I RECENTLY got engaged, which of course means everyone who has ever been married, been to a wedding or watched Love Actually has tracked me down with explicit instructions on how best to plan our big day. The advice varies wildly, aside from one key element: everyone is absolutely correct.
You don’t want your wedding to be too big, as it becomes too impersonal, but you don’t want it too small either, as this is your one big day, and why not make it a large celebration? They use their own wedding as the litmus test for how big or small is too big or small, insisting their day was perfect. To them, it was.
People who talk to you about weddings suddenly become stoic philosophers, offering circular meditations like “it’ll cost what it costs”, “this day only comes around once” and “it will be perfect, even if things don’t go perfectly”. Perfect.
Choosi released its Cost Of Love report last month, which clocked the average price of an Australian wedding at $24,660. MoneySmart has it at $36,200, which jives with most of the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard.
Both figures seem unreasonable to me and Choosi’s findings suggest I’m not alone in this thinking, with 90.7 per cent of those surveyed claiming the cost is too high. Yet, that’s the average cost. That’s a serious disconnect between what people think and what they do.
The actual day itself is just one element, too. There’s a buck’s party, a hen’s party, a bridal shower, an engagement party, a rehearsal dinner, a post-wedding brunch, a honeymoon, the flash mob Thriller dance, rehearsals for the flash mob Thrillerdance, hiring someone to choreograph the flash mob Thriller dance. The list goes on.
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It’s not just the happy couple who are feeling the pinch either. For example, the Choosi report states $513 as the average cost of a hen’s or buck’s party. If you have a destination wedding, there are travel costs, time off work, plus those three cans of Red Bull you need to stay awake through the actual ceremony.
In short: weddings are expensive.
The average price of an Australian wedding is $24,660.Source:Getty Images
An article ran on this website last Wednesday in which a bride spoke of the cost of her Byron Bay wedding blowing out from $35K to $50 large. (Sorry, weddings make me talk like a ’30s mobster.) Despite this 43 per cent blowout, she mostly seemed pleased they didn’t go into debt, rightly stating: “At the end of the day it’s only one day and you don’t want to be having to pay that back for years and years.”
This is true — going into that much debt for a wedding seems like madness. So does spending $50,000 on a single day, regardless of how pretty everything will look after being shrunk into a phone-sized square and washed out with the Nashville filter. In the aforementioned article, the bride referred to herself as a “huge saver”, which just means she prepaid for years and years. It’s the same thing.
My fiancee was given some smart advice regarding the brutality involved in culling a guest list: break the costs down per head, then decide if that person is worth, let’s say, $150 of your own money. This will help separate the wheat from the chaff, but such mathematical valuing of your loved ones could cast a pall over the entire day as you see invisible dollar amounts hovering over the heads of your guests like an energy bar in a video game.
It seems people regard the money spent on weddings as being in a separate currency with a different exchange rate. Flowers are suddenly thousands of dollars, napkin rings are worth dropping half a week’s wages on, and shoes that will be completely covered by a wedding dress are worth the GDP of a small landlocked nation.
The entire industry is set up to bleed you of money, under the hard-to-argue premise that this is your special day. The amount of pressure put on the happy couple to spend up big is substantial. Cutting corners on your wedding day seems ominous somehow, like a dark distillation of how much you value the marriage itself. It is also an industry where there is considerable pressure to match the weddings of those around you. There is pressure to spend a truckload of money, then to downplay how much you actually spent. Seemingly throwaway decisions take on seismic proportions, as now you are planning a $50,000 event, and so everything has to go smoothly. Not smoothly, perfectly. See how the wind is blowing the tablecloth corners up so the bare wooden legs are now visible? That’s because you were too stingy to fork out $900 on the diamond-plated tablecloth weights.
Everybody knows weddings are expensive.Source:Supplied
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