Beware the Wedding Industrial Complex
It is wedding season. I have a daughter getting married this weekend. For those of you with young girls: Beware the Wedding Industrial Complex.
In I'll Mature When I'm Dead, Dave Barry (who coined "wedding industrial complex") writes:
"If the wedding were a solar system, the bride would be the sun; her mother would be another slightly smaller nearby sun; the wedding planner would be a third sun; the caterer, floral installation professional, photographer, videographer, cake design engineer, etc., would be planets orbiting these suns..."
And Dave Barry had a BOY. All he had to pay for was the rehearsal dinner. Imagine what it is like to have three daughters (one married, one getting married this Saturday, a third to be married soon, no doubt) who not only plan their own ceremonies but have been recently involved in dozens of weddings of their friends.
This is the modern Wedding Industrial Complex: Year-long engagements, websites and facebook pages devoted to the bride and groom and their gift requests, bachelor and bachelorette parties that require their respective teams to fly to Vegas or beyond for nights of high-rent debauchery, showers, still photographers who provide 2,400 photos of the courtship, engagement, wedding, reception, and honeymoon for on-line purchase, reality shows dedicated not only to the ceremony but also simply the selection and purchase of the dress, on and on.
And very little talk, it seems, of what will happen when the klieg lights go off and gritty reality awaits. The marriage part.
If facebook has turned most young people into preening narcisists, their weddings are now an extension of that "look-at-me-and-shower-me-with-love-and-gifts-for-I-am-the-only-person-to-ever-be-married-on-earth" self-reverential credo. Youngsters who have been told since birth that they are special and whose entire lives have been celebrated for major accomplishments such as getting a 'C' in math or swimming the entire length of the pool now see their wedding day with the humility and common touch of Marie Antoinette.
My wife and I attended a wedding a few years ago where the young couple created a website of themselves with hundreds of photos, including a hideous series of them cavorting in a hot tub. They were not small people, and the photos recalled safari shots of hippos in Botswana. Why would they "share" that?
After another wedding, we cooled our heels along with all of the guests for two hours while the bride and groom finished up their photography session and finally deigned us with their presence at the reception and the eating and drinking could begin. I still resent them for that.
Don't get me wrong. I'm for marriage. My wife and I have been wonderfully married for 28 years. And our daughters have kept their weddings dignified (if expensive!) for this day and age.
But at what point did the average wedding process morph from something wonderful and important to a vulgarian cross between the 2,500-year Celebration of the Persian Empire and a scene from Cleopatra?
Or am I the only one who now cringes in horror when a fancy invitation arrives in the mail?
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Comments:
Sep '11
Re: Beware the Wedding Industrial Complex
Daughter[1] and her young man were talking about marriage, and had decided they'd get married when he returned from his deployment to Iraq. He was going to drive east with a ring, but apparently a transmission issue (a) prevented the trip, and (b) consumed the ring budget.
His First Sergeant got word of this, and intervened. "If you're going to get married, do it now. Because if anything happens to you, she will have no standing with the Army. She won't get notified; she won't even get a phone call. If you're in the hospital and she flies all the way to Germany, they won't let her in the door."
She flew to Kansas on Friday, and actually got the ring on Saturday. The "rehearsal dinner" Sunday night was Chinese food. The wedding took place at the magistrate's office Monday afternoon. Tuesday they spent all day filling out "you're in the Army now" forms; Wednesday she flew home, and he flew to Kuwait as part of the battalion's advance team.
Including airfare, total cost was less than $600.
(We did have the bash 14 months later, when he came home.)
Apr '12
Re: Beware the Wedding Industrial Complex
Grateful for both the wise advice of his Sgt and that he came home. Please, thank them both for their service and sacrifice.
Nov '11
Re: Beware the Wedding Industrial Complex
It is fortunate that we all live in a society with such material wealth that weddings fit in the past only for emperors are now so common as to be vulgar and something to complain about.
Jul '10
Re: Beware the Wedding Industrial Complex
Some friends of ours had a very inexpensive wedding. At halftime of that year's Superbowl, they all got up from the den, went into his uncle's office where his uncle (Kansas Supreme Court judge) officiated the ceremony. When it was over, they all trooped back to the TV and watched the second half.
Mar '12
Re: Beware the Wedding Industrial Complex
All these cheap wedding stories are making me feel a lot better about ours. My parents objected to our marriage for religious reasons, and we were fresh out of college and had minus money. We married in church with 8 people to watch, ate lunch at a lovely restaurant down the street, and got an overnight "honeymoon" in a B&B. Total cost was probably $500.
I do regret a lot of the things I missed, but I like the thought that the less you spend the happier your married life will be. That's been true for us so far (not three years yet, though!). --Joy