Challenge #14: Prom

I didn’t get asked to prom.

All around me, teenage girls are gasping: it’s the ultimate horror and sign of social failure. Prom is the supposed ‘end goal’ of high school. Here on the North Shore of Chicago it’s not only a dance, it’s a weekend – the dance only the beginning. After comes sleepovers, treks to family or rented lake houses where kids can hang out with their friends and get away with things they usually can’t back home. Dresses can be bought for upwards of $400, and there’s even a Facebook group to post your dress, because god forbid two girls wear the same one.

Before this 4-day extravaganza comes the ‘prom-posals’ and the ‘priets’ (prom-diets, basically the most teenage-girly word to ever be invented). These proposals have become unnecessarily complex, leading to unwanted pressure for the asker and often disappointment from the askee if the date doesn’t come through. An example: my best friend was asked through a full-length fireworks display that ended up on Good Morning America. 

Is it all really worth it?

I won’t deny that I’ve spent a solid amount of time frustrated at my situation – but it stems more at what prom has become than not being asked. I should be able to go to prom, single, with my friends, but my school has done everything possible to discourage that and it isn’t fair. In order to go, you have to sign up with a group of 10, meaning you have to be in a couple or you don’t get a table.

We’ve built up this event to an unattainable standard that it shouldn’t be. I remember as a young girl, reading the Princess Diaries books how the title character, Mia, would dream about her prom and losing her virginity to her boyfriend on prom night – a common teenage theme. As I think about it now, at 18, that sounds ridiculous,  but I fear for all these girls who have been so elaborately asked who might now feel the pressure to do something they might not be comfortable with.

Prom also has the ability to tear friendships apart. ‘Prama’, or prom-drama has been running rampant for the last six weeks at my school. I hear horror stories of groups shutting their friends out because ‘there isn’t enough room at the lake house’ or they don’t like one of the dates. I thought being asked would be stressful – apparently, that’s just the beginning.

This Friday, I won’t be leaving school early for my spray tan/hair appointment/nail appointment/makeup appointment only to spend a half hour crying that it isn’t ‘perfect’ enough. I won’t take an hour’s worth of pictures and then climb into a limo for ‘the best night of my life’. I don’t have the money and I don’t have the patience. I’ll spend my weekend writing my end-of-semester papers and thinking of what I’ll be able to buy to wear throughout my 4 years of college with the money I saved on a dress that will only be worn one night. 

Cia♀, 

Charlie