Southern California, 2025:
Somewhere in the USA, 1995
Posted on 08/08/2026 6:48:01 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Weddings are a joyous occasion, and I’ve heard of at least three in my social circles in the upcoming months. But two of these weddings are diverting from the norm of a weekend celebratory affair, choosing instead to hold their nuptials on a weekday.
“A weekday?!” one might well say. “How inconsiderate! I can’t take a whole day off from work just to attend a wedding!”
But perhaps that’s the whole point – not to be inconsiderate, of course, but to trim costs. After all, setting a wedding for a weekday reduces the costs of venues, caterers, florists, and other services, while also automatically lowering the wedding guestlist – not through invites from the couple, but through each guest’s own decision on how far they are willing to go to be available on the big day.
This trend isn’t just in my social circles, however. As a recent article in Elle explained, the younger generation is riding the pendulum away from the millennial trend of bombastic, Instagram-worthy weddings, opting instead for small, quiet, budget-friendly ceremonies that rely on dresses from grandma’s attic and a friend with a film camera.
“In many ways, this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” author Rowan Beaird writes. “Gen Z has lived most of their lives amid periods of profound economic precarity, and the idea of spending thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars on a single day seems absurd.”
Beaird believes these young couples are onto something, asking, “What would it mean for us to think of these celebrations not as a performance, but as simply what they are at their core: traditions, rituals, ceremonies marking the start of a marriage?”
Wait, weddings that are traditions, rituals, and ceremonies to mark the start of a marriage? What a novel idea!
Except … that’s exactly what a wedding was always supposed to be: a solemn pledge which marks two lives coming together symbolically and physically, promising to love and to cherish one another in sickness and in health, not a big party that celebrates a physical relationship that’s already started – and may even be on the rocks soon given the debt required to make the party bigger and better than the one the Joneses had last year.
In 1786, George Washington dropped a profound little line while writing to Charles Armand-Tuffin:
For in my estimation more permanent & genuine happiness is to be found in the sequestered walks of connubial life, than in the giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure, or the more tumultuous and imposing scenes of successful ambition.
Washington was writing more about the daily aspects of married life more than he was speaking of wedding ceremonies, but I believe his advice speaks to the trend away from over-the-top weddings. Essentially, Washington saw that a happy marriage isn’t necessarily one which has all the bells and whistles, the sights and sounds, the smells and the tastes that make a wedding Instagram perfection. Those things all appeal to the senses – the “giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure” and the “imposing scenes of successful ambition.”
Instead, it is the quiet solemnity – those “sequestered walks” – of a simple marriage ceremony surrounded by family, old traditions, and even homemade cake, that tend to create true happiness. For such events are not spectacles of eye candy that fool guests into thinking the couple has it all together; rather, they are humble attempts to focus on the people and realities of life – the stuff that all marriages are really made of in the end.
And when we recognize that true marital success is found in how we handle the simple, foundational things of life – God, family, friends, and resources – then perhaps we’ll have more couples who make it further than a few years after they walk down the aisle.
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Southern California, 2025:
Somewhere in the USA, 1995
It’s gotten really out of hand. Just attended one that must have easily hit $100K. I absolutely don’t get it. The Wedding Planner had a schedule that was seven pages long, and in parts, broken down in to 10 minute intervals... My favorite weddings have either been off in the woods somewhere, or in someone’s living room or back yard...
Weddings have become ridiculously expensive. Not only that, but how many marriages last 5 years? I say elope or at least keep it down to 2 dozen guests or less.
Good. I am all for people living within their means. I was raised in Northern NJ and developed a loathing of extravagant weddings. We had a nice wedding without the crazy stuff. My secret was keeping my mother out of it.
A co-worker and his wife does wedding videos, pictures and setups for beach weddings and the like, but as a side-gig on weekends. If this becomes the norm, then they will be out of a bunch of gigs............
An entire industry developed around encouraging women and their family to spend enormous sums on weddings as the culmination of their entire existence. Not the marriage mind, just the ceremony.
That includes the dress, venue, food, and hot air balloon.
It’s better when loving parents offer ‘the kids’ a choice - a set amount of money that can be spent however they want: spend it all on a wedding - or some on the wedding, some on the honeymoon and some on just whatever they want to spend it on.
My nephew is getting married at 1 pm on a Friday this upcoming Sepember, but the reception will be at 5:30. Reasonjng: He will not have to take time off of work or school (studying to be a plumber) and they can use the weekend for a short honeymoon. It will NOT be an expensive wedding. They will be married outside, an uncle will DJ the reception and they are serving non-alcoholic beverages and hors’douvers.
My parents were married on a Friday evening. (1957)
We got married in a garden overlooking the ocean at a five-star resort in Hawaii, and it cost $0. I was Wedding Planner at the resort, so got the OK from the General Manager and grabbed a time slot on a Sunday afternoon when nothing was scheduled in that venue. The florist who I worked with for my events provided the flowers — two leis and one small bouquet.
No music. The reception was cake and punch by my girlfriend’s pool.
The weddings I planned were ostentatious and outrageously expensive. Wretched excess, and usually Europeans. Ugh!!
Wow. All the while complaining they have no money to buy a house.
My wedding day depended on how much leave I had from the Air Force. I don’t even know what day of the week it was.
Sounds like GenZ is wise - not going into heavy debt to finance a one-day event. Worse are so-called destination weddings - my niece had to have one at Disneyworld in Florida - cost a fortune - and then she couldn't understand why none of her friends could attend. The groom's family had to stay in a cheap hotel outside of the park b/c they couldn't afford the $400/night at one of the hotels inside the park - and we got a military discount on the room.
Daughter just went to a weekday morning wedding in the wine country of California - still expensive but vastly discounted b/c weekday.
Yep, these destination weddings are a thing with some people.
Somebody at work had a destination wedding at a castle in Ireland. A few people from work attended.But most of us who were invited did not.
My wife and I had our wedding on a Friday evening, with the reception right after. We tried to keep costs down, including my wife renting her dress.
Jeff Jr and his bride were going to have a fairly lavish wedding. Mostly, this was because Mrs Vader and I married in a registry office in the UK and the bride’s parents never married.
Then covid hit and the world shut down. They were married by an ordained minister in our backyard under a tree that Jeff Jr had built tree forts in when he was a kid. We gave them the money we were going to spend on the wedding and they used it as a down payment on a house.
That is identical to a college friends wedding. We were all in college. His family was rich but he was broke. I don’t think the family liked the bride too much. She was Korean. The bride’s family made all the food. The wedding was just immediate family and a few friends in a neighborhood church and then back to the home of the bride’s mother for the reception where extended family came to celebrate.
The cost was minimal and they lived happily ever after. They didn’t need to spend $20,000.
My daughter got married in our yard. Over 100 people in attendance, total cost around $5k.
This was in 2017.
Get married at the church and go across the street to the K of C for the reception.
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