How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Prom

It’s prom season. Can you feel it in the air?

But the prom has changed. When I was younger, you went with whoever you happened to be dating at the time and you broke up with them by the end of the night, usually by vomiting peach wine coolers all over their shoes.

These days, the prom is a much more involved affair that necessitates months of meticulous planning and diplomatic negotiations, mostly via endless text chains. Major events are scheduled and rescheduled. Dresses are ordered online, tried on, returned, and reordered. Important peace treaties are formed between historically hostile friend groups. Extensive research and development efforts are invested in securing dates for every friend.

And then there is the prom-posal: Teenagers who just months earlier were running around in pajamas with feet appear at their dates’ houses with bouquets, candy, and clever posters, just to ask them to the prom.

“The prom is different now,” my mom said to me last night. We were looking at prom photos of all of her grandchildren, which she had aligned on her fridge to make it look like they were on the same grassy lawn with their dates. “It’s almost like getting married.”

My mom is 82 years old. When she was younger, getting married was like going to the prom. At the end of high school or college, you married whoever you happened to be dating at the time and you broke up with them by the end of the decade, usually by sleeping with your secretary or your boss or your neighbor.

“They look so beautiful,” she said, admiring the photos. “They’re such beautiful children.”

They are beautiful, I thought, but they’re also incredibly high-maintenance. How else could they be? They came of age in the middle of a pandemic. Big, fancy, in-person events take on a special sheen when you spent your first year of high school at home staring at a computer screen and spent your second year walking through the halls with a mask on your face. You don’t just paint your nails after all that, you get the acrylics crusted in glitter that matches your dress. You don’t just pick out a nice pair of silver heels, you get a silver clutch to go with it.