Sweet Talk.

I remember wearing a white robe and stepping wide-eyed into the baptistery corridor. The lukewarm water barely skimmed the bottom of my six-year-old neck. I held my breath the entire time the pastor spoke of innocence and Christian rebirth; when I emerged from the sacred backwards tilt, my face was purple and the female faces of my Baptist congregation were red with tear stains.

Now, I'm 21. I was a bridesmaid in my best friends wedding last June and I'm scheduled to serve as Maid of Honor in another's the June coming up. Over the summer, my roommate and fellow fashion industry intern in NYC was proposed to with a sliver of diamond on a silver plated band in Central Park.

My senior year of college began Monday. That afternoon, I stood outside my sorority house and beckoned with the cadence of familiar cheers a group of the most confident and disillusioned teenage women on Milledge Avenue - all innocent, wearing white sundresses and brimming with excitement.

Southern women are defined by and obsessed with the prospect of wearing white. We pledge our hopes and dreams and fears within God, sweet talkin’ gentleman and big-haired groups of fellow Georgia peaches. Some of us pray for the tenacity to stand firm in our cowgirl boots and conquer the world with unwavering morals and the doe-eyed ingenuity our mamas instilled within us. Still, others strive toward a life of potluck dinners and ironing dress shirts and spending a handful of evenings in hospital delivery rooms.

Southern Belles are certainly a spectacle, but our tendencies aren’t superficial. We’re livin’ lives we’ve heard of in country music tunes and witnessed within our neighbors for generations. With a penchant for the romantic and the classically unattainable, we’re spending the fairytale our 20s plastered with bright red smiles and backlit by the hope of a Georgia sunset.