The June Bride: Is She Still Appealing to Women Today?
Apr 5th, 2011 by admin
Ladies, when you were a kid, did you envision yourself walking down the isle with the man of your dreams, wearing a long white dress and surrounded by family and friends and a lot of flowers? Did you, as a teenager, dream about your wedding day as the most important day of your life? Do you still hold on to those dreams now, and hope they will turn into reality? Or, do you think all this is obsolete, as couples negotiate their relationships in different terms today and express such changes by letting go of old traditions and creating new ones?
Be it as it may, June has historically been and still is the most popular month for weddings. In fact, there are more of them in June than at any other time of the year. The influx of June weddings seems to be a testament of how important these events still are to a lot of young couples today. Their popularity is both not surprising on the one hand and startling on the other.
Why is this not surprising?
June is one of the most beautiful months of the year, with longer days, flowers in bloom, warm temperatures and lots of sunshine. These are some of the most immediate reasons why some couples choose this month to create life-long romantic memories they hope they will cherish together. In addition, there are a lot of historical reasons why June, throughout history, was chosen as the most popular month to get married.
Most societies, not only the US, have maintained this custom of June weddings and a hugely profitable industry has grown to cater to these traditions. This is evident in the number of businesses – magazines, wedding planners, flower shops, catering and clothing industries, photographers, and so on – that are making a profitable living by designing, planning, and executing weddings, in this way translating couples’ dreams into reality.
So, why is the continuous popularity of this tradition so startling? Because, at first sight, it seems to be in contradiction with the major changes that the institution of marriage is undergoing in this and other Western cultures. These changes are reflected in the number of romantic relationships where partners live together outside of marriage. These unions have, for the first time, outnumbered marital unions. Some people would go as far as claiming that traditional marriage is dead, and new ways of being together are replacing it and predict this trend will continue.
So, on the one hand, we have the maintenance of a tradition – June weddings – that goes back thousands of years. On the other, we have major changes that deeply affect traditional views of marriage. And these two trends seem to coexist. In the following blogs I will discuss in detail each of these trends.
If you are reading this blog, it is quite possible you are interested in this topic. Perhaps you are a prospective June bride yourself, or one who was married in June. Or perhaps you don’t want to get married in June nor at any other time. You may view this tradition as obsolete and out of step with current times. Whatever your position, please share your thoughts about this subject, and tell us how you think the June weddings tradition fits of fails to fit with the current social and psychological changes of the institution of marriage in this country.
