Whether you live in Manhattan or Milwaukee, if you walk into any late-twenties or early-thirty-something’s kitchen, you’re almost guaranteed to see a smattering of Save the Dates plastered across their refrigerator. In December, add some holiday cards complete with a baby or two. Your Instagram feed is filled with the same - engagements, weddings, and baby announcements. And as we approach the spring, you might find yourself in every corner of the country (and maybe even across the Atlantic) to celebrate your friends in what - based on how much attention it gets and money it costs - appears to be the culminating accomplishment of their lives. Forget cheers-ing to three decades, or getting promoted to VP in just 5 years, or landing a dream job. Forget starting a business, or getting your own place for the first time, or running a marathon. If a milestone isn’t associated with a ring or a baby, does it even count? 

Can I ask you a personal question?

Why milestones matter

As children, hitting certain milestones provides an indication that we are developing as expected - we learn to talk, crawl, and walk as babies, and as kids, we learn to read, write, build friendships, etc. Every year, we advance from one grade to the next, further providing a sense of accomplishment. As we hit early adulthood, graduating from college, landing our first job, or becoming financially independent act as signals that we are transitioning from childhood to adulthood. And throughout this entire process lasting 20+ years, we are mostly hitting these milestones in step with our peers. It isn’t until our mid-to-late twenties that things start to change and expected milestones get blurrier. But they still matter. Milestones, society says, are important because they help us track what we’ve accomplished and what’s yet to come, especially compared to our peers. And despite the average age of marriage for women in the U.S. being pushed to 30 years old as of 2022, when I think back on the past year of my life as a 27-year-old, it’s hard to remember a milestone I celebrated that didn’t have something to do with marriage or kids. Despite having friends who have hit big birthdays, gotten promoted, landed a dream job, started a business, graduated with an advanced degree, etc., it seems that the only milestones that get a formal celebration are those related to starting a family.

How the marriage milestone got so big

The post-COVID surge in weddings was something the industry hadn’t seen since 1984. We know that the pandemic delayed weddings and sped up relationships, resulting in a 2022 wedding boom, but what happened in 1984? A few things. First, Baby Boomers - a generation named for their population surge - were now aged 20 to 38 and ripe for marriage. Further, the generation of women who had delayed marriage inspired by the feminist movement were now ready to commit to marriage after having achieved the early career success and independence they had craved. Other factors include the booming economy, the fall of the hippie movement, the Reagan-era cultural return to “traditional values”, and even the ultra-luxe, televised wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles that 750M people around the world tuned in to watch. Forget the modest weddings of the 1960s and 1970s - the 1980s brought the introduction of lavish affairs complete with live bands, centerpiece cakes, and big guest lists. It was around the same time that women hopped onto the previously male-only tradition of bachelor parties with bachelorette parties (and for the first time, we as a society acknowledged that it’s not just men who give up sexual freedom with marriage). In the 1990s weddings became a focal piece in pop culture with movies like Father of the Bride, Runaway Bride, and The Wedding Singer. Vera Wang also entered the scene in this decade and so came the normalization of wedding designers, as well as wedding planners, though there was a bit of a rejection of 1980s exuberance and a return to minimalism. From 2007 to 2017, the U.S. experienced another wedding industry boom with bachelorettes quadrupling, wedding spending rising by 81%, and engagements being lengthened to greater than one year to allow for more time to plan and throw bigger weddings with more pre-wedding events. 

A recent article in The Atlantic refers to the growth in wedding events as the “wedding sprawl.” Today, in a typical 15-month engagement, there will likely be an engagement party, bachelorette party, and bridal shower. And weddings themselves are rarely just a one-day affair. In addition to the traditional day-before rehearsal dinner for the closest wedding guests, the welcome party has risen in popularity providing a pre-wedding party the night before for everyone. It’s also not uncommon to throw in a bridesmaid luncheon and a post-wedding morning after brunch. So in other words, in one 15-month period, you might find yourself attending ~7 events across ~5 days to celebrate your friend. Multiply that by however many close friends you have, and it’s…a lot of events. And they don’t come cheap. American Express crunched the numbers and found that the average millennial spends $900 per wedding they attend (so let’s say you’re planning to attend 5 weddings this year…that’s $4500). And then, when it’s all said and done, a few years later that same friend gets another frenzy of congratulations and celebrations when they have a child. 

There’s more to celebrate

Celebrating weddings and babies is not in and of itself a problem. In fact, it’s the opposite! It is an absolute privilege to get to witness and support my friends as they reach these important life milestones. I find this phase of life to be incredibly exciting and genuinely can’t wait to celebrate each and every one of my friends (and soon enough, I’ll be hosting a slew of wedding-related events myself, so throwing zero shade here). And I’ll also admit that these are BIG moments and deserve the excitement they receive. But what I don’t necessarily love is that they’ve become the only things we celebrate as a society. Milestones allow us to celebrate what we’ve accomplished and make us excited for what’s to come - without them, we’d just be blandly chugging along year after year. So when we reduce our adult milestones to just marriage and kids, we not only do a disservice to our other accomplishments, but we also signal to society that we’ve peaked and have nothing else to look forward to in life.

For single women, this adds to the already overwhelming cultural pressure to get married and have kids because it’s essentially saying “you don’t deserve to be celebrated unless you have a partner and/or kids”. If you remember from our “So…what if I’m not sure I want kids?” piece, you’ll remember that we have higher expectations for women vs. men when it comes to nurturing qualities. In this case, we aren’t even necessarily talking about women who choose to be child-free, just women who haven’t yet reached that stage of life. But the main point stands: we have a habit of celebrating women for our traditional roles in society and downplaying everything else. 

But it doesn’t stop there - I’d even argue that it’s unfair to married women. Because even for those who are married and have kids, treating those milestones like the capstone of their adult lives makes it feel like they’re capped at being a wife and mom and can’t acknowledge nor celebrate other facets of their life. In fact, as it relates to society’s perception of working women, research shows that we tend to do a major disservice to moms. A 2018 Bright Horizons study found that 73% of moms feel like they’ve been passed up for career advancement opportunities due to their mom status and 41% of Americans view moms as less devoted to their jobs - making working moms all the more deserving of career-related celebrations. 

Getting engaged, getting married, and having kids may very well be among the most exciting moments of our lives. But considering how multi-faceted the modern woman is, it’s safe to say there are other things you’re proud of yourself and your friends for accomplishing. So don’t be afraid to pop the champagne more often than not.

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  💭 Our two cents

As my close friends are in the 28-30 range, I’m just coming up on the early wedding years and will be in the early half of friends in my circle getting married. And while I’m so excited to celebrate my relationship and those of my friends, I’m also aware of the fact that it’s unfair that while we spend so much time showering our coupled friends, our single friends are the focus of very few festivities. And, once our friends are married, we sort of view them as having had their moment in the spotlight and they don’t get to host anything else for a while. But I wholeheartedly believe that all my friends are doing amazing things that deserve a formal celebration. Yet when I look at my calendar for the rest of the year, I see over 10 marriage-related events and almost nothing else. 

Writing this piece has been a good accountability check for me because it’s abundantly clear in looking at how and who I’m celebrating that I am certainly leaving out a lot of people and deserving moments. I hope that this exercise will help me to be better about reaching out to all my friends regardless of the milestones they’re hitting and be better about celebrating them. 

💃 The girls have spoken

In last week’s post, we tried to answer the question “So…should I be worried about deepfakes?” As one commenter noted (and we agree), it was startling to learn just how much deepfakes are being used to create explicit content of real women. This sort of content, whether real or AI-generated, has the potential to cause immense emotional, professional, and interpersonal distress when shared without the consent of its subjects or used as a tool to threaten them. Unfortunately, the possibility of explicit content being shared without consent is something that has caused roughly a quarter of us a great deal of worry in our own lives, while over 40% of us know someone who’s also dealt with these concerns. Perhaps what’s most unsettling about deepfakes is that they have the potential to force so many more women to experience these same challenges regardless of any actions or decisions they’ve made in the past. As another commenter observed, the gender discrepancy in the usage of deepfakes to create nonconsensual pornography also seems to go hand in hand with the gender discrepancy in society’s reaction to explicit content. While women are scrutinized and judged in such situations, rarely do men receive the same criticism, attention, and backlash. After all, it was Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, right? How much did people really care about Ray J?

💌 Up Next

That’s all for today! If you liked this edition of Not That Personal, we think one of your friends probably will too – refer one (or two or three) below. ;)

Have something to say? We’d love to hear it – reply to this email or leave an anonymous comment here :) 

Up next: So…have you noticed how gendered our language can be?

💖 S & J