Question about honking
Someone drove past me honking their horn this week and it reminded me: wedding parties used to drive around honking after the ceremony, the main cars festooned with white ribbons.
I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I saw this.
Did it become illegal? Or was it just an old tradition that gradually died out?
steph 10:30 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
The pleasure of a motorcade is lost with all the cones and traffic.
Ian 12:36 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
I think a lot of people have abandoned this tradition as the cost of living rises past wage growth – it it is an excessive cost – but I did see one go down Parc just yesterday. Bride and groom in a chauffeur-driven vintage Rolls (white) followed by a stretch limo (white) honking merrily.
MarcG 15:15 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
I remember driving around with a friend when I was a teen and seeing a couple of limos and thinking “oh cool a wedding!” and honking at them like mad before realizing it was a funeral procession.
DeWolf 15:43 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
Nearly every wedding I’ve been to in the past 15 years had the ceremony at the same place as the reception, so no commute required.
(Actually, in many cases the couple had previously gotten married in a civil ceremony and had their reception several weeks or months later.)
The one exception was a couple of friends in Amsterdam who got married at the local borough office and then had a fun bicycle procession (of course – it’s Amsterdam) to the reception venue in a nearby park.
Kate 19:47 on 2025-08-17 Permalink
You may be right – it might be the decline in church weddings. When I first lived in Villeray I’d often see cars lined up in front of the big church on Jarry on Saturday afternoons, waiting for the wedding party to emerge, but I haven’t seen a single one this summer.
CE 08:54 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
Not just church weddings but weddings in general. I’m getting close to 40 and have been to very few weddings over the course of my life. I know this doesn’t apply to everyone, but very few people in my circle of friends are married but many have been in long term relationships for quite a while, myself included.
Kate 09:03 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
CE, I haven’t been to many weddings either, and have only been a bridesmaid once, at an atypical small ceremony held in a Manhattan hotel suite. I caught the bouquet by necessity. I think if one’s friends tend toward the bohemian, weddings can seem like a ritual from another age.
DeWolf 11:02 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
There’s data on this: 43% of couples in Quebec are unmarried, compared to 23% in Canada as a whole, 21% in the UK and 18% in France. A large majority of children in Quebec are born to common law couples.
There are not many practical advantages to being married in Quebec. Common law couples enjoy pretty much all the legal protections of married couples.
That’s not the case if you’re living overseas or if one member of a couple is a migrant. In my case, getting legally married meant smoothing out immigration issues. I have quite a few friends who might not have gotten married if there weren’t such a big advantage when it came to applying for permanent residency or citizenship in various countries.
jeather 11:21 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
I am not suggesting that people who don’t want to should get married or have a civil union (which is identical to marriage but not necessarily understood outside of Quebec), but there are significant differences between the protections between couples who are common law and couples who are married/have a civil union. There’s no automatic sharing of the family house; there’s no alimony; there’s no automatic inheritance in the absence of a will. (Some of these will be changed if you have a child together born as of July of this year; I’m not clear which.)
Get married/civil unioned or don’t, but don’t pretend common law is the same as the others, because it isn’t. (I know a bunch of people who have been royally screwed by not being married when their partner died suddenly; if you’re not getting married you need to be On Top Of Everything before anything happens.)
Mark Côté 12:23 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
Absolutely jeather. It’s a popular belief that being in a common-law relationship in Quebec is about the same as being married, when in fact Quebec has pretty much the worst protections of all the provinces. I was pretty surprised when I learned about it some years ago.
Kevin 14:12 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
The myth that common-law relationships are the same as married couples is so pervasive, and so wrong, that a conspiratorially-minded person could easily assume that the idea was spread by rich men looking to take advantage of women.
Kate 16:09 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
Isn’t this at least partly because Quebec’s not a common-law jurisdiction? This all got hashed out a couple of years ago when the “Eric vs Lola” case was extensively covered. Anne‑France Goldwater got into it, trying to force Quebec to change the law so that cohabiting would turn into common‑law marriage after a period of time, or after a child, I’m not sure which.
Mark Côté: Protections – or responsibilities. One of the judges quoted in this business – a woman, I think – said that with one stroke of the pen, she could declare hundreds of couples married, all over Quebec. So she wouldn’t do it.
Kevin 18:43 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
Even in other provinces, common-law unions generally have different obligations than people who have been married. For instance, in Ontario one person could buy property only in their name, and the common-law spouse wouldn’t automatically have a right to half if they separate.
I know some common-law couples who are now in ugly battles with children following the death of one partner and the whole lack of automatic inheritance thing is nasty.
It ain’t sexy, but people do, at some point, need to write down contracts for relationships/wills/what to do if terminally ill.
Ian 19:22 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
My partner and I didn’t marry, but we have 2 kids. You had best believe we have clear wills. It is worth it, worth it, worth it. I say this having seen what has happened to people I know. It’s really not complicated or expensive, and you can even do it online.
Kate 20:00 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
I don’t want to be morbid, Ian, but what about before you die?
I’ve heard of people preparing various formal documents and so forth, to circumvent using the horrid word “marriage”. If it comes to wanting mutual inheritance rights, rights to decide for the other person in healthcare matters and so on, the shortcut is, you get married.
H. John 23:28 on 2025-08-18 Permalink
De Facto Unions, the term used in Quebec, are very different from “common law” relationships.
And de faction unions changed in June of this year if a couple shares children. The term in that case is a parental union:
https://www.quebec.ca/en/family-and-support-for-individuals/marriage-civil-union-de-facto-union/parental-union/about
@Ian I hope your wills were written by a notary (and not one by a lawyer, or online.)
Ian 07:37 on 2025-08-19 Permalink
@Kate we’re each other’s beneficiaries already for everything. It’s also a good idea to get a living will written up in case you slip into dementia and your partner doesn’t have the right to act on your behalf.
@H. John Yes, notarized. That is very important detail, thank you for bringing it up.
MarcG 08:11 on 2025-08-19 Permalink
Ian I think what you’re referring to is called a Protection mandate in Quebec.
Ian 07:58 on 2025-08-20 Permalink
Yes, and while we’re on the topic., “homologation” is another great technically correct English word that is actually a direct usage of the French word that hardly anyone outside of Quebec uses in English.