It's astonishing how easy it is to fall into the trap of "it's just a one-time event", "it's the most important day of my life", etc.
Get an air compressor and bottle the air at the wedding. Sell bottles of the stuff so people can catch a whiff of the big day later.
Implying that its all downhill from there. I find this such a depressing way of looking at life.
It's pretty easy for a wedding and reception to be boring for your guests.
You are right about the amount of big-day work though; we had a huge spread of food and booze and I remember eating a couple of crackers and a single glass of wine over the entire evening. This was a very relaxed version of a wedding as well; too much glad-handling to actually have fun.
15% of the weddings I've been to didn't have a groom
I've had two weddings and attended many many more. 90+% of the time is completely forgotten. The rest is good or bad memories that are largely disconnected from the service/goods quality and the price. I've seen success with plastic cups and failures with crystal.
(Interestingly, the vast majority of the "bad" events came from the wedding officiants, with photographers coming in at number 2, neither of which correlated to "quality")
The wedding is the inking of the deal, the most important moment is when you agree to the deal in the first place (and I hope that’s way far before the wedding takes place).
From there, the impact of the wedding is mostly memories, networking and social perception.
Similarly the birth of a child, not the agreement to try and conceive, is the bit that matters. (Although I'll accept the getting pregnant somewhat)
The act of marriage, of declaring in front of witnesses (friends/family) before the law that you bind yourself to another person in perpetuity is obviously the occasion that is important. Not when you decided to ask. Not when your partner said yes. When you do it.
(The party afterwards is sheer madness etc etc)
Mariage in theory only has a beginning, and in our times it’s mainly a promise (signing the paper or vowing in front of costumed people doesn’t mean that much more anymore).
Some people stay together without ever marrying, other sign the papers and do a wedding afterward (a lot of churches will actualy require the papers to be done before), or never. So, if the question is “where did it start ?”, my answer would be at the point where both people agreed to be together.
At that point you are effectively together, already doing what you are saying.
I fundamentally disagree with this. I think that lots of people view this thing very differently, and to some extent that's just cultural and based on their own views and experiences.
(Basically, I'm going to go with agree to disagree because I think your view is valid albeit not one I ascribe to)
The day Bruce Wayne's parents died was the most important day of his life. It is most assuredly not the day he looks back on as the best day of his life.
Is it this clip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUH6oRkWm-Q
"But you only turn 18 once!"
Which is true for every birthday.
i believe one partial cause of this is because there are higher expectations around the quality of goods and services applied for weddings. e.g. if you make fancy decorated cakes to order, what are the odds that the customer or one of their relatives is going to go berserk and refuse to pay if it has some perceived flaw? probably higher if you are making the cake for a wedding compared to some other arbitrary event.
Based on the comments ive heard from some people in the field (anecdote), this is a rationalization. If they discover that you lied about it not being for a wedding after it is done, paid for, and happy reviews garnered, they will be just as upset, but it us purely for the loss of income, not because of risk.
I have a friend who is a makeup artist who gets angry if she discovers a client has hidden the fact that the work is for a wedding. Not because it impacts the work, but solely because it changes the hourly rate she would charge.
Yes: diamonds, jewellery, mechanical watches etc are all bad value for money. People don't buy them because they're bad value. They buy them because they like wearing them, and women buy jewellery because it makes them feel pretty.
That's life. It's fine throwing money away sometime.
Yes of course it's silly! But that's not the point, and it never has been. Once you're at the point of buying a gift that costs far more than its intrinsic, utilitarian value, worrying about its "true scarcity" is just haggling on the details. I purchased an engagement ring for my wife that costed about $30,000. She didn't ask for anything remotely as extravagant as that, but she likes it and I enjoy it for frankly vain reasons. I take immense pleasure out of the reactions it elicits from other people. Despite being very clear-eyed about the artificial scarcity of diamonds and DeBeers marketing, I still bought it because I enjoyed being able to make a frivolous purchase. Personally I don't like spending a lot on things that aren't either experiential or somewhat long-lasting, so I'd never spend much at all on a wedding dress. But I don't begrudge people for spending money inefficiently if they can afford it.
We're all the same species. With very few exceptions, none of us is hyper-vigilant, hyper-rational or hyper-efficient. There are many, many things we idly buy which are artificially scarce or inflated in price. Buying them is not categorically different from buying expensive jewelry under a cultural zeitgeist perpetuated by a global conglomerate. I think most people really don't have much self-awareness about how high their floor of wealth and personal spending is over the ceiling of frugality and efficiency they talk about so much.
Yes, but that doesn't mean we have to actively make the situation worse.
If not, 30K might represent 6-12 months of personal runway to build your own business.
50% is considered very good, but in consumer focused America some people might save only 10% of their income (thus for a 100K income to save 30K represents 3 years of savings obliterated).
Sure if you have the money. The problem is that most people don’t and spend what would be a down payment on a house on complete bullshit. It’s a terrible way to start a marriage and likely leads to higher rates of divorce.
Too much of this is similar to "The child of a proper family marries at a certain age and gets a proper wedding".
Fight the power! Be the change!
> Too much of this is similar to "The child of a proper family marries at a certain age and gets a proper wedding".
Getting married "at a certain age" (i.e. young) isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, I'd argue that being a parent (or grandparent!) while you're still young, active, and in good health is a wonderful thing. It's blindly succumbing to social pressure to make financially disastrous decisions that must be avoided. Go ahead an have a wedding party too, but do it on your terms.
Be it most blatantly the shaming of older unmarried women in Chinese society or more practically arranged marriages of young girls in rural middle eastern areas. Honor killings are just the crassest and most publicized method to uphold the second tradition, but if you read reports of women who went through this, the first part is always brutal social pressure by the direct family including "asking" and begging by their own mothers. Never underestimate the viciousness of parents who think they are pushing their children to do the "right" thing and are not above making this their first priority.
If I caught someone in my family pulling crap like continually pressuring spouses to spend above their means and force them into debt with that line of argument they will likely have to reevaluate whether they might be better off without me in their life. A lot of people sadly only realize this after they see family members trying to do the same thing to the next generation. Differently put, depending on how much grandma doesnt understand the word "no stop it" she wont be coming over for the holidays anymore.
(I agree with you).. but back to the original commenter's point about the behavior, versus the object of the behavior:
Do you believe that eliminating (or sufficienctly discouraging through education or contrary social pressure) diamonds and/or expensive weddings would sufficiently eliminate this spending above ones means? Or would that spending just shift to other targets, such as different jewelry (which even the article refers to in talking about spending more money on setting instead) or experiences?
Having your fiance wanting a diamond ring is a different problem then your mother in law pushing you to spend 30k on your wedding to show off to the neighbors.
Advertisement based spending is just another set of problems when it develops without outside social pressure. Its the difference between your wife needing to show off to her mother and girlfriends, wanting to show off. or you two agreeing about how it might be spend best.
Just to point out though, while the example of diamond rings is focused on the female spouse, this isnt a issue that only happens with her. Pick another example and you could switch the roles.
The last option, of discussing how to spend the money, is simply about the state of your relationship. If you two agree that spending 30k is worth the fun of taking a few month off for vacation, all the best to you. Just do it because you want to, not because you think you have to.
If I had plenty of money and nothing more important to spend it on, I'd (personally) go for a crazy fun extravagant wedding. If not, then I wouldn't. If you have no savings, obviously don't spend a ton on a wedding...
Do you really want to enrich debeers? Buy a 2K wedding cake?
Alternatively I would get a custom piece designed.
There's a difference between shopping until you drop, and giving the woman you love the occasional gift to show that you love and appreciate her.
Yes, it's not required, you don't _NEED_ expensive jewellery or fancy weddings, but if you have excess money that you are not investing, why not?
On the flipside, I also like getting nice gifts. Don't you?
Just tell someone you love them and do nice things for them and be there for them. It's free.
I'm into mechanical watches. Just because I find them interesting, not for show. I'm not brainwashed, but heck, getting one I really want from someone I love would be close to the ultimate gift. Do I need it? Of course not. Do I expect it? Of course not.
Now you're just being casually sexist. If you want to judge people for how they choose to celebrate their mutual affection that's fine. So diamonds aren't your thing, thanks for sharing. But let's not go down the rabbit hole of litigating one gender's susceptibility over another's.
You should look into getting a therapist to talk through whatever has soured your outlook on life to this point of bitter cynicism.
Citation needed. Seriously, mechanical watches can be a great investment if you know what you are buying.
Averages are mostly useless for this kind of things where some people can go crazy on prices. What is the median? Are other deciles available to check?
But I think the most important would be with the cost of a wedding / current capital owned and cost of wedding / revenues ratios.
The source here, valuepenguin.com (which is trying to sell you wedding insurance), cites three data sources. Once source is no longer online. The other two sources (TheKnot and Costofwedding.com) claim to have conducted surveys. But The Knot just surveys people on its own website (not representative). Anyone want to venture a guess as to whether a representative number of courthouse-ceremony-and-lunch-buffet-afterwards weddings are counted in these figures?[1]
Meanwhile, Cost of Wedding is "owned and operated by The Wedding Report, Inc." and reports the results of a survey The Wedding Report did. And The Wedding Report has this gem in its methodology description:
We take a bottom up approach to "Average Wedding Cost." The total "Average Cost" is calculated using "Weighted Demand Average (WDA)," which is; average spent times demand equals the weighted demand average. Sum of weighted demand average for all items equals the average wedding cost. Using WDA instead of a summed average gives a better calculation, because it takes into account all items that couples may or may not purchase.[2]
As far as I can tell, this means the average cost is calculated by first determining average costs for each item you might possibly purchase, and then adding them all up as if every couple purchases every item! Umm... no. That's not how you do math.
[1] "Respondents were recruited throughout the year from TheKnot.com membership." https://xogroupinc.com/press-releases/the-knot-2017-real-wed...
[2] https://www.theweddingreport.com/index.cfm/action/home/view/...
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/weddings/2013/06/average_...
I grew up exclusively attending weddings from the (bottom of the) bottom half of that median and I now routinely interact with people who (seemingly) have only been to weddings from the top half; the disconnect is enormous.
If a person was married in their 20s and 30s but their marriage ends in a divorce in 40s this person spent a very significant part of their life with a companion. It simply doesn't matter that the marriage ended up with a divorse, as long as it lasted and both parties were satisfied, it was a marriage. The fact that the marriage ended up with a divorce doesn't make it less quality, or less worthy to spend more money on.
(My own marriage probably cost $30k - was a decade ago and I forget. But then we had 60 guess, at least half of whom if I employed would cost at least $600 for the day, so the bigger cost may well be lost earnings)
We started googling for ‘state park weddings’ and found a great park an hour outside of town on the waterfront with a barn. It cost us $500 to book it for the day.
We tracked down the wedding planner from one of the weddings there on instagram. She had only done the one wedding for her friend and didn’t know if she wanted to do it for a living. She offered to do it for us for almost nothing. She completely blew us away, making handmade decorations, and even emceeing for us. We ended up giving her a 100% tip and still feel like we underpaid. We didn’t get a DJ, we just used Spotify. We hired a photography student that was a friend of a friend to do the pictures. We got a roadside bbq joint to cater. I think we spent $3500 for everything including the wedding dress and photographer.
We used the savings to do an around the world trip for our honeymoon. I think after the wedding and honeymoon we ended up with like $2000 of debt on our credit card.
So you can definitely do a low budget wedding that’s still beautiful if you try.
Our ceremony was held at a small 19th century chapel. The reception was at an 18th century mill house. Worked out great.
Weddings could be casual ordeals without frills and rigid formalities but they function as a status symbol of sorts.
https://studentloanhero.com/featured/wedding-costs-survey-co...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/one-third-of-couples-go-in...
Very much depending on some key demographics[0], and also assumes that all marriages start with an expensive engagement and wedding.
[0]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...
I would ask my wife if she wanted a fake diamond and new car or a real diamond.
That ancient statistic is very misleading. It is derived from dividing the number of divorces by the number of marriages. A more interesting statistic is the number of people who get married and then divorced compared to the overall population. This is much lower since some people have a lot of divorces.
The $500 is a bit misleading - each family later threw us a small backyard get together with other friends/family, but we were in different countries, so there was airfare involved later, and the food/catering for each event was probably a couple hundred each (burgers, chips, drinks, cake, etc for a few dozens folks). Including airfare to visit people, and the cost of those events, it was probably still under $3k. I understand it was 20 years ago, but some people were spending $20k even back then, apparently.
Just buying dinner and drinks for 150 people (which seems like a lot, but it's really easy to come up with a list that long) will probably cost you $5000. Then you need another place to put those people and that's another $5000. Then you might want a nice photographer for at least another $2000. Add in music, decorations, lodging, clothing, etc. and you're almost to 30k for a pretty "normal" wedding. Once you start getting higher end food/drinks/venue then the prices go up quickly.
Average U.S. wedding cost $30k in 2014, while the average engagement ring was $5600, or 19% of the cost [0]
https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-cost-of-wedding
While reducing/eliminating the cost of the ring is a big saving, the entire wedding industry is a shocking way to start your marriage (especially given about half will end in divorce)