The Stag of the New Millennium

The new millennium stag is a very different breed from the traditional caricature. Due to a mix of increased affluence, a trend of marrying later and a more relaxed attitude to unmarried co-habitation, the stag do has taken on a new significance.

Oddly, as divorce rates rise, the final step towards marriage feels to today’s prospective brides and grooms to be a much greater step than it used to be, as traditionally couples needed to get married in order to live together. Now, as couples tend to live together first, sometimes for years, marriage seems like a conceptually greater leap.

As such stag dos have also taken on a greater significance as the final blow out of young irresponsibility and a marker for the inexorable decline into middle aged responsibility. When this is combined with a greater affluence generally and couples possessing more readily available cash as they are marrying later, the stag do has grown in size to become stag weekends.

As stags now celebrate their impending nuptials over a number of days, they have discovered that they can’t maintain such a protracted event fuelled by alcohol and strippers alone. As such stag weekends take in a cornucopia of different activities, partly encouraged by commercial factors as an events industry has sprung up to support the growth of stag events.

Generally stag weekends revolve around activities worth their weight in masculinity such as paintballing, blindfolded 4x4 driving, shooting and white water rafting. However, for the more sophisticated stag, there are often more sedate activities such as life drawing and wine tasting to usher in the new, responsible chapter of their life.

It’s interesting to see how the expansion of stag activities has accompanied a change in attitude to marriage, and to consider how marriage is simultaneously less important and more important than it used to be. Once committed, divorce is more likely than ever, although these statistics could perhaps be slightly skewed by increasing life expectancy, but the prevailing attitude to marriage amongst today’s young people seems to reflect an increased seriousness to the undertaking beforehand.

Stag weekends have not ballooned simply because people are richer, although this has enabled it, the cultural change that accompanies the whole arena of stags and grooms is perhaps more to do with the change.