Here comes the bride

Bridget Jones mumbled the wedding march in her thirties. And she seemed naive to me. I still silently cheered that wedding bells would run for her in one of the sequels. 

In elementary school, the 'wedding' was a ceremony celebrating our first and last shy kiss, a tradition after which at least we girls dreamed at home for a long time and imagined the ideal marriage from the movie screens with the prince on a white horse, while our poor husband was probably still sleeping sweetly at home and dreaming of a football match. Nevertheless, over the years, we started increasingly rolling our eyes at the mention of marriage. At first, shame was the main reason - the wedding presupposed falling in love. Later, we became increasingly aware that buying a broom to jump over in a wedding ceremony is not enough, but the money in the account begins to fly away. 

Nevertheless, I grew up in an environment where marriage was the highlight of a woman's life. Kids are probably even more critical, but they should only exist with being married first. However, If it happened accidentally, the wedding must have occurred during pregnancy. No drinking for the woman, though. Parents have saved money for such weddings and sent their children to Sunday school. They did not interfere with dating, but they grabbed the first chance if they liked the guy, and the brandy was already pouring big time, accompanied by the accordion and many people in beautiful dresses. Thus, several of my classmates were married when they turned eighteen. 

However, high school was a little different. There, some girls kept the idea that they would never get married because the cost of the wedding ceremony was too high, and marriage had lost its true meaning in this day and age. And I agreed with that statement., although from time to time, my head still carried me into a children's daydream about a black wedding dress.

In college, there was a second wave of marriages in my generation, but they were rare. Wedding bells only rang for a few, although they were almost all in long relationships. Then I got a little run down by time and didn't keep up with my generation anymore, but it hit me when I started working in a huge office. There, people younger than me were married. Most of them to get their 'green card,' but at some point, they got married out of love and not out of status. I was twenty-seven, and I felt like an old divorcée. Like Bridget Jones, I went to some couples diners until I realized I didn't belong there. After a year, I left this job (not because of my single status) and went elsewhere. 

It would be better to call the new office a chicken coop. There was just one rooster in it, and he spent most of the time with his head in some other spheres, and the hens were talking about the wisdom of life every morning. And the central theme of one of the conversations was a wedding. Of course, all the older ones were married, but this did not surprise me as much as the girls who were much younger than me. They demanded marriage from their partners because they did not attend religious education for nothing and invested in living together. One got married quickly because she accidentally got pregnant and only hoped to be married and graduated before giving birth; the other got married, even though her guy had a massive house loan and a big fight for a job, but the party and celebration of joined loan.

The third one was convincing the guy for more than a year to get married because they have been together for a really long time, and this is the next logical step, the penultimate before that big coronation when the monkey lifts Simba into the air as the next lion king. And so the poor man proposed to her on their vacation. When she came back happy, and there were questions about her wedding in the office, she said that they didn't have the money for the wedding, not even a small one at the moment, and they would probably need two years or more to save it. I appreciate the patience, but why was the engagement so critical? And more importantly, what is happening to the younger generations?

According to research, as many as 81% of Generation Z think about the possibility of marriage, and every second of them is convinced that marriage will happen sooner or later. Millennials are less fond of it. Many of them live with their partner because of the high cost of living, and they do not even imagine a loan for a wedding celebration. In addition, many people consider this an outdated tradition. But apparently, wedding bells will still be singing to the next generation.