Luxe Bridal Boutique - Wedding Dresses

I've written before about the seemingly contrasting messages we offer to young people in church about sex and sexuality:

Sex is dirty; save it for someone you marry someday.

Umm, what? Granted, we walk a narrow rhetorical tightrope when discussing sex with our kids. If we tell them it's actually pretty awesome, and then tell them they can't do it, that's a setup for failure. On the other hand, if we focus on the negatives, we risk scarring and shaming them into a life of emotional conflict and struggle when it comes to sexual intimacy.

What we end up with, often times, is a vacuous silence when it comes to the real, difficult issues of sexual identity, impulse and expression. Add to that the Christian emphasis on marriage, and the result in many cases is scads of unhealthy, sexually awkward young people, married far too early with no idea why.

I was interviewed recently by Chelsea Batten for an article on virginity in Converge Magazine (yes, they wanted my opinion on virginity, what of it?), and she asked me about my take on the Church's approach to the matter. This, excerpted from her full article, linked above:

"I think we sometimes conflate institutional systems and structures, and covenant with God, to the point that we believe that signing a marriage license is God's intention." This from Christian Piatt, an author and blogger with Patheos andThe Good Men Project.

"You can be married and use someone," he points out. "You can devalue and denigrate someone without ever touching them. You can abuse someone sexually without ever having sex with them."

He reviles the setting of arbitrary sexual boundaries as a means of emotional and spiritual protection in sexual relationships. "Hand jobs okay, intercourse not" is, he says, a Pharisaical reduction of the law to its letter. It preserves personal gratification, rather than reverence for the other person and their body, as the goal of a sexual relationship.

Marriage, says Mr. Piatt, is no magic pill for a righteous sexual relationship. The end of the matter, he says, is being able to say to your partner "'I'm doing this out of love and respect and reverence for you.'"

This isn't to say that the notion of romantic love -- and as sex being used to express such love -- was nonexistent. One doesn't have to look any further than Song of Solomon in Scripture for evidence of so much. But whereas sex in today's western culture has taken on so very much with regard to power, identity, personal worth and more, it was mostly about baby-making back in the good old days.

Now, the average age for marriage (compared with 12 to 14 back in the day) has stretched into the mid- to late-20s, with many waiting until their 30s to tie the knot. And though it's tantamount to heresy to say so, we Christians are stuck in large part in the ancient understanding of what it means to be married. Keep in mind, however, that back in those times, it was also thought that the man held the entire human embryo in his semen, and that women merely carried the seed planted in them (patriarchy alert!), and that a man was bound to marry his sister-in law if his brother died. There were even rules about sex with slaves, so let's not go too deeply with our infatuation with "biblical marriage," shall we?

All of this is a rather roundabout way to suggest that our inability to engage a real, contemporary discussion about sex, sexuality and marriage reduces the terribly complex landscape of human intimacy to the same old silver-bullet panacea that marriage fixes everything. Wait until you're married, and then you'll magically know how to treat someone's body with love and respect, and how to express yourself in a way that honors the covenant binding two people together (in theory) for the rest of their lives.

And where, pray tell, does this flash of knowledge come from? God? If so, why is the divorce rate 42 percent among Christians? And what about this statement from the head of one of the leading religious research bodies in the world today:

"While it may be alarming to discover that born-again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time," said George Barna, president of Barna Research Group.

We preach that marriage fixes everything, from sexual infidelity to general moral decline in our culture. But it hasn't, and the way we teach about it, it won't. And it's not marriage's fault. I think it has more to do with what we understand marriage to be than anything else.

When we talk about being a Christian as principally being about the moment at which you accept Jesus as your savior (if you believe that is necessary), we do a disservice to every day that follows, in which the path toward Christ gets nothing but harder. Likewise, when we focus our attention about marriage on the act of getting married, as if some magical mojo rained down from the sky to help us honor that covenant forever after, we're being just as naive and foolish. We're setting up our young people for failure, primarily because focusing on getting them married (so we don't have to talk about sex) is a hell of a lot easier than helping them stay that way.

Want to get married like Elizabeth Taylor? Now you can!

The dress Taylor wore at her first wedding, to hotel heir Conrad Hilton in 1950, will be auctioned by Christie's in London next month, Reuters reported Friday.

The dress was designed by film costume designer Helen Rose and was a gift from MGM studios. It is estimated to be worth about $75,000.

Here's Taylor and Hilton on their wedding day:

According to the Daily Mail, the dress had a 20-inch waist when then-18-year-old Taylor wore it, but has since been let out to 22 inches.

Taylor and Hilton split eight months after the wedding, and Taylor went on to marry an additional seven times. Click through the slideshow below for details on all eight of Taylor's weddings.

Keep in touch! Check out HuffPost Weddings on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

My wife and I don't have a lot of great wedding photos. From our own wedding that is.

Just as everyone else, we were trying to be budget-conscious and I was just beginning my career as a wedding photographer when Brenda and I got married. I thought, well, we'll hire someone cheap and I'll just compensate for whatever shortfalls the photographer has since I will be taking photos as well. That was probably the only regret from our wedding day. I did take some photos, but there is only so much you can do before the bride says, "OK, you have to be in front of the camera, not behind it." And we did get the photos back from our photographer, but they were only mediocre at best; they covered all of the basics, but certainly weren't anything spectacular.

So, fast forward a few years and I am now a full-time wedding photographer living in San Francisco who shoots close to 40 weddings every year. Brenda and are always on the lookout for new and creative ideas and one day it just hit us. Why don't we go somewhere really picturesque and compensate for the uninspiring photos we got from our wedding day. We still have the dress, still have the bride, we have lots of camera equipment and infinitely more knowledge about wedding photography than we did back then. It was settled, we booked our trip the same night.

We started out in Las Vegas. The flights were cheap (although the food was horribly expensive), but we weren't there to stay, we rented a car and drove through Nevada, Arizona, and eventually ended up in the gorgeous state of Utah with Bryce Canyon being our first stop. I could not believe how fearless my wife was as she put her dress on and went out on that ledge. I took a few frames and rushed back to get her, that was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

I'm happy to say that the rest of the trip was a lot less scary. We've hit snow, got lost in the desert sand, had a chance to shoot at Canyonlands, climbed a mile to the top of Arches National Park, discovered the stunning Valley of Fire in Nevada and ended back in Vegas where all I wanted to do all night was look through the photos I've taken throughout the trip.

It was exactly what we wanted and so much more. We now have some gorgeous photos of Brenda in her dress, but most importantly we have something no one else does. I look through hundreds of thousands of wedding photos every year and I've never seen anything like these. I'm willing to go pretty far to set the bar higher for all of us and hey, it doesn't hurt if I end up with some beautiful photos of my wife in the process.

There is one piece of advice that I took away from this whole experience. Invest in memories. The food will be gone, the music will fade and flowers will wither, but the photos of you and your loved ones on one of the most special days of your lives will last forever.

Please feel free to check out my full wedding portfolio at my website (www.redspherestudios.com) and follow me on Facebook.

After a two-year engagement, Anna Bankes and Justin Neis finalized their wedding date (July 13) and venue (Spirit of Life Catholic Church in North Dakota). There was just one problem: their pastor refused to marry them.

Bankes, 42, has intellectual disabilities and is at the developmental stage of a 15-year-old, and Neis, 33, has physical disabilities that require him to use a wheelchair, they told the Bismark Tribune Thursday. They said their pastor, Rev. Chris Kadrmas, told them he wanted them to wait to get married because he didn't think they were ready yet.

Kadrmas said it wouldn't necessarily be impossible for them to marry, but that he wanted them to take more time to make sure they are prepared. He suggested that Neis, who lives in a separate apartment in his parents' house, move to a group home for six months to a year first.

The couple plans to marry at a different church this summer.

Earlier this month, another disabled couple who had been denied the right to live together in a group home was offered an apartment at a different group home.

Find out some of the country's strangest marriage laws in the slideshow below.

Keep in touch! Check out HuffPost Weddings on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

To participate in a mass marriage ceremony in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh on Monday, there was just one requirement for grooms-to-be: prove they owned a toilet.

In an effort to improve sanitation (India's 2011 census revealed that less than half of Indian homes had a toilet), the local government required any groom who wished to participate in Monday's mass marriage ceremony to send a photo of themselves with their toilet, or prove their intent to install one within 30 days of their wedding, the Times of India reported Tuesday.

The initiative is part of the state's Mukhyamantri Kanyadan Yojna (MKY), a program launched in 2006 to help poor women marry. Under the MKY, the state pays for couples to participate in mass marriage ceremonies and awards them housewarming gifts worth 15,000 rupees ($270), according to Slate.

The toilet requirement, which requires groom to prove that their homes contain a toilet in order to receive the MKY benefits, was added in 2011. More than 1,700 couples have married under the MKY this year, according to The Wall Street Journal. One hundred eighty-four couples participated in Monday's ceremony.

In addition to hygienic concerns, MKY attempts to address the problem of women and girls being raped when they go out to relieve themselves in the open (especially in the early morning or late evening). The BBC reported earlier this month that 400 women would have "escaped" rape last year if they had a toilet in their home.

Test your knowledge of marriage around the world with the quiz below.

Keep in touch! Check out HuffPost Weddings on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.