By Isabel Tabs ’17

Some may call junior year their worst nightmare, not because of SATs or the pressure of college coming up, but because of prom. Your parents remember it as their best high school memory, but in the 1980s, “promposals” or the need for a $1,000 dress didn’t exist. So what really is the point of prom: a high school memory or just the anticipation of it?

The one thing to know about prom is that the guy has to ask the girl, right? False: They’re just social norms and preconceived notions. More important, he has to ask her in an elaborate way that probably costs more than a ticket to the actual prom. From a girl’s perspective it’s stressful anxiously waiting for a guy to ask and holding high expectations for how.

“I couldn’t wait around and wait for someone to ask me; I was getting so much anxiety,” said junior Karly Blume. “I just had to be spontaneous and ask a friend from Seton Hall.”

Just because it’s Junior Prom doesn’t mean you can’t ask a senior or an underclassman. Be active. It’s your prom, you can take whoever you want even if they go to West Essex or another school, but girls as well as guys shouldn’t have anxiety about a date because 1) you are not alone and 2) there are plenty of people to go with, and who says you can’t go by yourself?

We have all seen the common cliche promposals. *holds up a bear and a poster that says, “Prom would be unBEARable without you”.* These promposals can be justified by the fact that people want to “gram it.”  Prom season brings the most feed to my Instagram; people want to show off their extreme ways of how they got asked to prom. It’s interesting to see the couples, but the repetitive cliches aren’t necessary.

“I wanted to do something original for my promposal, so I put the note inside a fortune cookies,” junior Spencer Peckman said. “I really wanted to make it good, but I didn’t stress because I knew I would be getting a date.”

I can attest that there are far greater issues than finding a date and a promposal idea; it’s the fact that prom is April 1. Not that it’s on April Fool’s Day, but it’s so early. Students fail to realize the true reasoning behind because it’s not explicitly stated by administrators. Students tend to live in the past and future instead of the present during prom. In other words, they look forward to the hype of prom (getting the dress and taking pictures) and going down the shore.

Since the prom occurs in the early spring when the weather still tends to be cold, the school administrators might assume that students would not be interested in going to the beach, a longstanding high school cliche that many adults would love to squash entirely.  After all, who wants to sit on a beach in 50 degree weather? Yet going down the shore after prom has become a tradition, and many students don’t let the weather deter them. But the ugly truth is that this might actually have the opposite effect; what administrators may not realize is that the most stubborn students will be more likely to be cooped up in a motel room with nothing to do, which might actually elicit more risk-taking behaviors.

But there are still those students who want to cherish the dance, because isn’t that what we are paying $80 for? “I just want to enjoy prom and stop hearing people complain about not getting a date or a dress,” Blume said.

As much as prom is about the dress and the date, it’s simply not. It’s a high school memory you should look back on when you’re 40 years old with no regrets tearing up the dance floor.