What Were Those Cohabitation Numbers?
Telegraph – Why have weddings become so grotesque? By Andrew O’Hagan
Last year, your run-of-the-mill wedding cost the couple – or the bride’s parents – £18,000. Young couples were often to be found topping up that figure with bank loans worth tens of thousands. The average couple thinks a big wedding is more important than a big deposit on their first house.
Fair enough. But new figures tell us how much the guests at these wild extravaganzas are paying: £55,000. That’s the collective figure for what guests will spend on a typical wedding day – presents, transport, hotels, all the rest of it. You can call that £370 per person and you can add £119 if the person in question attended a stag or a hen night.
I don’t mean to speed the plough into the Age of Prudence, but isn’t this really kind of grotesque? What has the spending of cash got to do with the celebration of two people’s love?…
But I can honestly say I have barely known a British wedding where there was not some element of scorched patience or plain bad faith: mothers-in-law who hate the menu and interfere with the seating plan; fathers giving speeches who have nothing – nothing! – of interest to say about their beloved daughters after knowing them for 30 years; friends who feel imperilled by the vivid scene of other people’s happiness; ministers who squirt banalities and clichés like bad perfume over the congregation; children who riot; bands who suck; and guests who giggle through ceremonies and bitch through receptions as if the day was a giant joke.
Good grief. All that money…
August 28th, 2007 at 10:52 am
We got married in a church on a Saturday afternoon, the day before Easter. The Church was already filled with flowers. The minister did it for free. I slipped the organist $20.
There were just family there. We had a picnic after, in my parents backyard. We drove to La Jolla that evening and had a bucket of steamers and a bottle of champagne. Sunday at the San Diego Zoo. Home that night. Both of us back to work Monday morning.
Didn’t cost much but it must have been good enough. Here it is 26 years later, we’re still married, getting along fine.
August 29th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Me, Judy the boys, Father George, a couple of close friends, Mom and Dad and the coreish part of my extended families…. :> About 150 people in a Chapel designed for about 40 professional Episcopalians. The fun part was Father George’s later description of some of my kin dealing with kneelers. We did have one hell of a fish fry after.
August 29th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I’ve been to three weddings (no, four!). None of them struck me as particularly magical. The one last year was the best because she looked so pretty and Elvis was standing right there and, well, it was a bunch of Aussies in Vegas and how can that not be a great wedding, but none of them really left me a-wishin and a-sighin afterwards. But then none of them were mine, either.
August 31st, 2007 at 8:40 am
I was at a good one at the beginning of the month, on the flat land to the west of Stirling and the River Forth in the back garden. I gave the Wallace monument a wave for you, ninme.
The service was in an old stone barn they’d whitewashed, music a soprano with bits from Puccini, then we drank Pol Roger for an hour and a half, then speeches dinner and dancing (Scottish) in a marquee. Lots of drink and hilarity. It was all very “Four Weddings”. A bloke in a sealskin waistcoat whom I hadn’t seen in years recited a verse I’d made up 17 years ago. Very odd feeling, that.
Then it rained and we had great fun driving our SUVs out of a boggy field in the dark.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:14 am
See that sounds nice.