None of us are going to be going to weddings anytime soon. In many states and cities, what we see as traditional weddings, with large gatherings of people, have been banned. We are living through a period defined by its disappointments, by concert debuts that will not happen, by plays that will not launch, by aborted careers and, yes, by grand wedding dreams that will never reach fulfilment.
The disappointments of missed weddings are no doubt painful. But the truth is that a re-evaluation of the contemporary wedding was already well overdue.
In 2019, the wedding industry is, or rather was, worth $70 billion (€61.5 billion), and that’s in the United States alone, and that doesn’t include honeymoons. It was pure madness. Many industries are going to have be be reconsidered in the wake of the economic shutdown, and weddings should be at the top of the list. Like the cruise industry, we should just let it die.
The institution of marriage has been declining even as the cost of weddings has been exploding. Today, about half of adult Americans are married. In 1960, the number was three-quarters. And the people who do get married, get married way, way later. In 1962, half of 21-year-olds were married. In 2019, that number was down to 9 per cent. In 1962, 90 per cent of 30-year-olds had been married. In 2019, only slightly over half of 30-year-olds had been.
Women dress up like they're minor members of the Russian royal family from the 19th century and men dress up like they're waiters on cruise liners
Half a century ago, marriage meant big life changes: losing your virginity, moving in, merging bank accounts, having kids. But now, three-quarters of couples already live together. They split the bills. They share a bed. Marriage is not a requirement to be an adult any more.
Nonetheless, we maintain these supposedly necessary traditions. The most widespread collective response to the approach of gender equality has been that, in our most significant public declarations of love and commitment, women dress up like they’re minor members of the Russian royal family from the 19th century and men dress up like they’re waiters on cruise liners. I guess it’s good to begin any major phase in life with a consciousness of your own ridiculousness, but surely there ought to be limits.
And then there is the cost. The average cost of a wedding in the US in 2019 was $32,329 (€28,415). A 2018 survey from Confetti magazine said Irish weddings cost on average approximately €25,000.
The median cost for a house in the States that year was $200,000 (€175,813), according to Zillow.
Do the math: the average cost of a wedding is a serious downpayment on an average house. You start off the period of your life when you really need money by collecting it in a pile and burning it. A big wedding makes leasing a sports car look like a good financial decision.
The "tradition" behind weddings was all thought up by Madison Avenue types a hundred years ago
Spending all that money on a wedding won’t make you happier, it won’t make your marriage stronger. The opposite, in fact. In 2015, social scientists in Singapore did the work. In A Diamond is Forever and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration, they found marriage duration is inversely associated with the spending on the ceremony and the engagement ring. The more you spend, the shorter the marriage lasts. But that’s obvious any time you go to a wedding. You can tell how unhappy a couple is by the size of the flower arrangements. (For the record, my wife and I eloped in the aftermath of September 11th. We were, according to lifestyle journalists at the time, a “terror marriage”.)
The idea that you need to have the big wedding because of “tradition“? The “tradition” behind weddings was all thought up by Madison Avenue types a hundred years ago. Karen Dunak, a history professor at Muskingum University in Ohio, wrote As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America. It’s a fascinating history of the consumerist nonsense that is the modern wedding. “When you have this rise and this increased democratisation of a consumer culture in the 1920s, this is when you have more wedding registries; this is when you have department stores that would have wedding departments,” she told me. “This is when you have the commercialisation of a lot of services related to the wedding. That you would have bakers who make wedding cakes, you would have wedding boutiques, you would have florists who would make wedding arrangements rather than people doing it as a part of home craft.”
Covid-19 is ruining a great many beautiful things, glorious art, wonderful meetings, even love itself
But global crises like Covid-19 changed it overnight. “[The wedding industry] was disrupted a little bit with the Great Depression. It’s changed some more with the nature of World War II, where you happen to have very rushed weddings where people meet each other and somebody’s heading off to war. It’s after World War II where you would have a church wedding, that you would have a reception, that you would have dinner, that you’d have dancing.”
The tradition of huge elaborate ceremonies followed by enormous parties, all at vast expense, belongs to the recent past of unparalleled growth. That period is over. It’s time to make some new traditions – vastly, vastly cheaper ones.
Before Covid-19, a wedding was a way to begin your life together in a splurge of debt and wasteful narcissism. That is what a pre-Covid wedding forced you to do: it forced you to turn your love into a lifestyle. It forced you to turn your private life into a big display. There was enormous social pressure to engage in what is obviously a folly: to begin adulthood by lying, by making up fraudulent histories, by pretending that you’re independent, by grotesque and unoriginal conspicuous consumption.
Covid-19 is ruining a great many beautiful things, glorious art, wonderful meetings, even love itself. But this destruction – the destruction of the wedding industry – we should take for what it is, a blessing in disguise. Let’s not let the insanity back. We should keep weddings right where they are, right now: nowhere. – Guardian