#91: The Idea of Marriage

Being the overly Catholic and family-oriented people that they are, Notre Dame Students all have a strong innate desire to quickly get married and have children.  Very few Notre Dame Students actively want to be single, and almost none aspire to be womanizing bachelors who have trophy girlfriends late in life (or the other way around).  

This obsession that Notre Dame Students have with the idea that they will get married soon after they graduate is embodied in the tradition of “ring by spring.”  Ostensibly the goal of every Notre Dame Student, “ring by spring” is the objective of Notre Dame women to get proposed to by the man of their dreams and of Notre Dame men to propose to the woman of their dreams by the time they graduate. 

In order to obtain or present a “ring by spring,” a person usually must have met their future husband or wife by the end of their freshman year, be dating this person by the end of their sophomore year, and regularly be breaking parietals together by the end of their junior year.  This well-worn path puts the Notre Dame couple right on course for spring engagement at the Grotto (see #61) during their senior year, and the ideal Basilica wedding the summer after that.

The problem with this tradition is that very few people actually participate in it any more.  While Notre Dame Students still love to talk about “ring by spring,” and they certainly talk at length about anybody they know that achieves the goal, most Notre Dame Students are in no position to actually participate in the tradition.  This is not only because many Notre Dame Students move on to grad school, med school, or law school after graduation, but also because the modern world sends graduates to all parts of the country in search of jobs and service opportunities.

Despite “ring by spring” being barely feasible for modern Notre Dame Students, these students continue to talk about it because they are obsessed with the idea of marriage.  They like to talk about the weddings of older siblings and of the potential of friends’ future weddings because the modern idea of weddings brings together religion and drinking in order to celebrate the final result of a long-term relationship (see #99).  So even if students aren’t getting married (or even engaged) very often as students any more, the idea of marriage is never far from the mind of a Notre Dame Student.