Summer is traditionally the most popular time for a wedding. Longer hours of daylight, warmer weather, a fantastic choice of flowers and seasonal food make a pretty good case. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe things other than the purely pragmatic draw us to having a summer wedding without us even being aware of it.
Well, in Ancient Rome, 1st of June was a celebration of Juno and Jupiter who happened to be the gods of marriage and childbirth. In Victorian times, the abundance of seasonal flowers was not only beautiful, they were scented – helping out at a time when personal hygiene was perhaps not as easy to maintain as it is today… So perhaps there’s a bit of inherited memory involved, embedded in our brains, and we plan weddings for summer because that’s what our forebears did.
Also, subconsciously, it seems that we’re more prone to relax during the summer thanks to the warmth, better weather and longer days making us feel more leisurely. We may pick summer because experience tells us that we, and our guests, are likely to be in higher spirits and more relaxed.
A wedding is a ritual and rituals are comforting, so opting for a summer wedding ritual may help give the couple a soothing sense of calm and stability if feeling that doing things the way they’ve always been done (as they see it) is important to them.
Plenty of research has been done on how weather and exposure to light affects mood. As summer is associated with positivity, sunshine and happiness, it makes sense that people are drawn to summer for their wedding. Part of the feel-good factor may even stem from that lovely feeling we remember from childhood as school finishes and the long summer break stretches ahead. It may not really have been week after week of lazy days and sunshine, but that’s how many of us remember it.
So, perhaps, as adults, we transfer that feeling to what hopefully will be one of the happiest events of our lives. Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.