As I was flipping channels the other night, I stumbled upon a TLC marathon of Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta. I was really looking forward to zoning out, until I looked up at the screen and saw that the bride featured in this episode was only seventeen years old. Don’t get me wrong; I love Say Yes to the Dress as much as the next person. It’s the TV version of cotton candy: fluffy and lacking substance, but delicious all the same. But watching a seventeen-year-old girl try on wedding dresses left a terrible taste in my mouth. At seventeen most people are just barely old enough to drive and not yet old enough to vote or buy alcohol. At seventeen most people are literally light-years away from finding themselves. At seventeen most people aren’t making a lifelong commitment to another teenager. But this girl was.
Seventeen-year-old Kara of unspecified “small town Texas” still had braces. She had met her fiancée at age 15 in a youth group at their church, and they were both saving their first kiss for their wedding day. She had graduated high school early at age 16 and was enrolled in community college at the time the episode was filmed. It was very obvious that her misogynistic patriarch of a father had total control over her entire life and all of her choices. He brought her two young sisters to the appointment, along with his many specific, conservative and rigid dress requirements.
My mouth watered as I thought of the hundreds of different ways I could make fun of these ostensible rednecks, but as much as I wanted to laugh and make light of the situation, I also wanted to cry. I was glued to the screen, horrified but simultaneously captivated by the tragedy that was this girl, her opportunities so few that at just seventeen she was ready to pledge herself for eternity to the first and only person she had ever been with. I felt sorry for Kara, and for her two younger sisters who probably saw their sister, a bride at seventeen, as a role model. But more horrifying to me than Kara’s age was the fact that there was almost no mention of just how unusual this situation was. Even a Google search of “say yes to the dress 17 year old bride” yielded little indication of public outcry; a handful of disdainful tweets emerged, but nothing more. Say Yes to the Dress seems harmless, but in reality its messages about what it means to be a woman are ridiculously backwards and, frankly, harmful to our society. Young girls all over the country have access to shows like Say Yes to the Dress. I’m not sure that we should so blindly approve of a show that essentially teaches girls that marriage truly is the pinnacle of female existence and that getting married at seventeen is normal.
“Every little girl dreams of this day!” If I were to guess, I’d say that this phrase is uttered roughly 10 times during any given episode of SYTTD. I don’t know if I’m missing something really huge here, but when I was a little girl I thought boys were gross and my interests included Candy and Finding Ways to Acquire More Candy. Consequently, I still think boys are gross and I am still very much interested in finding ways to acquire candy. In all seriousness, though, I never once dreamed of the day I would find my wedding dress, and my parents never once made me feel that my wedding day would be the ultimate zenith of my very being. My parents got married at 35 and spent most of my childhood telling me and my sister stories about how much fun they had during their 20s, moving from apartment to apartment, frequenting dive bars, dating total weirdos and seeing as much of the world as they could, even in modest circumstances. If I had told my parents that I was getting married at seventeen, they would have had me committed. They always taught me that the point of being young is to find yourself by experiencing all that you possibly can, within your circumstantial limitations. I see, now, how lucky I was.
For me, marriage is something you partake in when you’re ready to settle down for a good long while. It’s a serious commitment that may or may not imply having children, and I really believe that marriage isn’t for everyone. Of course it’s normal to look forward to picking out a dress and getting married, but isn’t it just as normal to want to have some adventures first? By settling down at seventeen, Kara was limiting herself to married life far earlier than she had to. She would never live in a crappy apartment with friends in a lonely city, would never buy mismatched teacups at flea markets. She would never travel the world or have a whirlwind romance. I don’t mean to say that you can’t do any of those things while married; I mean to say that you can’t do them in the same way. Experiencing the ups and downs of youth and discovering the world on your own should be a wonderful, terrifying, amazing experience, one that you can’t have if your future is set in stone. You can’t adequately define yourself if your sense of self is so intricately wrapped up in another person, and you can’t fully love someone else if you don’t love yourself independently of that person.
I don’t mean to condescend. Maybe braces are only indicative of dental immaturity, and maybe Kara really was as old at heart as her chauvinistic father claimed. Maybe true love and soul mates (and unicorns) really do exist, and maybe this seventeen-year-old girl from rural Texas had found something that eludes so many of us. But amidst a flurry of “jokes” from girls my age about attending college just to get their “Mrs. Degree,” Kara’s story made me sick to my stomach. When there are girls on popular television whose worlds are so small that they literally have nothing better to do at seventeen than get married, and when vapid harlots like Courtney Stodden achieve fleeting celebrity for getting married young, it’s important to remember how lucky we are for all the opportunities that we have.