Weddings: summer Fridays favourite

There were some 88 thousand weddings in the Netherlands in 2000. Choosing a wedding date is now mainly a question of personal preference. Considerations that were important a quarter of a century ago, such as having a job and a place to live, are hardly relevant today.

May, June and September favourites

There seems to be a preference these days to get married in May June and September. Many marriages also take place in early July and late August. Between mid July and mid August there are substantially fewer weddings and in the winter months, too, relatively few people get married.

Marriages per month, 2000

If we look at the days on which people marry, there is a strong preference for Friday weddings: about 45% of weddings take place on a Friday, the equivalent of 750 weddings every Friday. Weekends are less popular, only one percent of all marriages take place on a Sunday. Monday is the least popular weekday for marriages.

Weddings per day of the week, 2000

Not on Friday 13th

Special dates are popular as wedding days. On Wednesday 2-2-2000, for example, five times as many couples married as on a normal Wednesday. The same was true for Tuesday 22-2-2000, with about twice the number of marriages as on the Tuesdays before. On the leap Tuesday last year, 29 February, there were three to four times as many marriages as on the two subsequent Tuesdays. Wednesday 31 May 2000, the day before Ascension Day (a national holiday in the Netherlands) was a top day in terms of wedding numbers (over 1,200).

In addition to these popular days, there are also dates couples avoid: Friday 13th, for example. There was one Friday 13th in 2000, in October. Some 550 weddings took place on that Friday, 300 to 400 fewer than on the Fridays before and after.

Carel Harmsen and Suzanne Loozen