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.
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.