The Obsession with Princesses - For Children or Adults?

My twenty-one year old best friend from home just called me a couple of weeks ago to tell me that she had gotten engaged the night before. Her fiancé, a twenty-five year old in the army, was just sent to Haiti until next month and had proposed before he left. Last night, I spent two hours on the phone with her planning everything from her color scheme to the centerpieces, and was surprised with some of the things that she decided.

My friend, Laura, had always been a sporty, blunt, guy's girl in high school, and her sense of style had always been simple and no fuss. However, when we looked at the wedding dresses she had fallen in love with, she said, "They're exactly the opposite of what I thought I wanted", which was also something simple and no fuss. Of the dresses she showed me, on the contrary, some were ballgowns, some were completely covered in lace, others in beading and embroidery. They had bows, they had flowers. This is definitely not what I would have pictured Laura wearing on her wedding day ten years ago, or even two years ago, but nevertheless, this is what she is drawn towards now.

Aside from the dress, Laura's vision for the atmosphere of her wedding was also a digression from what I expected. Having decided to have the wedding at home, she talked of votive candles in her pool and hanging from the trees, twinkly lights wrapped around every tree trunk, chinese lanterns hanging inside the tent, and lights hanging from the draperies of the tent. She said, "I just want twinkly lights and candles everywhere!"

This conversation with Laura got me thinking. Why is it that when my friend was faced with the reality of a wedding, she drops her personal sense of style and starts planning the stereotypical "princess" wedding, something far from her personality? She was surprising herself with what she wanted, because she had always thought she wanted something simple and in line with her everyday style, but deep down this is not the case at all.

I have decided that girls are taught from a very young age that they have one day in their lives on which they can be a princess and go over the top, and no one will think the worse of them for it - their wedding day. While obviously some women choose to stay away from the princess wedding, I know it is quite common to want nothing else. The power of Disney and of fairy tales is the most evident in the business of weddings. While many women think that their love of princesses has disappeared with their maturation, it has a tendency to sneak back to the surface when that woman gets a ring.

While I agree with Professor Busl as she wrote in her post on Sex and the City that there comes disappointment when a woman has unrealistic expectations of her wedding, I think that the real danger appears when people think only about their wedding and not about the marriage. If a woman wants to plan a beautiful wedding that makes her and her husband happy she should do so, but they have to enter into a marriage with an understanding of what marriage is and that it will not be a perfect fairy tale. As I was looking on Youtube today while thinking about this, I stumbled upon an ad that was quite disturbing to me. No wonder, after watching things like this, women in our society think that their weddings are the culmination of their entire lives up to that point (For some reason my computer won't upload the video, so here's the link).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InV7Sh5zNtg