A five year engagement seems to be the new norm. Five years?! That is how long couples take to save up enough money to have their dream wedding. The average cost of a wedding is $30,000 and young couples simply don’t have that kind of money floating around. This cost may be skewed a bit due to the highest costing weddings up against the lowest priced affaires.
USA Today yesterday ran a fluff piece as an excuse to promote the release of a new Jason Segal movie, The 5-Year Engagement, which while astonishing in its transparency was sadly typical in terms of the wedding narrative it pushed. The gist of the piece was that couples are having longer engagement periods in order to save up for ‘dream weddings,’ which now cost an average $26,500. But who are these people allegedly spending so much?
I know a lot of people who’ve married recently or are marrying soon. While I’ve not discussed precise wedding financing with most of them, the general consensus among these newlyweds and soon-to-be-weds is that weddings don’t have to be staggeringly expensive. There are “traditions” and “necessities” that you can skip. Or there are ample ways to get deals or scrimp on these things.
Of course, I understand how averages work—just because many couples spend less on their weddings, many spend more; and despite the fact that my personal wedding sample spans states and social milieus, everyone has been (independently or historically) somewhere on the spectrum of middle class.
Still, I can’t help but suspect that $30,000 planned-for-2-years wedding is more of a media creation than a reflection of most realities. Or the weddings at the top cost so much that they skew the average misleadingly upward. Or that there are many, many people who get married in very simple and inexpensive ways who fly under the radar, whose experiences aren’t included in these officials surveys of wedding costs (which, by the way, always seem to be conducted by The Knot or Brides magazine or other parties with a vested interest in the notion that having a wedding requires lots of money or lots of planning and DIY centerpiece guides)…Continue Reading
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