With wedding season on the horizon, chances are some of your pals are taking the plunge and finally getting married. Marriage trends amongst millennials show that people are getting married later and later, holding out for that perfect someone. Our generation seems to have higher expectations – whether it’s career, relationship or the best place to eat a taco – and thus, odds are you will be participating in wedding season well into your thirties and even forties.
Another interesting phenomenon associated with millennial couples is that they tend to date and then live together for a few years before they tie the knot. While our parents’ generation may have felt the need to get married young, and societal expectations did not allow them to share a home before the nuptials were official, they had to dive in and hope for the best.
Conversely, the millennial wedding can seem like a gratuitous party, since the couple is already living as a unit. At the same time, if the parents are helping to foot the bill, it is a great excuse to throw a huge party for your friends and loved ones and celebrate the love of a lifetime. If you’re getting hitched to your partner, you may as well take a couple weeks to blow off some steam and gather all your friends together. As we drift towards middle age, there are fewer opportunities to get away from work and spend quality times with friends.
Of course, the big celebration is not necessarily just about the wedding, there’s also the bachelor and bachelorette parties,which can be just as memorable as the wedding itself. It’s a chance for your friends to celebrate the wonderful individual that you’ve grown into before you merge into a (hopefully) lifelong couplehood. While the traditional stag party involves printing embarrassing celebratory custom shirts for the occasion and staging an ambitious pub crawl, there is certainly a multitude of ways to send your friend off with bravado and gusto. Quality screen printing companies – such as Toronto based PromoPays – can print any outrageous design you ask of them to commemorate the big day, and have it ready and shipped in two weeks.
While a drunken spree around the best dive bars in the city is some people’s idea of a good time, it may not be everybody’s cup of tea. If the bride or groom is a more wholesome type who enjoys exercise and the great outdoors, a canoeing or rock climbing trip can make for a fantastic stag as well. You can climb or shoot rapids all day and booze it up by the fire when the sun goes down.
And while spa stags involving massages, manicures and face masks have been typically thought of as appropriate exclusively for the bachelorette, within today’s less rigid conception of gender, the men can certainly rock out a facemask complete with cucumbers over the eyes and a hot stone massage.
If the celebrated bachelor or bachelorette are foodies, you could also surprise them by making a reservation at their favourite restaurant and going all out on wine and fancy dishes. Something like the Bo Ssäm dinner at Momofuku, for example, is a super fun way to stuff your faces with delicious pork in a classy setting – if there’s a vegetarian requirement, then Woodlot near College and Bathurst in Toronto can supply a variety of gourmet options while still serving up meat dishes for those inclined.