Thanks! We got married this past August.
I only realized that ‘met by’ wasn’t actually English until I was in college. (Sometimes, I really miss the happy Jewish smiley face.) I’ve spent my whole life ‘eating by’ or ‘staying by’ so-and-so, which I guess goes to show you the power of dialect.
The points Shayna raises are definitely true. While I don’t know exactly what she’s imagining of me (I’ve found that most people picturing ‘Orthodox woman’ picture an older Hasidic woman, dressed in a particular, hyper-modest style, with a dozen children, no education, and a Yiddish accent, none of which are true of me), she and I probably approach religion quite differently, and therefore would look at a ketuba very differently. While I would go through a civil court as well as a religious one in the case that I were (God forbid) getting divorced, I considered the religious wedding ceremony the ‘real’ one, and wouldn’t have thought of myself as married without a ketuba. (We didn’t actually get our civil marriage license signed and mailed out until we’d been married for about a month - many Orthodox Jews are fairly casual about getting civilly married, with most bothering to do so eventually, but they’ll manipulate the timing for convenience, such as tax purposes, getting out of university housing requirements, or when they get a chance to get to city hall. I’ve known people who got civilly married earlier/later for each.) So for me, the ketuba is primarily the thing by which I got married, and has more religious than sentimental significance. (I suppose I get sentimental about my wedding ring, which I wear even while sleeping, although technically it’s also something that allowed me to get married religiously.) I would have liked to have a pretty one not so much because it would have been a romantic symbol, but more because there are so many pretty ones available, and I’ve seen many that I find attractive and would like to have hanging in my house. I suppose I’m not as much of a romantic as many women. But Shana’s point remains - it’s difficult to quantify any group opinion, but ‘Jewish women’ is such a broad group that it makes the task almost impossible. I don’t think one could even do something like that well for ‘Orthodox women’ - my stereotypical Hasidic lady and me (working on my second master’s degree, obsessive reader of the newspaper, football fan, feminist, socializer with non-Jews, watcher of movies, and definitely not Hasidic) probably have very different views of ketubot as well.
By the way, kissing a mezuza is a custom, not a law, and some people do, some don’t, and many people vary. I won’t if I’m moving from room to room to room in my house, or if I’m entering the living room where it’s inconveniently located above a railing, for example, and many people (like my husband) don’t bother with it at all. The laws about mezuza have to do with how it’s written, and where and how it should be hung, but as long as there’s kosher mezuzas hanging on the relevant doorways, you’re good, and can ignore it entirely if you like.
