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Cambridge graduate Zoe, 25, is a good example. She was proposed to in 2023 but hasn’t shared the news of her engagement on social media, as doing so “spoils the nice bit that you get from seeing people in person and telling them”. There is also the worry with announcing the news on Instagram that “people who aren’t a part of my life, like people I used to go to school with, would gossip about me”. At work, too, she has kept things on the down-low, waiting more than a year to tell colleagues about her engagement. She has only just begun to wear her diamond-free ring in public.
Zoe is alert to how her peers might take the news that she has decided to settle down in her mid-20s. “I wouldn’t want to give an impression of being boring,” she says. “I feel like the vibe of being married isn’t what I’d want acquaintances to think my life is. I wouldn’t want to call myself someone’s wife because of how many negative things seem to follow when I hear that word out and about.”
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With fashion dictating that couples keep their betrothals quiet, then it’s no wonder then that small weddings are becoming the norm. Elley Roberts, an events manager at the Brickhouse Vineyard wedding venue near Exeter in the UK, says that “microweddings” – with fewer than 40 guests – have never been so popular. Elopements, too, are in fashion, and bookings for them come in year-round. “Some couples have been engaged for ages when they come to us and others do it on a whim,” Roberts says. Others still “plan a big wedding that doesn’t work out and think, forget it, let’s make it just us”.
But much like Taylor-Joy and McRae, many couples clearly see appeal in the shock factor of a secret wedding, to which a silent engagement is essential.
Roberts has hosted post-elopement parties at which newlyweds surprise their guests with footage of their weddings, as has florist Nadia Nasser. In May 2022, Nasser styled flowers for what guests were told was an engagement party, only for the couple to show off a film of them signing the register two weeks before. “So the engagement party became a wedding party,” Nadia recalls. “The couple wanted their wedding day just to be about them,” she says, but at the same time wanted a party “to enjoy and digest the fact that they were finally married”.
“I feel like the vibe of being married isn’t what I’d want acquaintances to think my life is.”
Sarah Tappen, also a florist, says that it’s now fashionable for couples to separate the legal bit of marriage from its celebrations – with or without bombshell revelations attached. “This year I’ve observed a significant number of people opting to legalise their union before their official wedding ceremony,” she says. Silent engagements too “seem to be happening more in the past few years, from what I’ve seen”. Tappen puts both down to small, pandemic-era weddings that gave couples the freedom to orient the day around themselves. “Weddings, as wonderful as they are, can also be incredibly stressful and unpredictable,” Tappen says, adding that she has “often advised friends to consider this approach.”
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Ellie, 24, is one such Gen Zer with plans for a two-part wedding. Ellie shared her big news online when she got engaged last year, though her fiancée Rosa opted not to. As a same-sex couple, they’re less concerned about coming off as old-fashioned. “There’s less of a patriarchal feeling to marriage as an institution when it’s between two women,” Ellie says. Yet the pair still want to keep things relaxed.
The couple will have a ceremony in their back garden, led by the friend who set them up in the first place, with a legal marriage at a registry office a fortnight beforehand. It’s the sort of thing that’s harder to organise if you’re booking a big venue, says Ellie, “which isn’t very us at all”. While Rosa is unlikely to share their wedding photos on Instagram, Ellie might post a few – though “we’re not getting a professional photographer or anything”. Rather, the pair are “asking a few of our friends and my dad to take photos, and leaving disposable cameras around the place too for anyone to take some hard copies”.
All this “saves money that we’re going to use for some medical expenses instead”, Ellie says, “but we think even without the financial factors, we’d have wanted something chill”. With many young couples like Ellie and Rosa already sharing homes and finances long before tying the knot, perhaps the “big news” is just no longer so big after all.
The Telegraph, London
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