Bruce Feiler

And I said, how did this happen?

And she said, because I went online.

And like a lot of women in the early days of the internet, and I said, my husband's doing this and my husband is doing that.

And I feel ashamed and confused.

And other women said, well, that's happening to me.

Older women got on and said, yeah, my husband did that too.

And I sort of kept it to myself.

And the empowerment of being on the internet and feeling confidence is a lot of what's created these, what I call new rituals around the world.

And so it's a way of saying, we're going to take even this thing that is difficult and we are going to turn it into a ritual.

It's not a celebration.

of what happened, but it's a celebration of the community that will help you get through it.

And I wanna say a couple of things in response to that.

The most important thing and the first thing I will say is that pre-scripted foreign language rituals are, that's exactly what people are rebelling against in a lot of ways.

And yet there is, as you say, a kind of comfort and meaning in those rituals.

I talked to a woman, she started something called the Purple Pundit Project.

which actually hosts non-traditional Hindu weddings and in many cases for LGBTQ families.

And she said, you know, the most important guests at the wedding in a lot of ways are not the couple or not even the parents, it's the aunties.

And she said that a successful ritual has to pass the auntie sniff test.

And I like crazy love this.

She's like, it can't be so new that it doesn't have some of the trappings of an old ritual in order to feel like a ritual.