You're not kidding! My wife was a wedding coordinator for nearly a decade and I used to joke with her "What next, wedding water?" Then someone got the bright idea to buy bottled water wholesale, label it with the wedding details and sell the result at a huge markup.

Startup idea: Wedding air.

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.

Wedding rain, sold in convenient spray bottles.

> "it's the most important day of my life"

Implying that its all downhill from there. I find this such a depressing way of looking at life.

I can't believe I'm about to defend a marketing slogan. "Most important" doesn't imply "best", in my opinion, I think it implies that this day has the most impact on your life, so make it a good one. Maybe future days will be better because of what happened on this day.

I will say that at 37 years of age i believe my wedding was the most important party i have thrown in my life. With people giving up an entire weekend to fly in to a central location for my wife and I it seemed only fair to make sure everyone had a great time.

It's pretty easy for a wedding and reception to be boring for your guests.

Heh, that's the conundrum about weddings. It's supposed to be about you and your spouse, but the people getting married end up spending all their time stressing out over keeping the guests entertained.

in my experience and I suspect most western countries it's about the bride, but the groom's role is largely ornamental.

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.

> the groom's role is largely ornamental.

15% of the weddings I've been to didn't have a groom

I can agree with your view, but would add that "fun" and "flawless" are not synonyms. Heck, charge the normal rate for things and I'd be able to afford more fun!

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")

That’s still usually not the most important. For instance even if your partner is the best thing that ever happens to your life, the most important moment will be the proposal or whatever moment you recognize and mutually accept you need each other in your life.

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.

Saying that you will do a thing and doing a thing do not have equal merit. If I say I'm going to climb everest, you can be sure that the moment which is remembered is the one where I made it to the top (or failed to).

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)

I agree with your point, to the extent that climbing a mountain or birthing a child have a clear end you can evaluate afterwards to mark if you did it or not.

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.

> signing the paper or vowing in front of costumed people doesn’t mean that much more anymore

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)

it doesn't matter how you define it - the initial premise was that once you've decided that it the most important, then it's all downhill from there.

You're conflating importance with quality.

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.

From peep show, one of the funniest comedies around in my opinion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4QRf-HKJ8E&t=8m20s

That video was blocked for me.... maybe because I'm in the UK.

Is it this clip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUH6oRkWm-Q

No the part after the marriage where sophie starts crying in the car and Mark tells her to stop seeing the wedding is over and they are over that hump

It's the same as someone who says:

"But you only turn 18 once!"

Which is true for every birthday.

When people say that, they mean this is the only time you will officially transform into an adult. Still ridiculous, but 18th birthdays are different from other birthdays.

The other opposite would be considering your final day the "most important day of your life".

> Yeah, it's upsetting. As soon as merchandise X is prefixed with "wedding", the cost is doubled. Wedding cake? Boom. Wedding napkins? Check. Etc.

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.

> i believe one partial cause of this is because there are higher expectations around the quality of goods and services applied for weddings.

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 agree that this has to be a huge factor in the price discrepancy. Even for lavish bar mitzvahs and the like, people don't typically sweat the details the way they do for weddings.

This is not an exaggeration. Many fields such as makeup, hair, and photography literally charge more for the same work if it is a wedding.

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.

Working with weddings is awful and most definitely impacts the work. Everything is high stress and fraught with complicated politics - I was involved in the photography side of things.