Now, I don’t have any hard proof for this theory besides [expressively waves hand at that chart], but here’s what I think is causing the funky trimodal distribution above: Everyone at the wedding — the couple, their parents, their parents’ parents — gets a few songs from when they were in their late teens and early 20s. Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math. According to the U.S. census, the
median age at first marriage for the bride is about 27, so for a 2016 wedding, we can approximate that she was born around 1989. That means her parents would have gotten married in the late 1980s — let’s just say 1986. Mom would have been 22 or so back then based on the census data, which would place her birth around 1964. That would put the 2016 bride’s grandparents’ wedding around the early 1960s, when the median marriage age for women was 20.
So it isn’t so much that “‘Uptown Funk’ will be absent from weddings within 10 years,” but rather “‘Uptown Funk’ may be absent from weddings within 10 years, but it could make a hell of a comeback in 25 years when the 2016 couple’s offspring starts getting married.”
