The percentages, based only on this man’s intuition, are the proper numbers to use ascertaining what people spend on a wedding, the ninety-nine being relative to the one. Weddings for the ninety-nine percent, well, they are cheap. Inexpensive may be a better word. Frugal might work too.
When my wife and I married, we clearly were in the ninety-nine percent. We were so in the ninety-nine percent our major expense was the gasoline it took me to drive from Missouri to South Carolina where she lived, and then back to Missouri. If gas prices then were what they are today, I’d still be single.
The other expense was renting my new in-laws’ back yard for the wedding, which, as it turned out, was free. The presiding minister was a friend so his honorarium was limited to a free lunch after the ceremony. Was it cold cuts? I can’t remember.
It had to be cheap; sorry, frugal. I was on a year’s sabbatical from parish ministry and working as a weekly newspaper editor in Walt Disney’s boyhood home town, Marceline, Missouri. It’s a great job, by the way, if you can’t find another. Weekly word jockeys aren’t paid much and they are exempted from overtime rules.
We could have afforded more, but I was really trying hard to live on the salary without tapping other resources. I like to think, poverty aside, we were more intent on constructing a marriage than staging an event. Yet had we spent more, even way, way more we still would be among the ninety-nine percent. I do admit to a certain snobby sense of self-righteousness for having had such an inexpensive wedding.
I mention all this having run across recent figures for an “average” wedding in the United States. Are you ready: $27,021. This is from an annual survey of young brides eighteen and older who had a wedding in 2011. Nothing is reported of child brides.
This is an uptick from 2010 when the “average” was $26,985. I found no indication where the extra thirty-six dollars went but it is more than the present inflation rate. In 2009, before the recession really kicked in, the average was $28,385. Penny-pinching of a sort marks the two later years, but figures will increase, betcha, as perceptions of economic recovery improve. I don’t know who these “average” people are, but I’m pretty sure I don’t know any of them.
Where one lives affects the “average.” New York City brides shell out a whopping $65,824; some $2,403 going for a dress alone. In North and South Dakota the more sensible brides spend $745 for the dress, but I suppose it depends on how you describe sensible.
A reception hall runs $12,116. Whatever happened to the church basement, or the Legion Hall, or the community center? Wedding budgets—if that word applies at all—range from $65,824 in New York and in Virginia, $14,203.
In a Chicago area wedding the number of invited guests ran about two hundred four at a “luxury” affair; the more ordinary sort averaged only one hundred thirty-six, proving the poor have fewer friends. A majority of weddings extended to three or more days for all the events connected to getting hitched.
I guess there is biblical precedence from that three-day wedding reception at Cana and all that wine. St. John does note that Jesus and his mother and the disciples, including those three sailors Peter, James, and John, who likely drank more than their share as sailors do, left the reception and traveled back to Capernaum where in at least one translation they “rested” for three days.
I really don’t know what to say about all this, except ostentatious excess rules the wedding biz. A friend once defined ostentatious as neighbors placing the old washing machine on the front porch where everyone can see they bought a new one. More modest folk, he said, hauled the old one to the back yard. A twenty-seven thousand dollar wedding, it seems to me, falls in there with a display of old washing machines.
I’m inclined to think that they are compensating for something, a yearning they can’t define. When we have lost the distinction of Christian marriage in society as a vocation of the baptized in the exercise of the priesthood we share in Christ, then, as Billy Joel sings, “something has been taken out of our soul.” The closest our culture can come to matching the excitement and solemnity of a wedding feast is twenty-seven thousand dollars. Ah, but what else should we expect? With all the de trop nonsense we clergy have allowed and encouraged by silent consent, it’s nobody’s fault but our own.
So I’m going to start charging a clergy fee. I shall insist on ten percent of the total wedding cost. Go with the flow, I say.
Russell E. Saltzman is a Lutheran pastor, an online homilist for the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary, and author of The Pastor’s Page and Other Small Essays. His previous On the Square articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
The Knot
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.
Comments:
Now, who wouldn't identify with the 99%? Practically all of us (certainly more than 99% of us) know enough people richer than we are taxed who we wouldn't mind taxing more heavily than we.
Of course, if we go beyond that analysis we might realize that 1%ers--excluding people with a government protected monopoly--can only get richer when they get paid for something (work or capital) the payor wanted to pay for. Why should we be angry with them for addressing the needs of a market? Oh, I know, the Marxist critique can be trotted out, but that has been discredited everywhere it has been tried. Only Democrats are still peddling that. Even the Chinese Communists recognize the value of capitalism, albeit still talking out of both sides of their mouths while suppressing all dissent.
In my more cynical moments, I have formulated a 'Law of Weddings and Marriages', to wit: The duration of the marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. . .
Cynical, certainly. But as I look back on the most opulent weddings it has been my privilege(?) to attend, I am hard-pressed to think of one that arrived intact at its second anniversary. . . Perhaps my friends/family have simply had bad luck. . .
We fuddy-duddies don't get it: words don't have one meaning, they're there for us, we decide what they mean. An expensive wedding is not about marriage or monogamy or spirituality or committment etc. but a party. Remember the GSA fiasco?
America is revelling in its day. We "celebrate" a building's committment to green energy, LOL but we don't honour anything. It's a big party and the Democrats want to order more booze and put it on their credit card while the Republicans want to kick everyone out and clean up. Who do you think is going to be yelled down as a debbie downer or a hater or whatever? Hmm.
And the Catholics are the same. They're looking 50, 100 and 500 years down the road while everyone else is thinking about right now! But alas the rules of life are conservative and at some point the hang over and that itchy feeling down there catch up with you.
I agree in the sense that most of the best weddings I have had the honor of attending (particularly my own) have been simple, especially in the setting for the reception, with the greatest emphasis on the wedding itself. But I have been to beautiful weddings that were very expensive to stage, and were the beginning of fruitful and (so far) lasting marriages. A wealthy family is doing the same thing that a poor family is doing in hosting a suitable wedding feast: honoring the couple, especially the bride. But, the most awkwardly extravagant wedding I have ever been too was hosted by a couple that is as poor as church mice.
Our culture suffers from celebrity fixation and an over-reliance on consultants who tell us what is necessary to do something 'the right way.' Wedding consultants and planners are in the business of selling other people's venues and services for a fee or a commission, and generally have no stake in whether the real elements of the wedding are hidden by the incidentals. This is as true for the poor as it is for the rich. Indeed, extravagant weddings (and proms, and other events) are a way that the poor and middle class (99%-ers all of them) are encouraged by our culture and the businesses involved to wastefully emulate the rich, even when the are not rich.
Finally, one practice that may be emerging as a trend is that some couples I know of are looking at the cost of weddings, along with their parents, and opting for much simpler (though still beautiful) weddings, and receiving some significant portion of the avoided cost from their parents (or preserving them for their own savings) as a nest-egg for the future.
We booked a pretty good reception hall for $1500. Lowest price we could find.
It's the extras they use to bring up the bill. $75 if you want a particular color for the lighting. If not, it cycles through the rainbow. I'm hooking up an iPod and custom playlist rather than contract the "approved" DJ at a starting price of $400.
Catholic churches have ranged in price from "free" to registered, tithing parishioners, to $2500. We've spent $300 to book the church.
Overall, I think the astronomical cost is one of those evil, "things of this world"-- the "keeping up with the Joneses"--that many Christians have compromised and let slip into their lives. I also wonder if we're given these prices by an industry that wants to desensitize and make one think, "it's normal", and quite literally by a Satanic influence that wishes to strain and destroy covenantal marriages before they even begin.
My favorite experience was the wedding a year after the death of the bride's mom. She inherited everything. She was the "good" daughter. The other one got nothing. Bride decided to demonstrate her good fortune with an over the top wedding. Everything was first class except ... I had told the bride she needed to purchase beeswax candles for the candelabra. She went cheap in that one area. Halfway through the wedding the brass followers sufficiently warmed the tops of the cheesy candles that the brass weights started bending them over like fishing poles. Soon all the little followers were falling off onto the slate floor. Thunk, rattle and roll. Is Karma an OK Christian word?
To name a few: There are churches charging literally thousands of dollars for use of the building, as Artaban mentioned. That doesn't include pre-marital counseling, "Engaged Encounter" weekends, or natural family planning classes and materials. Further, most engaged couples must now take into account a longer list of wedding traditions than did previous generations. In previous generations, the bride's mother did most of the planning and most young people married within their geographic region, religion, ethnicity, and class. Most of their friends were also within a narrow demographic.
Inter-religious weddings are now very common, often requiring two officiants. Traditions from multiple regions and cultures must be celebrated. I have yet to find a wedding tradition that involves 0 expense. Add in enough inexpensive traditions, and you have an event sufficiently complicated that it requires professional managing, destroying any cost savings.
Marriage rate: 6.8 per 1000 total population; Divorce rate: 3.4 per 1000 total population, you see how much money is wasted.
then the tears started to roll down her face. it was as if she had known the truth of things all along.... which left me wondering why we're always hiding from the truth of things. peter kreeft calls it insanity. pascal might have called it "diversions."