Posted on 07/20/2023 8:49:00 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
In 2021, the median salary for Americans 25 to 34 was $52,156 per year. Meanwhile, the cost of the average wedding was around $30,000. What’s wrong with this picture?
You have young couples getting together, struggling to pay their bills, maybe with college debt to pay off, probably getting ready to work on a kid – which we all know is insanely expensive these days – and they’re going to spend $30,000+ on a one-day ceremony. Let’s also not forget that a man is supposed to spend a “two-month salary” on an engagement ring. That’s another $8,692 of that median salary. Now, we’re pushing up towards $40,000 – and that’s before the honeymoon, which may add thousands more.
You may say, “Well technically, the bride’s family is supposed to pay for the wedding.” Yes. TECHNICALLY. But does that always happen? No. Even if it did, would that young couple be better off starting with $30,000 that they could use for a down payment on a new home? How about spending that money on a mid-sized car? What about just having $30,000 in the bank in a world where 64% of Americans say they live “paycheck-to-paycheck?”
Of course, it could be worse than just spending $30,000, which could make a huge difference in getting your marriage off to a good start. An awful lot of Americans actually GO INTO DEBT to pay for their weddings:
Unfortunately, many couples start their wedding planning assuming they can keep costs under control. But a 2019 study by LendingTree found that 45% of newlyweds went into debt for their wedding.
This is particularly ironic because (depending on which statistics you believe), somewhere between 40-50% of all marriages end in divorce. Does anyone actually have an ex they wish they’d spent an extra $30,000 on instead of banking it? Exactly. Worse yet, what causes divorces? Well, there are a variety of things, but take a look at #5:
How many marriages do you think have ended up in divorce at least in part because of financial problems related to the wedding? It has to be a small, but significant percentage, right?
With that in mind, why are there so many big weddings, particularly since, let’s be 100% honest, very few men care about having a big wedding ceremony? If anything, the vast majority of men don’t even want to attend a wedding, much less be strong-armed into paying an exorbitant amount of money and doing months of planning for an elaborate ceremony they’re only participating in to please their future wife. If their future wife were to say (and genuinely mean), “What I really want is to get married in a nice, quiet ceremony with just our parents and siblings,” the number of guys that would push back on that to try to get the huge ceremony is going to be infinitesimal.
Once, extravagant weddings probably made more practical sense in a, “If he can’t afford the wedding, how can he afford to support his new wife at home” kind of way. However, not only has it become much more common for women to work outside of the home, weddings have gotten several orders of magnitude more expensive over the years:
Is there any practical reason why marriages need to be so expensive and elaborate these days? Not at all. So, why is it like this? You can sum it all up in one word: Marketing.
From the time they’re little girls, women are hit with marketing about their “special day” that’s “just about them.” They see other weddings that look glamorous and cool. They look at more marketing, then they tell themselves, “Mine is going to be even better than that one day!” They often start thinking about venues when they’re teenagers, spend hundreds of hours planning it in their minds, romanticize the whole event, and then when the time comes to get married, they want everything to be “perfect” so they can show off their pictures for years to come. But, what really makes the day so special? Is it the ceremony along with the “perfect” dress, hors d'oeuvre, and flower arrangements? Or is it that they’re committing to a man that they’re hopefully going to raise children with? The man they’re hopefully going to spend the rest of their life with?
Now, I get it. Some women love their weddings. Some women have been dreaming of this big day since they were little, and they just can’t give up on the idea. Fair enough. However, if you’re a woman and that doesn’t describe you, you can be one of the women that helps break this chain. You can be one of the women who helps normalize getting rid of these over-the-top, wildly expensive, over-dramatic ceremonies. There are already women who are fine with small ceremonies or eloping to Vegas, but once it gets to a critical mass and more people start praising women like this for “putting their marriage first” and “being low maintenance,” the whole marriage ceremony industry will start to change for the better.
Now show us the graph of the "Top Men's Reasons for Divorce!"
Regards,
Some women love weddings so much, they can’t wait to get divorced so as to have another wedding. And then another, and another, and another...
An acquaintance has paid for two daughter’s weddings, $60,000 each. Nothing short of insane.
Two kids we know are getting married in August. Two weddings. Each have sent out no less than three announcements / invitations. I’ll send a gift and wish them well. They won’t even notice we are not there.
We married nearly 50 years ago. I paid for everything but the dress and that came from Penny’s and she was a knockout. The rest could not have cost much because both of us had less than not much. I managed 5 days in a row off at Christmas time and we got caught in a terrible ice storm heading back for Midland, Texas. My boss covered for me until we could get back and we went from there. Our weekend “entertainment” consisted of very long trips around the Permian Basin making the rigs so I could better learn my trade. We had a good time of it.
The whole affair of making a splash, statement or one-upsmanship is way out of hand.
I’ve started thinking about the subset of things I have learned. It is the things I have learned that I wish I had learned a WHOLE lot sooner. I think one of those things is that if you can marry for love and not for lust it is a whole lot better. Knowing the difference, that’s the rub. Waiting for the perfect one and waiting too long, that’s the problem?
The biggest story that everyone missed in this article is that a groom’s suit costs only 1/3 as much in 2013 as it did in the 1930s, adjusted for inflation. Mic drop.
My husband and I got married at City Hall in 1972 after having lived together for two years. I wore a dress I already owned. One of our professors had a reception for us with about 40 people. When the prof’s wife took me to a bakery to look at wedding cakes, they all looked pretty much the same. She said she was hesitant to mention it, but their 17-year-old son really wanted to make the cake for us. I said yes. The cake was delicious, though it didn’t look like a tradititonal wedding cake, but I was so touched that he wanted to do that for us. I have never once regretted not having a big wedding.
The marriage starts after the first big argument, so all the expensive ceremony social postering means nothing.
Postering = posturing
Add to that the 75,000 pickup truck ...
Also the $120,000.00 Electric car being shoved up our @sses
I was mean to my daughter. I decided how much I was willing to spend, wrote a check, and handed it to her and told her she could spend it on wedding, honeymoon, or towards a house down payment.
Suddenly, when it was HER personal money she would be spending, she became much more frugal in her plans.
Stripers are fish
My wedding cost me $50.00 for the
preacher. My wife is pretty much
down to earth, and would consider a
$30,000 wedding endowment as a down
payment on her first house.
Married 47 years now...
That’s what I told my wife!
“I swear I didn’t know my brother’s party was going to be like that. I thought it was a fish fry on the patio!”
The biggest story that everyone missed in this article is that a groom’s suit costs only 1/3 as much in 2013 as it did in the 1930s, adjusted for inflation. Mic drop.
If the suit was made the same way today as in the 1930’s, all hand stitched, it might be at least 3x.
Completely hand stitched is like Oxxford. $4000+. (although Oxxford is using more expensive febric than what would have been for an average 1930’s wedding suit)
Too many women want a fantasy wedding but not a marriage.
When you start with a ridiculous and expensive fantasy, how can you deal with the reality of a long-term marriage?
As our daughter was growing up, I told her that if she would avoid the expensive wedding, I would take the money that would have been spent on the wedding, put it in a mutual fund, and give it to her and the groom as our wedding present. Mrs. C would go bananas whenever I said it, because she wanted the biggest, most expensive wedding possible for her daughter. Unfortunately, Mrs C passed away two years ago, but not before spending all the savings on her medical bills for ten years of MS.
Daughter just recently got engaged. She is already making her plans, will be spending about $5K on the wedding and reception, and she’s content with that, as is the groom of course, and am I. The one dispute we had is that I wanted to play the organ at her wedding, and she wants me to walk her down the aisle. Aisle walk her down the I’ll.
When my parents got married, the reception consisted of cake and fruit punch in the church basement.
What they do with “their” money, is nobody’s business but theirs.
What they do with our tax dollars is ours.....
Of course it is a big waste of money, just like funerals. And brides in white dresses??? LMAO! The bride and groom probably have been shacking up for a couple of years already, and may even have kids. What a farce! I don’t go to any of my friend’s weddings anymore. Then, you have the whole woman’s “I am not happy anymore, sooo I need a divorce” thingy after a few years. Like I tell my male divorce clients, if you have to get married again, if you are that stupid and masochistic, marry some chick from another country. American women are, by and large, a bunch of crazy whores, with stupidly bad tats, and high body counts. They are not wife-material.
Ha! When my former employer’s daughter got married, he chartered a plane to fly them and her 150 guests to some high end resort in the Caribbean for a very lavish wedding over three days, then back. Rumor was that he spent over $500K on the whole affair.
Not even six months later, the new son-in-law was arrested in a prostitution sting and the couple was divorced very soon after.
What a waste!
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