For the past two Tuesday nights, our class has been attending “host family” dinners with Danish families located around Copenhagen. These dinners gave us a chance to not only have an amazing home cooked meal, but also gain some insight on what the typical family culture is like here in Copenhagen.
Now, while there are many similarities between the family environment here and what I grew up with, one of the main differences I discovered was our views on marriage. In the US, it is the norm (though this of course changes depending on area) that two people will date, marry and then have children. During my first host dinner here though, I learned that in Copenhagen, many couples chose to not marry or marry after they have kids. While many US couples marry because they are in love and see marriage as a way to publicly display that, couples here may chose to marry simply because of tax reasons or for custody reasons.In my mind, this seemed like the exact opposite of the normal US custom to get married but wait a few years to have children.
At first, I thought that this was strange and almost illogical- if you have already have children and know that you’re going to be spending you life together, why don’t you just get married? My host family explained that here, marriage is seen more as a government document, not a declaration of your love for another person.
In the specific family I was with, they had two children around 20 and 25 but the parents only got married 10 years ago. The mother said that they finally chose to “get hitched” when her husband was going on a trip, but the daughter quickly commented that it was also because her mom found a cheap wedding dress on sale. Their ceremony took place in their house with only a few friends and their children. This sounded more like a small get together than the extravagant family weddings I had grown up with.
In the US, the average wedding has around 120 guests and costs weeding nearly $27,000. Now weddings are amazing events to attend and they allow the bride and groom a chance to celebrate their love and party the night away with their friends, but $27,000 for one night of fun is a ton of money! I’m not saying that I don’t expect to have a fun wedding in my future, but I do understand the appeal of a typical Danish wedding and saving my money for another purpose.
Now there are of course many other interesting differences between a Copenhagen family and an American one. I think I found the varying views on marriage particularly interesting because in the US, marriage seems to be such a fundamental part of family culture. Here though, the focus seems be more on growing as a family before attempting to involve the government in their relationships.