It Ain't About the Money, Honey!

Dollar bill inside a ring A number of years ago I read an article in the Washington Post Magazine (attempts to track it down online have been unsuccessful) about expensive weddings. The highlight of the story was the description of a couple who spent $100,000 on their special day—and this happened at least a decade ago, when a $100,000 wedding was really a $100,000 wedding. It wasn’t even one of those destination weddings; all the money was spent on clothes, food, flowers, rentals and venues, with the appropriate professional staff to carry everything out. The driving force behind all this spending was the groom, interestingly enough. You’d have to call him a groomzilla, I guess. He exerted maniacal control over every single aspect of the event, and at some point, as the costs mounted and mounted, he said, “Well, we’ll just go for the $100,000.” (I don’t know what he did for a living.) And guess what? In spite of all his efforts, in spite of his driving everyone around him absolutely crazy, the wedding wasn’t perfect. In fact, his most vivid memory of the day seemed to be that the enormous hydrangea blossoms used to decorate the reception had brown edges and didn’t look fresh. That’s what he saw the minute he walked into the hall.

Now, it would be very interesting, and probably very sad, to track down that couple now. They are almost certainly divorced. Know why? Aside from the groom’s obvious perfectionism, something which would strain any marriage, the expenditure on the wedding itself is also a good (or bad) indicator of the union’s stability. Recent research on this topic has show that a couple spending more than $20,000 on their wedding has a 3.5 times higher divorce rate than those spending between $5,000 and $10,000. If you really want a long-lasting marriage, spend less than $1,000. (I think we spent around $4,000 on our wedding in 1992, so I guess we’re in the safe zone.)Why would this be? It’s not the money itself, per se and as such. Instead, it’s what the money represents: the importance being given to a single event (the wedding) rather than what that event symbolizes (the marriage that follows). Couples are being encouraged in every possible way by the nuptial-industrial complex to think that having a picture-perfect wedding guarantees they’ll have that same kind of marriage. All of these things must be done, from “save the date” postcards to elaborate websites (sometimes with a professional photographer hired not to record the wedding but to record the proposal, either on the spot or re-enacted later), to reception dinners with table decorations, napkins, gift bags, and ribbons on the chairs all matching the color scheme, to photo booths for the guests (a rather recent must-have) . . . on and on. And then the day or (sometimes) the weekend is over, and what’s left? Oh, right. The marriage. The bride and groom look at each other and think, “Wow, that was fun. I’m sorry it’s all over. And who are you again?” If ever there were a striking illustration of the principle that money doesn’t buy happiness, this is it. (And then the bills start rolling in, thus adding even more stress to the relationship.)

As with so much else in life, a happy medium is almost always the best way to go. You can drive everyone crazy by trying to be too frugal, too. It’s all a matter of priorities. Are you most concerned with appearance? With doing what the arbiters of taste tell you to do? Or are you most concerned with relationships, with what/who actually matters and will still be around after the party’s over? I have a lovely memory of the teal-colored forks we had at our wedding reception. Know why? Because my mom looked around and found them for me. She had been struggling with depression for several years at that point, but because she loved me and took a real interest in the wedding she made an enormous effort to do her part. She picked out four dresses for herself and returned three. She ordered the nuts from Jerry’s Nut House, since they were supposed to be the best source in Denver. She and my dad schlepped the punch ingredients to the church and set up an assembly line. They weren’t trying to impress anyone, exactly; they just wanted to be a part of the event, to show their support. My mom did kind of crash and burn when it was all over, but I think it was an encouragement to her to remember that she’d done her best to show her love to me by all she did to help.

If you’d like to read some recent articles about the expensive-wedding phenomenon, here are a few links:

“In Sickness and in Health . . . But Not in Debt” from OZY Magazine, June 2015
“Will a Cheap Wedding Help Your Marriage? A Lesson in Causality” from the Real-Time Economics blog of the Wall Street Journal
“Expensive Weddings Result in Shorter Marriages” from bigthink.com

It Ain’t About the Money, Honey!

1 thought on “It Ain’t About the Money, Honey!”

Related posts:

1 thought on “It Ain’t About the Money, Honey!”