Social media is giving a lift to the centuries-old practice of looking to the stars to decide on the exact time, date and location of a couple’s big day.
Last year, Alice Bell told Jesse Zannino that he needed to propose by May 2023.
“My astrology for getting married
“I actually predicted myself getting into a relationship in 2021 using astrology,” said Bell, 30, an astrologer based in New York and the author of Trust Your Timing: How to Use Astrology to Navigate Your Love Life and Find Your Authentic Self. “I knew something important was going to happen with relationships.”
“I looked up my birth chart before our first date,” Zannino, 32, said. “And based on the description of Scorpio moon that I read online, I was nervous that she would be turned off by it.” Instead, she was intrigued.
After Zannino, a director of business development, met Bell’s astrologically aligned proposal deadline on April 28, she quickly mapped out potential wedding charts in order to find a date. She landed on June 8, 2024, which was ideal for both of their birth charts, she said. A birth chart is a snapshot of the sky at the time, date and place a person is born, taking into account how the position of the sun, moon and planets interact with one another to influence the person’s life path and personality.
Wedding charts are like birth charts, but for marriage ceremonies. “Where the planets fall in the chart and what the rising sign is will give you insight into the energy surrounding the start of the marriage,” Bell said.
She wanted a wedding chart that would “stand on its own” but also activate her and her fiancé's birth charts in positive ways. (She had previously attended weddings with “bad astrology,” like planetary retrogrades, she said.)
While Bell is primarily using astrology to plan her wedding as a way to ensure the day has “good energy” and her guests have a great time, some astrologers believe that the date and time of your wedding will also influence the future success of your marriage.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.For centuries, astrology has played an important role in Indian weddings and arranged marriages, in which the bride and groom may be matched by an astrologer. In America, astrological wedding planning is gaining popularity, coinciding with the rise of “new age” spirituality and wellness content on social media. According to a 2018 poll by Pew Research Center, 29 per cent of Americans believe in astrology, up from 25 per cent in 2009, which might be why so much viral wedding content on TikTok includes astrological wedding seating charts and “the zodiacs as wedding dresses” videos.
“The majority of my clients who come to me for readings are women, so they are who are asking me the most about choosing a good wedding date based on astrology,” Bell said. “I don’t think I’ve ever given a reading about wedding-related stuff to a man before.”
The practice of checking horoscopes for compatibility before marriage is an Indian tradition, said Sundeep Kochar, an astrologer in Mumbai, India. “Even now, jokingly, I say, ‘Before falling in love, get your horoscopes checked,’” he said. “Marriages are made in the stars.”
Kochar uses Indian astrology — which is based on the moon sign, not the sun sign — to prepare clients for marriage by approaching it as premarital counseling. “What you can come to know after two years of marriage, I tell people in advance so they can accept each other, know how to deal with each other and make changes,” he said.
Kochar also helps couples set wedding dates, though this can lead to several weddings happening on one particularly auspicious day. “There are days that are really popular in Indian astrology,” he said. “Everyone wishes to get married then.”
Astrologically speaking, some years are also better than others to have a wedding. Jess Campbell, an astrologer who runs the Spicy Gemini Memes account on Instagram, delayed getting married in 2021 because she “wasn’t seeing any great astrology.” She ended up picking a wedding date in October 2022, as Venus (the planet of love) is harmonious during the early Libran dates of the month.
For couples that are already married and didn’t consider astrology for their weddings, Campbell, 30, often retrospectively checks their event charts. “It started as a curiosity to see if the charts echoed any themes they were navigating, so I looked at my immediate circle, and it totally tracked,” she said.
Other couples find it rather overwhelming: For Amber Ying, an automation robotics associate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, searching for the perfect wedding date using both Western and Chinese astrology — based on the Chinese calendar — “ended up being too much.”
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.“As a Taiwanese American, I wanted to reach into my ethnic heritage,” Ying, 28, said. “But the two systems have different philosophies, and some of our family and friends couldn’t make certain days.”
So she is getting married on Aug. 4, the anniversary of the day she met her fiancé. This means that she’ll be walking down the aisle while Venus is in retrograde — something she doesn’t seem worried about as long as all of her loved ones can be there.
“I saw an astrologer say, ‘There’s no such thing as the proper day for your wedding, there’s only the day you choose,’” she said, adding that this changed her mindset around event astrology, “because if you keep staring at the stars in the chart, you’re not really looking at what’s in front of you.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Laura Pitcher
Photographs by: Hiroko Masuike
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
