals, birthdays and the purchase of an iPhone.

After one prepared speech, a few people from my family and friends got up and said things, all of which were heartfelt, different and rather touching. I also said a piece myself, though I can’t for the life of me think what it was about now, and although I remember wanting to seem suave and sophisticated like David Niven, I suspect I looked far more like the Charlie Sheen of 2011.

My advice to anyone planning to get married; plan it yourself, without the interference of well-meaning relatives and friends, and keep the decent traditions while abandoning the tedious and trivial. Above all, only aim to do it once, and avoid the mistake of marrying just so that you can play two-backed beastie; nobody (not even Georgians) need a ring to do that.

Tim Ogden