Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
It's August: A month when many couples decide to tie the knot.
There are some wedding customs dating way back, like including "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."
But it turns out that many young couples are focusing a lot more on the "something new." Culture analyst
, founder of Culture Brain, has been looking at the wedding practices in 2015 and what they tell us about modern love.
Weddings: What's old, and what's new?
Lee says weddings have evolved in the millennial generation, including venue selection. The traditional wedding would happen in a holy place, but then in the 1980s and 1990s, more couples sought to say their I Dos in fancy hotels. Today's brides? Well, they want rustic.
"Young brides want a destination wedding, and they want all their friends to kind of come to almost like a camp-like environment, and have this kind of bucolic setting that they're in, so that's just an interesting observation," she said.
Gone are the days of designing beautiful invitations that turn into keepsakes for the couple.
"Today's younger generation, they don't look at that as the thing that they're attached to," Lee said. "Usually new couples create a website just for the practical stuff, but on top of that, they'll hire a designer to make a fancy animated introduction — a little GIF story of their love. It's really fun, and it's this BuzzFeed generation watching videos and YouTube and Vines, of course they're naturally going to make an animated GIF invitation, and that seems impressive to their peers."
Most interesting to observe, Lee says, are how the vows have changed.
"The vows are not so, kind of, traditional and stuffy. Deviating from all this, 'obey,' 'death do us part,' 'in sickness and in health,'" she said. "What I'm seeing is that the real, honest, authentic expression is coming out a little bit more in the toast, because everyone is just a little bit more relaxed," Lee said.
Lee is hosting an event in downtown Los Angeles titled, "Modern Love: A conversation about human love rituals," on Aug. 27. Click here for more information.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.