Photo: Mark Schafer/HBO.There's a lot to talk about with the return of HBO's Girls. We've already written up a rundown of what the foursome is up to in the premiere episode here, but now we need to talk about something else. Something bigger than Marnie's (Allison Williams) contour disaster, or Hannah's (Lena Dunham) unsurprising selfishness, or even that make-out session between Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Adam (Adam Driver) between cigarette puffs.
We need to talk about why everyone on Girls keeps getting married. The episode was even titled "Wedding Day." Why, in the course of so many revelatory moments and other relationship milestones, do we have to see Marnie walk down the aisle with a man so clearly wrong for her?
I get that messy relationships are major pegs in the show's plotlines, but I'd rather see the girls fall down a New York manhole than see them walk down another aisle. How do we, as viewers, even relate to that? Apparently we should start, since it is the second time one of the four has gotten hitched after an extremely brief amount of time knowing the guy.
via YouTube.
Jessa's shotgun wedding was a blip on the radar, and totally meaningless to the rest of the show. The marriage was basically over by the time we saw Jessa again. I bet you she even forgot she got married. I did until I wondered why Jessa was being so nice to Marnie for once in this week's episode, and then I realized it's because she is sympathetic to Marnie's fool-in-lust attitude. And instead of saving Marnie, and all of us, from the clichés of bridezilla freak-outs, Jessa just avoids all confrontation, and helps braid Marnie's hair into a woodland-nymph braid moments before she walks down the aisle.
I know I'm not the only one who finds this portrayal of millennial relationships unrelatable, and uninteresting. The current trends for millennials, male and female, single and taken, show that marriage is not nearly as important to us as it was to previous generations.
In 2014, the Pew Research Center published a study, "Record Share of Americans Have Never Married," that highlighted current demographic shifts in marriage. The study found that in 2012, one in five adults ages 25 and older (about 42 million people) had never been married.
Photo: Mark Schafer/HBO.We are waiting longer to get married, which is leading to us having better health (single women generally have more time to exercise and take care of themselves), higher education (we are more likely to attend graduate school than every other previous generation), and more influence politically (how single women vote could easily, and dramatically, shift the 2016 presidential election).
I am not against marriage at all, personally, but why can't Girls focus more on those other millennial trends? It'd be a lot more empowering — and a lot more relatable.
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