Star signs and lucky wedding dates: what holds up and what does not

The question turns up in almost every set of wedding plans, usually in passing: whether the date sits well astrologically, whether a Leo ought to marry in August, whether the moon is owed anything. Whoever asks it rarely means astronomy. What they mean is the feeling of making a very large decision without a rehearsal.

So this is handled the only honest way it can be: customs are described, not graded, and no effects are claimed for any of them. Plenty remains usable all the same. Date customs are old, they are well documented, and they have blunt consequences for which weekends are still free and which went months ago.

A wedding is one of the few decisions taken without a rehearsal that cannot be undone without consequence. At thresholds like that, people have always reached for signs: a date that fits, an object that is supposed to bring luck. This is not a quirk of a few couples. It is part of the furniture at nearly every wedding you have ever been to. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue — and, in the older British version, a silver sixpence in her shoe. Confetti at the church door. A horseshoe handed over on the way out. Rain called lucky by whoever gets it, while everybody else repeats that happy is the bride the sun shines on. Nobody claims a mechanism. Almost everybody joins in.

The star-sign question belongs to that same family. It is a wish for a good omen over a large decision. It gets asked when a lot is open anyway: just after the engagement, just before the first booking, just after the first serious argument about the guest list. Which is why answering it with a fact rarely helps. Anyone asking whether the eleventh of June is a good day is not short of information.

For the two of you there is a practical side to that. When one of you raises the subject, it is almost never about astrology as such but about one of the three questions sitting behind it: is this the right time, is this the right person, will the day be any good. The first two belong in an honest evening between the two of you, the third belongs in the planning. The calendar answers none of them. Seeing that saves you a long discussion about planetary positions that was really a short one about something else.

Picking a favourable moment has its own name in English: electional astrology. Somebody working that way does not look up the two of you and read off your sun signs. They calculate a chart for a particular day at a particular time and place, so that the ceremony gets a chart of its own, the way a person does. It is offered as a paid service, and what you get back is usually a shortlist of possible dates with time windows attached.

Two motifs come up again and again. The first is Venus: while it is retrograde, astrological sources widely advise against marrying. The second is Mercury, the retrograde everybody in the English-speaking world has heard of, where the standard advice concerns signing things — worth knowing only because a wedding involves signing a register or a licence, and someone will point that out. The moon runs alongside both: a waxing moon is held to be favourable, on the reasoning that what begins should grow.

The German-speaking version of that last one goes further, and you may well meet it at a wedding in Germany or Austria. There the folk rule is that the vows should be said before midday, while the sun is still climbing. It survives because it costs nothing to obey: a civil wedding there is an appointment at the Standesamt, the register office, and those appointments are mostly weekday mornings anyway. In Britain, Ireland, the United States and Australia the default is a Saturday afternoon, so the rule has nowhere to land. There is no English equivalent of it, and nothing to do about it — but if a German relative asks why you are marrying at three in the afternoon, that is what is behind the question.

What is genuinely usable here is the order of operations, and it matters more than it sounds. If the subject means something to you, settle it before you approach a registrar, a church or a venue. A date that gets booked first and assessed afterwards can only unsettle you: cancelling costs money, ignoring it feels bad.

The other way round, a shortlist of favourable days drops into the search perfectly well as one more filter, as long as it is not the only one. An astrologically ideal Tuesday in February is still a Tuesday in February, with everything that follows from it. Apply that filter first rather than last and you tend to end up with the days on which nobody is free.

Whatever anyone thinks of the stars, there is a long list of rules about when people marry and when they do not. They are documented, some of them are two thousand years old, and they still shape which weekends book out first.

• The days of the week. The English rhyme is unambiguous: Monday for wealth, Tuesday for health, Wednesday the best day of all; Thursday for losses, Friday for crosses, and Saturday no luck at all. The day it rules out flatly is the one nearly everybody now marries on, which tells you roughly how much weight folklore carries against a working week.
• May. The best known European superstition comes from Rome. May held the Lemuria, the festival for the restless dead, and Ovid records in his calendar of feasts that common opinion held only bad women married in May. The line outlived two millennia — in English as the rhyme about marrying in May and ruing the day, in German as a farmer's rule. May is now one of the most sought-after wedding months there is. The superstition did not survive contact with good weather.
• Lent and the church calendar. Marry in Lent, live to repent is the old form of it. In practice the Church of England will marry you on any day of the year, though Holy Week and Good Friday are ordinarily discouraged and individual clergy decline them; Catholic parishes do not hold weddings during the Easter Triduum, and a wedding in Lent is generally expected to be a restrained one. None of that is a question of luck. It is a question of the diary, and one call to the parish office settles it.
• Friday the thirteenth. The modern English-speaking contribution. It is one of the few dates in high season that nobody is fighting over, so couples who are unmoved by it get a choice the rest of the calendar does not offer.
• The Jewish calendar. No weddings take place on Shabbat or on festivals. Beyond that there are mourning periods in which weddings do not happen at all: much of the Omer between Pesach and Shavuot, and the Three Weeks leading up to Tisha B'Av.
• The Chinese almanac. The Tung Shing lists auspicious and inauspicious days, and families in Britain, the States and Australia still choose from it. Eight counts as a lucky number and four is avoided, because the word for it sounds like the word for death.
• The Hindu muhurat. A priest sets the date, often down to the hour, from the panchang — and whole stretches of the year are ruled out, Chaturmas being the best known of them.
• Neat and repeating dates. Sevens, twelves and doubled digits are wanted everywhere. There is a trap in them for anyone marrying across the Atlantic: the United States writes the month first, Britain, Ireland and Australia write the day first, so a date that reads beautifully on one side of your guest list reads as nothing on the other. Only the genuinely symmetrical ones work in both.

The twenty-ninth of February deserves its own line. It exists only in a leap year. Marry on it and your anniversary either comes round every four years or falls on a stand-in day. That is arithmetic rather than superstition, and it is the point overlooked most often.

Which yields an unglamorous but serviceable rule: customs do not make forecasts, they make markets. What many people avoid is easier to get. What counts as lucky goes first.

There is a difference between a private superstition and a religious obligation, and it becomes practical immediately. Whether you pay attention to the moon concerns the two of you. Whether an invited family is not permitted to celebrate on a given day concerns your guest list, and that cannot be repaired after the fact.

Three situations come up regularly. Guests who keep Shabbat can neither travel nor attend on a Saturday until after dark — and Saturday is precisely the default wedding day in Britain, Ireland, the States and Australia, so the clash lands harder here than it does in Germany, where a civil ceremony is usually a weekday appointment. A Sunday, or a Saturday celebration beginning after nightfall, resolves it. Muslim guests fasting through Ramadan eat nothing during daylight; the month moves about eleven days earlier each year against the Gregorian calendar, so check the year you are marrying in rather than this one. And in families with a Hindu or Chinese background the date may be the subject of a consultation of its own, which you do not override without trouble.

Handling it is undramatic. Ask early, ask specifically, and ask the person concerned rather than the branch of the family: is there any period in your calendar when you could not celebrate? That one question, put before anything is booked, spares you the later choice between the date and the people.

Your own family is the special case. When parents or grandparents insist on a date custom, neither refuting it nor giving in helps. Take the wish seriously, state your criteria, and decide for yourselves anyway. If it can be met at no cost — a day earlier, an hour later — do it and never mention it again. If it breaks the date, say no once, kindly, with a reason, and do not debate the reason. That is the same move that works wherever else a family expects a say, including where the expectation arrives attached to a contribution towards the cost, and a date chosen out of deference is never afterwards remembered as deference by anyone.

Once the symbolic layer is cleared away, a short list of conditions is left that will either carry a date or sink it. It is unromantic and its effects are not in dispute.

• Availability. The registrar or officiant, the place, and the one or two suppliers you will not do without have to be free on the same day. In England and Wales the registrar is booked separately from the venue and the two diaries are not the same diary. This single point eliminates most dream dates, however good the number looks.
• The legal clock. You cannot secure a date as far ahead as you think. In England and Wales notice is given at a register office at least 28 clear days beforehand and holds good for twelve months, so a date further out than a year cannot yet be locked legally, only commercially; Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own systems. Ireland requires at least three months' notification to the registrar. In Australia the Notice of Intended Marriage is lodged no less than one month and no more than eighteen months in advance. In the United States it is a marriage licence rather than a notice; the rules are state law, and the licence commonly holds good for somewhere between 30 and 90 days, though some states impose a short waiting period before it can be used. None of this stops you choosing a date. All of it governs when you may act on one.
• The weekday in the year you mean. A date that means something to you may fall on a Wednesday in the year you want it. Ten seconds to check, and still noticed too late on a regular basis.
• The people who should be there. Shift patterns, exams, house moves, due dates, an operation already scheduled. Gather that informally while nothing is fixed — afterwards the same question sounds like an instruction.
• The season. It decides light, clothing, weather risk and half the running order, and it is the only item on this list that cannot be corrected at all once you have booked. Worth saying plainly for an international readership: a summer wedding is June to August in Britain and North America and December to February in Australia and New Zealand, so anything you borrow from the other hemisphere — a supplier's quiet season, a photograph, an idea about the light — arrives with its months inverted.

Only after that comes the meaning most people look for first. A date with a history behind it, the day you met or a grandparents' anniversary, carries well, as long as it is not set against the five points above. A date with no history at all is just as good: it acquires its meaning on the day itself, and a few years later nobody remembers that it did not have one before. Once those five line up, the date stops being a question and becomes the thing everybody asks you for, which a wedding website of your own answers once instead of forty times.

One last point rarely appears in lists. Check whether the day is already taken in either family, by an anniversary of a death, a separation, an accident. It is the only date question in this article where an uneasy feeling is a good adviser. This is not about an omen. It is about people who will be thinking of something else on that day every year for the rest of their lives.