WEDDINGMANIA
June 4, 2007

An acquaintance of mine spent $60,000 dollars on a wedding 8 months ago. Yesterday I heard there is trouble in paradise. They’re seeking advice from divorce lawyers. Sixty thousand dollars getting married; now it’s probably another 50K for a divorce.

People seem to be waiting to tie the knot, a lot of people wait until they’re in their 30’s or even 40’s to marry, but age and wisdom doesn’t seem to be helping the divorce rates. Over the last 20 years I must’ve attended at least that many weddings. I can count on one hand the people still married.

I used to make a joke that some people’s wedding ceremony and reception lasted longer than their marriage; but these days it seems like more like truth than an ironic statement.

I’m not saying people should stay in loveless, miserable relationships. The end of a marriage is a sad event, but it seems even sadder when you recall the giant wingding of a wedding that kicked the whole thing off.

Personally I think weddings are getting out of control these days. Some people have an engagement party, followed by the women holding a wedding shower. Then there’s the bachelor party, and in recent years the bachelorette party; with the whole social whirlwind culminating in a wedding ceremony followed by a sit down dinner for hundreds of people.

Oh, and don’t forget the rehearsal dinner if you’re blessed/cursed with the honor of being a member of the bridal party. This status has a whole list of obligations. When your friend tells you tearfully of her divorce after 6 months of marriage, it hurts a little more seeing your $1200 bridesmaid dress every time you open your closet.

Once I heard a bride commenting on the voluminous guest list for her upcoming wedding. She said the distant cousins and the people she barely knew would help offset the cost of the surf and turf, once she opened the gift envelopes after the reception. Pretty sad state of affairs, counting your wedding guests by the anticipated cash gifts rather than years of friendship. Like I was out of touch with reality, she explained to me that people were expected to give enough cash in their gift to “pay for their plate”.

I hope less people are like this than I’m imagining. Personally, I have never used my ESP to guess the cost of an upcoming wedding or had the rudeness and audacity to speculate on what someone spent on the food I was eating as an invited guest at a reception. I’m hoping I’m in the majority here, rather than the minority.

There’s another disturbing turn in Weddingmania: running off to some exotic locale and expecting your friends and family to trail along like a circus train, usually at their own expense. It’s understandable, in our shrinking world, when 2 people carry on long distance relationship that a wedding might occur out of town. I’m talking about a bride and groom who decide their nuptials should take place on a romantic beach in the south Pacific and they provide their future guests with airline schedules and a hotel brochure offering reduced rates in the invitation.

This is a true story:

A couple from New Jersey decided on a traveling circus wedding in Florida. They wanted their guests to fly in on Thursday night, attend a brunch on Friday; then some would attend a rehearsal dinner on Friday night. The ceremony would be held late Saturday afternoon and the reception Saturday night. There was a wedding breakfast on Sunday morning. The bride wanted everyone at the same hotel; she booked a block of rooms at a reduced rate: $150 per person per night. With airfare, it cost my friend and her boyfriend about $1500 just to arrive at this shindig; after incidentals, they were in the hole for $2000.

Later back in Jersey, I heard that the bride complained that the gifts were “chintzy” and the cash barely covered the cost of the reception hall. She was also highly miffed that many of her friends and family didn’t make it. The bride’s mother was also dismayed, she couldn’t understand why people didn’t want to take a “little vacation to Florida”. Some vacation.

Nowadays more and more people want something unusual for a wedding. Even if they forgo the full traveling circus, they want to be married in a forest under a waterfall or in the middle of a field raised up in a tethered hot air balloon.

It’s nice to see 2 people in love start their lives together, but it takes a little blush off the rose when your credit card is maxxed out or you spent half the day in the blazing sun swatting mosquitoes and the rest of the following week putting calamine lotion on your poison ivy.

When my parents got married 55 years ago, after a ceremony in a South Philly church, they had a reception for about 50 family and friends in a local athletic club hall. There were trays of sandwiches, drinks and the wedding cake. They’ve been happily married ever since. Even adding for inflation, the whole shebang cost as much as today’s bride spends for her dress and shoes.

I guess people watched the fairy tale wedding of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana. I think they figure they’re every bit as good as European royalty and they’re gonna put on the dog to prove it. A word to the wise, that big blow out didn’t help the royal marriage last any longer.

Some people are pretty cavalier these days when they decide to get married. I’ve heard more than one person say,” If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

I’ve actually heard people openly admit, “We’ll have a big party and a great honeymoon trip, and if we invite enough people, the gifts will pay for everything.” I’m afraid a lot of people think like this; some of them do the wedding thing three or four times.

As for me, next time somebody invites me to their fourth wedding, this one at dawn at Cinderella’s Castle in Disneyworld, I think I’ll give it a miss.