This weekend I had the pleasure of going to the prettiest, most perfect, picnic wedding (and yes, thank you so much, I found some shoes in the end).
This would be the second friend of mine, both of whom are only a year older than I am, who is now married, til death, infidelity, divorce or insolvency do them part. But let's not be cynical, even if it is Monday morning. Instead, let's look at the facts:
I am not the only person to have noticed that there are more than a handful of girls around my young, tender age of twenty two who suddenly seem very eager to have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Little girls, it seems, have started dreaming about white gowns, bouquets and tiered cakes again.
And it's not just the ladies anymore, either. My first boyfriend - or rather, my first long-term, adult(ish) boyfriend - was planning our future together (including wedding and house in the suburbs) at a startlingly early point in a relationship that was never going to end in wedding bells. Then again, he also wanted matching tattoos. I should have seen it coming. The scary - scarier - part is that he's not a one-in-a-million male anymore...I hear more and more men talking about 'settling down', while their girlfriends look on in horror.
Not that I'm in any way against marriage (well not really) - I'm just a little confused about the sudden rush. What happened to the nineties' trend of nobody getting married til they were in their thirties - at least? And if the early noughties taught us anything, it's that we ladies can have it all - success, happiness, love, great sex - without a shiny rock weighing down our left hands (although who doesn't love a great piece of jewelery?). The way I see it (and I worry I'm a fast-dwindling minority) is figure out who you are, and what you want from your life (and career), then get married. And nobody can do all that in their early twenties.
So why are we suddenly jumping into white dresses as though Vera Wang might very suddenly die? In a world gone retro mad, is a conservative backlash the next trendy thing? Do we suddenly want to be 'settled' by twenty five like our parents, and their parents before them? And what happens when it goes out of style? A husband and a marriage are not as easy to get rid of - or forget about - as last season's harem pants.
Having said that, I've always had very Jane Austen-esque, romantic ideas about love, and the wedding on Saturday was so incredibly perfect that I found myself absent-mindedly planning my own white gown. So I guess that makes me a hypocrite.
Interestingly though, every girl there expertly dodged the bridal bouquet. Perhaps there's hope yet.
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