Wedding As Status Symbol

This week, I put down the deposits on our ceremony venue and stationery, and bought my dress and shoes (both vintage, per the Compact, and both amazingly beautiful). So I have got wedding on the brain.

One thing that's been very clear from the beginning of our planning is that it would be very easy to spend ungodly amounts of money on this thing, and there seems to be an assumption even from the most well-meaning quarters that we will do so. People have this idea that "the average American wedding costs $28,000!" or they have a certain vision of how a wedding ought to be, and once you have that number or that picture in your head, it's difficult to talk yourself down to something that doesn't involve a down payment.

But the $28k figure is suspicious, at best. First, the survey pegging that as the average cost was conducted by the Conde Nast Bridal Group, publishers of Brides, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride. Notice a theme? That's right, all of their publications depend on an audience of engaged women willing to spend about $10 per magazine for hundreds of pages of ads showing them how to spend $3,000 or more on a dress. So let's just say they have an interest in skewing that "average" number high. Really, really high.

Second, what does that number do? As Rebecca Mead points out in her book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, publicizing the $28k cost as "average" means plying couples (and their parents, who frequently have deeper pockets and are paying for some portion of the tab) with the idea that if they spend less than $28k, their wedding will be below average. We can't have a below average wedding! We might have a below average marriage! Clever trick, that.

And all these movies and TV shows and magazines that show the "normal" wedding as involving a huge frothy dress, a sweeping entrance, a grand reception with sitdown meal? The idea that this is the most specialest day of your life, that it has to be perfect, that the bride is a princess and her groom a dashing prince? They reinforce the idea that this is the way things are supposed to be done, and if the way it's supposed to be done costs bank, you've got to suck it up and make bank or You. Are. Doing. It. Wrong.

Those expectations make it easier for even conscientious couples to overspend: if that's what you've seen at every wedding you've ever been to, if that's what your parents are pressuring you to have, if you feel like you can't legitimately ask far-flung family and friends to travel a long distance at great expense without at least feeding them steak and whiskey, for godsake, it takes a steel spine to say No, we do not choose to spend money in a way that is so out of step with our everyday life.

My question to people with longer memories than mine: when did this come to be? I don't doubt that there have always been people who spent lavishly on their (or their children's) weddings. But for a very long time, those people weren't normal, economically speaking: royals, nobles, wealthy merchants, the idle rich. Normal people, the middle class and poorer folk alike, got married in ways that resembled every other day of their lives. A more dressed up, joyful, public day, for sure, but my understanding is that getting married didn't used to mean pretending you were Anastasia Romanov or Miss America. At least in my family, it meant wearing your nice clothes, exchanging some touching words and a simple band, and afterwards having cake and punch and finger sandwiches in the church basement or your great auntie's living room. Decidedly not bank.

That's what my grandparents did. Theirs were weddings that were congruent with their means and their lifestyles. But we don't need to go back two generations to see that the outsized expectations people have of weddings are a new phenomenon. The Conde Nast shows an increase of 100% in wedding-related spending between 2006 and a decade previous.

It's not just that the traditional line items are getting more expensive, though they are. There is also a whole new set of norms compared to the conventional wedding of the pre-war era: the all-day photography coverage rather than the standard portraiture shots, the wear-only-once dress rather than the nice outfit--maybe new, maybe not--that could be worn again, the DJ plus the band, the sit-down meal for hundreds of guests, the favors, the limo, the "destination wedding," the "black tie" dress code, the gift bags to be placed in the hotel rooms of out-of-town guests. These are not just things hocked in the pages of advertiser-driven wedding magazines to women who (hooray!) get to feel inadequate and expectation-saddled in a whole new way. Of course not everyone who gets married these days does all of these things, but not a single one of these items would be commonly seen as outre, and doing all of these things would not be remotely conspicuous or noteworthy. What is up with that?

I am not interested in criticizing people who make these sorts of choices. How hypocritical would that be, with us hiring a photographer with assistant for eight hours of coverage? But I do think it's worth it to criticize the way in which couples are pushed to make those choices unthinkingly, and also worth it to think of whether the expectations we might have as guests are fair or warranted. There is something wrong with the fact that these costs are seen as across-the-board normal, rather than as indulgences to be chosen with care based on one's priorities and means.

I got a panicked email from a friend of mine a few months ago, asking me to look at an online retail listing for a suit and tell him if that was OK for a "black tie" wedding he'd been invited to. The guy didn't know how to dress for a black tie event because newsflash! Unless he is a Gatsby enthusiast or the son of a socialite, no contemporary twenty-something man is likely to have ready access to a tuxedo. At root, it's very costly play acting of an imagined social status to throw a "black tie" wedding when the couple getting married have never before had a "black tie" occasion save their senior prom.

Maybe I will go down as the world's ultimate wet blanket for saying so, but weddings that are so astronomically out of alignment with a couple's normal life are cheesy and grasping. I don't care if your parents are paying for it, I don't care if it's what you've always wanted. I don't care that, theoretically, you are only going to do this once and you don't want to feel like you missed out on any aspect of the fairy tale party. If saying so makes me mean, I don't care about that, either. A wedding can be a status symbol, just like owning the McMansion or tooling around in the leased Jag. And it's no more admirable or wise to have a status symbol wedding you can't yourself afford than to have a status symbol house or a status symbol car that is beyond your means.

So what are we doing about it, Shiner and me?

First and not at all intuitively, we're giving in. There are going to be a number of things that, while not legally, religiously, or ritually neccesary we are going to want to have. That's OK, we're products of our culture. But we are giving in selectively, based on what we most value and based on what we can afford. So jewel-encrusted engagement ring, no. Scads of photography, yes. Bouquets and attendants, no. Fancy, delicious cake, yes.

Second, we are paying for everything ourselves, based on what we can comfortably afford. Not accepting money from our parents has a number of pleasant side effects, among them making sure they we're not inflating this event beyond what is really important to us just because we suddenly have more "free money" available to spend. Our budget allows us to have plenty of indulgences, but we cannot have them all. If we could afford less, we would spend less, and we would still end up just as married and ultimately just as happy. Our families and friends have made numerous suggestions and voiced several expectations about what we will or will not be doing, but we cannot afford to do everything they want. That's fine. It's thoughtful of them to try to be helpful, but it's our responsibility to commit to no more than we can afford.

Third, the rule of the day is What Would Grandma and Grandpa Do ("WWGGD?"). We're focusing on the ceremony, and as a result we're deliberately keeping the reception low-key and relatively inexpensive. Shiner is wearing a nice suit he can wear again and again. My dress could also be reworn, though honestly I'm more likely to save it for eventual donation to a vintage textile or fashion history collection--it's really that amazing. We're having blank letterhead stationery made so we can handwrite our invitations and thank you notes and use any extras for everyday notes and letters (we are both paper nerds). We're not doing anything that feels unimportant to us, and we're being very deliberate in sussing out exactly what is important to us--and why.