There's a horrible single-women cliché employed by films and television, where desperate single women start planning their weddings before they've actually found potential husbands - so keen are they to get down the aisle. Got the dress, got the venue, now all I need is the groom - LOL! Because women are obsessed with weddings, and single women are both obsessed with weddings and desperate - got it?
But like many horrible film and TV clichés it seems, there's a grain of truth in this one. A poll conducted by Interflora has revealed that six out of ten single women have started planning their wedding, and while most women start drawing up plans for the big day when they’re 13, a quarter of those surveyed said they started thinking about it when they were as young as six. A very specific 13 per cent have also decided which month they want to get married in - which seems quite a cavalier approach, given our weather’s scant disregard for the seasons.
HOWEVER, 58 per cent of women have said they wouldn’t share their secret special wedding plans with their boyfriends, less they seem a bit mental.
At first glance this sounds like a classic ‘women are crazy and obsessed with pretty dresses and unicorns’ story, but actually, it makes sense - and is probably quite a normal normal response in a child/teenager/grown woman child.
Getting married is the one of the few tangible benchmark of being a ‘grown up’ that we can picture, and imagine from a young age, so even if we’re not veil-obsessed bridezillas from the planet Shit Sitcom Clichés, we’ve probably all thought about it at some point.
Plus whereas ten years ago our covert teenage wedding planning might have amounted to a hushed conversation with our best friend, or a guilty glance at a wedding magazine in WH Smiths when we were buying a new protractor and some gel pens, now we’ve got Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to keep us interested.
And then there are online wedding dress shops – the ultimate internet rabbit hole for the casual wedding fantasist. I’d love to know how much of Net-a-Porter’s wedding dress shop traffic is from casual browsers who aren't actually getting planning a wedding. Based on my own internet browsing history, I suspect they far outnumber the women who are actually getting married in the next 18 months.
Follow Rebecca on Twitter @rebecca_hol.
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.