A Different Drum: Getting the wedding cart ahead of the horse
My son is getting married. Sound the trumpets and the alarms. Unfortunately, under the heading of not wanting to be an interfering parent, I did not have the down-to-earth “talk” with him and his girlfriend (about paying them to elope versus having a large wedding with all the bells and whistles) before my son was already working with a jeweler, designing an engagement ring that combined a diamond from his girlfriend’s grandmother’s ring with one he had picked out.
Incidentally, his girlfriend (now fiancée) loved the sentimental gesture and ring. But that’s beside the point in this discussion. In the not-so-distant distance, I heard the gears of the wedding machine revving up. Uh oh.
A June 2023 report from the online wedding site Zola showed the current cost of the “average” wedding is $29,000, up from $28,000 in 2022. Of course, in larger cities, where everything costs more, the wedding price tag is closer to $35,000 or more, with New York weddings topping the chart at an average price of $43,536. So glad we live in the comparative middle of nowhere.
Amidst the international inflation and political uncertainty we’re all currently immersed in, I can think of few things as stupid as shelling out that kind of money for a wedding. Of course, most of it would likely have to be borrowed, which is even dumber than spending one’s savings for a wedding.
And I don’t know why the $29,000 average is described as the cost of a “wedding” when it’s actually the accouterments surrounding the walking down the aisle, not the exchanging of vows, themselves, that drives up the cost and have the power to turn the blessed event into a cursed way to start a marriage — mired in senseless debt.
One of my favorite people who has addressed wedding craziness is Elizabeth Doherty Thomas, MS. I learned about her quest to put sanity back into the marriage process through mention of it by her father, Bill Doherty, a prominent marriage and family therapist I was familiar with through both my family life education and counseling studies.
Writing at yourtango.com, Doherty Thomas says, “Having grown up as the daughter of a famous family therapist father, I found myself in a strange new world when I became engaged. After deciding to use myself as an experiment on how to avoid the wedding industry and instead have an “intentional” engagement, I quickly realized that wedding planning offered tremendous opportunities to learn about relationships, marriage, and family life.”
The Doherty Thomas website, dohertyrelationshipinstitute.com and book (both co-authored with her father), "Take Back Your Wedding: Managing the People Stress of Wedding Planning," are solid, practical references to be consulted by couples BEFORE they embark on the wedding planning process. Although, few, if any, couples intent upon marriage seem to have any idea of what they may find themselves subjected to once they start down the slippery slope of wedding planning.
While I’m happy my son and his fiancé have become involved in pre-marital couples mentoring (which emphasizes the covenant of marriage versus a contractual approach to coupling), they are still up against the big societal push to turn wedding activities, especially the wedding reception, into a no-holds-barred major production.
In contemplating ways to scale things down, I found myself coming up with some unofficial rules of thumb for how much to pay for things and who to invite to wedding activities. For example, people who have never been to their respective houses and/or them to their houses probably should NOT be on the guest list. Makes sense to me.
The real point to ponder is what a wedding and marriage are truly about: the relationship, not pomp and circumstance. So when it comes to food for the wedding reception, I came up with another guideline: If you would not consider taking people out to dinner outside of wedding festivities to spend $30 apiece on their meals, don’t drop that kind of money large-scale per head at a wedding reception. The goal is to create memories, not debt.
How my heart soared recently when my son asked an important, anti-$29,000 question, “What do you think about us serving pizza at the reception?” Sounds terrific.
— Kristy Smith’s Different Drum humor columns are archived at her blog: diffdrum.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: A Different Drum: Getting the wedding cart ahead of the horse
