First, a horror story. One of my best friends raised a daughter. He spent over $60,000 sending her to a four-year college. As soon as she finished, she decided to get married so he had to spend another $30,000 on a wedding. Well, maybe he didn't have to spend that much but as pointed out in the article, it doesn't take much to run up the cost of even an average wedding.
But here's the punchline. Within three years, her marriage fell apart and now she's living back at home with two children. So the poor guy spend about $100,000 to get her educated and out of the house and now she's right back under his roof where she started.
Makes me glad I had two sons and no daughters!
When I got married back in the 1980s, I would have been perfectly fine eloping for a weekend in Las Vegas. Have an Elvis impersonator do the wedding and then party down at the Circus Circus or Caesers Palace. I would have been fine with that. I would have had cheap champagne poured in the bathtub and rose petals dumped in the bedsheets. After all, I'm a romantic kind of guy.
But my wife would have none of that. Instead, it was the full Italian wedding experience from soup to nuts. Right down to the chicken dance at the reception. It was a year of hell preparing for that one day. Well, mostly hell for my bride-to-be and my future mother-in-law. I let them deal with all the nonsense of lining up photographers and deciding what color the flower arrangement would be and all that other stuff.
I just told them to let me know what time to show up and what to wear. So I got off pretty easily. But I think even back then, it was a $50,000 wedding. This was back in the mid 1980s so a lot of money.
What a racket.
I agree with you on the fancy smancy weddings. I have not paid for one but I have attended a few and many of them didn’t work. My husband and I had a very simple wedding, I wore a borrowed dress and it has held together for almost 58 years ( if I counted right) .
( geese can it really be that long?)