Happy #monthsary babe! Vernacular readings and practices of monthsaries among young couplings on social media

Abstract

Video abstract Romantic monthsaries, or monthly commemorations of the date on which a couple first got together, are increasingly practiced by young couples and archived on social media. As a form of visually oriented practice, monthsaries are fraught with vernacular readings, perceptions, and practices. This paper investigates the practice of monthsaries among ‘young couplings’, which I define as the experiences of young people’s partnering practices in their teenage years and/or their initial experience of early partnering regardless of the age of first coupling, in which young couples do not yet have any formal status, are unable to experience domestic living together, and have limited opportunities to be alone and intimate. In the absence of any scholarly precedence and adopting a Grounded Theory approach, this paper is an exploratory study that approaches monthsaries through internet folk knowledge, forum threads and visual displays of monthsaries on Instagram.