one of the forum threads reminded me of one of my courseworks, in which I studied the wedding ceremony from the point of view of the science we all love. Below I offer you my theses, reflections, conclusions to which I came while studying this issue. Let's start with the conceptual apparatus (where would we be without it): a wedding ceremony is a system of traditional symbolic actions, socially significant and requiring a certain type of behavior from an individual, group, society that consolidates marriage. It traces the remnants of archaic forms of customs, beliefs, family and marriage relations that were formed in various historical eras, and clearly reveals the ethnic specificity of the everyday culture of various population groups. A wedding is a rite that accompanies marriage. Let us consider the wedding ceremony as a kind of social ritual in more detail. Social ritual is a historically established form of non-instinctive, predictable, socially sanctioned, ordered symbolic behavior, in which the method and order of execution of actions are strictly canonized and cannot be rationally explained in terms of means and ends. Such rituals are necessary for the very possibility of joint collective existence, the predictability of social events , and, therefore, set the conditions for social survival and security. One of the most important consequences of the ritual is psychotherapeutic compensation, which consists of communicating, uniting people, overcoming loneliness, anxiety, discord with oneself, alienation, isolation and gives a person a sense of belonging to a group. If they cease to fulfill their function, then the images necessary for the transition will be produced in the unconscious in the form of dreams, creativity, or in symptoms of psychosomatic disorders. Ritual transforms the complex experiences of an individual into a coherent system of symbols and offers him an image of a simple and orderly world. Among the rituals, the rituals of transitions, in other words, initiations, are distinguished separately. The rituals of transition are divided into three ritual complexes: the ritual of separation, the ritual of movement, and the ritual of reunion. Also, the wedding ceremony is divided into elements: pre-wedding (matchmaking, shaking hands), the wedding itself (ransom and painting) and post-wedding (festival and feast). A wedding is the first big project that allows future spouses to once again, more carefully and consciously get acquainted with the interests and values each other. Assess the significance of your surroundings by compiling a list of invitees and experience a lot of new impressions associated with organizations of a larger or less large-scale holiday. Pre-wedding preparation allows you to move away from/replace the growing anxiety with the pre-holiday bustle. Especially in our society, where the expression of emotions is not encouraged. It is clear that as history changed, the functions of the family also changed, this inevitably led to a change in the wedding ceremony. However, the main characters of a wedding always remain two subjects (the bride and groom) and one object - their family .The wedding ceremony is a complex, time-extended social ritual, which represents in a simple scheme a complex system of changes in the lives of two families. And including pre-wedding, wedding and post-wedding customs, it is also a ritual of transition - initiation for the newlyweds. The process of separation, displacement and reunification "one's own - someone else's - one's own", a man and a woman go through different ways. This ritual helps a girl to die as the daughter of her parents and move on, to be born again in the house of her husband. For a man, the whole ceremony involves separation from his parental family into an independent life, inclusion in the bride’s family system and return back to his family, but in a different capacity, in a different place in the hierarchy. Although the wedding is the finale of many fairy tales and stories, it is only the first stage the birth of a family, foreshadowing a long and happy life, and the guest-witnesses are invisible guardians of the safety of the marriage. The sacrament of marriage.