What if you were told at your wedding that you won’t spend the night with your wife? What will you do? Will you patient enough to wait the following day?
What better time is there for the honoring of long-held traditions than at one’s wedding? It is a time of family, celebration, and the joining together of two families.
This momentous occasion in life is marked by many rituals that we are familiar with, such as the carrying of the bride over the threshold, the clinking of glasses to get the
happy couple to kiss at the reception, and the bride walking down the aisle with something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
Around the world, however, marriage customs are taken to a level that some of us would consider a little cuckoo. Varying religious beliefs, culture, and history have produced very different sorts of traditions when it comes to a wedding.
In the coastal Atlantic country of Namibia in Northwest Africa, the bride and groom spend the first night after the wedding ceremony is performed separately from each other. A Namibian wedding is characterized by everyone being invited, henna art, killing livestock to be eaten, lots of music and dancing, and food, food, and more food.
It sounds like an all-around good time, right? Well, imagine if, at the end of it all, you had to go home like every other night of your life and wait another whole day before actually spending the night as husband and wife.
After wedding
preparations that can take up to a year in Namibia, and after all the excitement of the wedding itself, the bride and groom are technically husband and wife but spend one more night apart.
The second night after the ceremony they may spend together, but shockingly, the marriage is not even considered official until the woman has given birth to her second child!
