My wife and I were married in 1998 at a cost of less than $1,000. But we were both 44 and adult.
And the honeymoon ain’t over. Dead serious. It only got stronger.
Well, the rings were worth about $2,000 and pretty darned nice, thanks to Costco.
The Wife and I eloped in ‘94.
Her crazy a$$ psycho liberal sister (from Minnesota) is still upset that she was not invited to the wedding.
Not a joke.
Some brides are more emotionally invested in the wedding than they are with the marriage.
The tv show Say Yes to the Dress amazes me. I can’t believe those women who pay thousands of dollars on wedding dresses. What a waste. Would rather put it towards down payment on a house.
I thought my marriage would stay intact until I died, but it was not to be.
My divorce did not happen at my initiation. In my view, my ex-wife really wanted to be divorced all along, but needed to go through marriage to get there.
We bought one another expensive items, but our financial situation was good. We did not have to stretch or go into debt to finance our lifestyle, which was never as lavish as she wanted.
She’s not my problem any longer. On to better (and younger) things.
Neither of my weddings were expensive. First one was at an awesome ranch where I spent my childhood summers. Second was at a relative’s horrible country club and I hated the location. Gorgeous thick silk dresses for nearly free: my mom’s, and a rental.
But apparently it isn’t the cost of the wedding guaranteeing the divorce. The key seems to be knowing how to pick your spouse, dammit. I picked two men who are still my friends. But one was a foreigner with some scary mafia ties that I didn’t understand at the time would become a threat. And the other abandoned not just me but four kids, possibly due to his mental illness (sometimes bran dysfunction and character issues are hard to distinguish). I would have been a great wife to somebody.
I doubt I’ll get married again. I’m sad about it. But I think from now on I only have time for a boyfriend. My kids will always come first.
There should be a bridal magazine out there called “Grooms and Other Accessories”
Everything has to be a production now. We do not attend outlandishly expensive weddings that are performed in some unusual place that is difficult to attend. The goal seems to be the gifts, rather than the attendance anyway.
It’s become a big racket.
The traditional concept of the wedding, reception and honeymoon has changed. Marriage was once the defining transition into adulthood. The wedding was a religious rite to ensure God’s approval of the couple and/or a legal bindIng arrangement with witnesses and certificates. The reception was the community approval of the marriage and the time to help ensure the couple had the basics to set up their new independent home. The honeymoon was a time of privacy for the couple to bind through consummation of the marriage without the community and family distracting them.
Today couples live together, sometimes for years before deciding to marry. They already have the homemaking basics and more. They couldn’t care less about community approval. I applaud those who finally make it legal or religiously binding but nowadays guests are merely expected to grant their wish lists for fabulous honeymoon trips or luxuries. And the wedding itself becomes a huge production intended to impress everyone at enormous expense. It’s just another competition for compliments or bragging rights. Social media has made it so much worse.
I blame a mix of reality shows pushing up the expectations, feminist / self-centered indulgence when they do get married and rise of self-centered “destination” weddings that inflate the cost with travel expenses for everyone.
I’ve had people get mad at me for saying we’re not traveling to their honeymoon destination for a wedding, we’ll send a gift. Or in two occasions, since we showed up as a family of four, here’s a token gift. We traveled with children, our presence IS the gift.
I watched the old movie “The Catered Affair” last week when TCM ran their Debbie Reynolds tribute. She plays a young working class bride whose mother (Bette Davis) wants to give her the big wedding she never had even though her father (Ernest Borgnine) is a cabbie who can’t afford it. It was quite the contrast to today’s weddings.
I'm in my early 20's. My firsthand opinion of the current crop is that many men are emotionally immature capable of improving..But many, even most, women are emotional toddlers with entitlement attitudes, wild expectations, no respect for others and a breathtaking capacity for psychological and emotional cruelty.
I'm not some kind of "woman-hater" by any means. But the current state of society, a potent mixture of sloth, greed and post-Christian ethics, is such that it brings out the worst possible potential in females and squashes, if not inverts, their better tendencies. I suppose in the past society was pre-Christian and warfare-based, the worst in men was brought out. But the current social paradigm makes most women a nightmare to deal with.
It would take a semi-miraculous confluence of events to get a ring on me, that's for sure.