For Richer or Poorer | A Love Letter to Weddings

Castles in the Sky #46

Going into debt to pay for my wedding was among the best decisions of my life. 

When I got married, I figured if I am an adult and I can’t spend my money to throw the biggest party of my life to celebrate marrying the woman of my dreams, then what the hell is the point of any of this? It took a year to pay off some of the credit cards I had used after the money from my parents and in-laws ran out, but I have no regrets. My wedding was among the best days of my life. 

Weddings are misunderstood; they are one of the most important cultural rituals we have. 

As a man with generally neutral-to-masculine tastes, people reflect back to me that it’s unusual how animated I get when the subject of weddings is brought up. This is because most people with highly vocal opinions about weddings fall into one of two camps–camps I don’t fit into. 

The first is: “the bigger the better. Weddings are status symbols. You must go to this venue, have this food, and spend this much per guest.” The first camp of people might say, “yes, weddings are important. Every wedding should be a huge party–spend all the cash!” This message comes to us pervasively but indirectly. On TV, on the internet, you hear about bridezillas and destination weddings. You hear about per-person costs and headcounts. You hear about who had a “good wedding,” and who didn’t. The message is clear: weddings are a big, expensive party, and the bigness and expense correlate directly with the wealth, power, and taste of the families.

There is so much wrong with this pervasive message about weddings that you start to understand people in the second camp. These are the people who say, “weddings are a racket–why go into debt for one party? Most people get divorced, anyway. Make a registry, email it out, and go to the courthouse.” They may qualify their distaste for weddings, “love is important, but weddings are a scam. There is an upcharge for everything. Don’t waste all your money on a bunch of people you may not even like that much.” The disdain for weddings is so strong you wonder if they even support marriage–and some people don’t! They lash out against tradition at every turn saying things like, “marriage is an outdated institution–we don’t need it anymore,” or “the bigger the wedding, the shorter the marriage.” Their view is clear: to spend money, get dressed up, and invite others is naive, and may even damage your future. 

These are both so wrong. 

These stereotypes are born in some truth. On the one hand, weddings are special–they should be monumental. Weddings do say something about the people getting married and their families. On the other hand, when you go to get married, everyone is suddenly reaching for your wallet much more aggressively than ever before. But both of these views miss what’s important about weddings. 

As a thought experiment, imagine a group of alien anthropologists were to visit Earth and try to find the similarities across all cultures. It’s safe to say they’d notice that we all commemorate certain life milestones, the most important among which are births, marriages, and deaths. Of the three of these, weddings are the only ones that we have any control over scheduling.  This alone is a reason to be thoughtful with weddings. 

In a modern society utterly devoid of the kind of rituals that used to dot our lives, weddings are one chance that we have to pause, gather our loved ones, and pay attention to what makes a good life good. 

Weddings are a mashup of all the things in life worth celebrating. 

A wedding is a paragraph where every sentence is a declaration about the things that are good and matter in our lives. 

People deserve to be happy. There are so many demands on our time, so many reasons to be upset, so many things to worry about and guard against: we are all trying to make money, stay in shape, stay up with the news, care for our mental health, be a good friend, etc. Ask yourself really, how often in our lives do we get together to celebrate that something is going well? How many other times do we bring together so many different types of people just to say, “today is different–we put aside our troubles, our concerns, our worries, just to get together and celebrate that these people love each other.” How often are we like, let’s just party? Let’s just get together and be happy for somebody. 

Some things are worth making sacrifices for. The symbols and traditions of weddings are meaningful on a personal and societal level. We’re under a constant onslaught of messages from society trying to get us to be more traditional or to be more innovative. How many shared traditions and symbols do we have left across our fractured global culture? When you say wedding, what you mean is unambiguous: two people coming together to build a life, supported and celebrated by people who love them. And yes, weddings can be expensive. But without making choices and giving things up, you cannot build anything. To have a wedding is to publicly say, “I am celebrating finding this person, and foregoing all other people.” Without some sacrifice, life is just one hedonistic mad dash from beaches to buffets to nightclubs. (And even if that’s what you wanted–wouldn’t it be more fun to share with somebody?)

Hospitality feeds our souls. Old cultures and religions have stories about what to do when a traveler stops by your home. One meme I see a lot on social media is that people would be livid if someone stopped by their house unannounced. Our hyper-commercialized society has every cost split. Every interaction is elaborately telegraphed or takes place via phones. Getting together under one roof (or in one field) with people you wouldn’t normally gather with and breaking bread is good for you. There are certain things you get sitting across the table from someone that you do not get over Zoom. 

Everybody needs a chance to dance. I know men who dance exclusively at weddings. In many parts of mainstream America, this very human, primal activity has been relegated to dark nightclubs that smell of sparklers and dimly lit bars that smell of beer. Weddings are one of the only places everyone cuts loose and dances because it’s fun. They do this because their friends and family are there, and there is cross-genre, cross-generational music. But weddings are also a celebration of music as vessels for feeling. Think about how much meaning is packed into the first dance or the song played when the bride walks down the aisle or the couple leaves. 

It is good for us to keep doing hopeful things. If you spend any time keeping up with current events, you know that every year is the worst year ever. Our politics are consumed with people angry and upset that the world is going in the wrong direction. Much of our art is about zombies and evil governments and evil corporations. Everything is “dark” and “atmospheric.” Where else but weddings do we routinely come together to say, “this is really lovely–and you have lovely things in store for you.” A wedding is a visible, tangible celebration of hope. 

We are inundated with mixed messages about everything in life, not least among which are the messages about the value of weddings. In a world where happiness is elusive, hospitality is nonexistent, and hope is naive, weddings are something to be celebrated.  But at this point, you may still be wondering, “I understand why weddings are good, I just still don’t understand why it needs to be expensive.”

People who want to spend a lot of money on their weddings should feel free to do so. 

My argument is not really that everyone should spend a lot of money on a big wedding. My argument is that if you want to spend a lot of money on your wedding but feel guilty, this is–in fact–justifiable. 

Before I make this point, indulge me in a thought experiment. Try to think of the last wedding you went to where you knew both people really well. I want you to describe that wedding in three adjectives. Hold those adjectives in your mind before you scroll past this picture of me on the best day of my life.

Now that you have these three adjectives that describe the wedding, ask yourself, “do those three adjectives also describe the couple who got married?” 

Odds are the answer is yes. I stumbled upon this thought exercise on accident one day with my wife. I was trying to explain to her my intuition that–not only should we do the weird things we want for our wedding, but in a way, people would expect it. I have since done this thought experiment with dozens of people having similar wedding planning predicaments. They all chuckle about, “wow yeah, the wedding I was thinking of was traditional, boring, and elegant–just like the couple!” Or, “yeah, it was like a psychedelic hippy party, and they are psychedelic hippies who like to party!” 

These conversations with friends who are planning weddings was where my thoughts originally started to crystallize. In the case of people who agree with me–people who want to make the biggest ritual celebration of their life a statement about all the things they find important–I share a few pieces of straightforward advice. 

First, do the weirdest thing that feels right. When you’re planning your wedding, there are a lot of other people’s expectations to deal with. As you try to make the right decisions, there will be certain things that you want to do but that you know seem weird. But when we think that something is ‘weird,’ it is not really about what we think at all. Weirdness is a construct that is a stand-in for other people’s expectations. So when faced with several equal choices, pick the weirdest one as it is likely the most authentic one–the one that most closely aligns with what you “really” want. The little flourishes of weirdness are what give weddings their personal flavor. 

Second, invite people! In the past, I was pro big wedding under all circumstances. Today, I have moderated my position after going to a few weddings during the pandemic that had less than twenty people and were super special. However, I think that a lot of people who want small weddings get nervous at the idea of having a bunch of people around and having all the attention focused on them. Here’s the thing: sometimes in life you need to let people celebrate you. They want to love and support you. Think of someone who you know who you’re close to who’s very shy. Imagine they didn’t invite you to their wedding. How do you feel? You probably feel left out–like you wish you could support them.  

Third, prioritize then compromise. One of the best pieces of advice I got when my wife and I were planning our wedding was this: figure out the two or three things we each cared about the most, then be a stickler for those. On everything else, have opinions but be willing to budge or even delegate. Listing what mattered to each of us and comparing was super helpful. Talking it out made it easy to figure out where we would be willing to compromise or surrender room in the budget and where we couldn’t. As a result, we both really loved the wedding we had despite not getting our first choice on a lot of stuff.

Weddings are worth the investment. 

Imagine being told about your wedding without knowing what a wedding was: “You are going to make one decision that will affect every aspect of your life. If you do it right, you really only need to do it once. After you make that decision, everyone in your life who has even marginally positive feelings about you will celebrate your commitment with gifts at a party.” You would be so excited. Yet, many people succumb to the peer pressure of a wedding set on others’ expectations or try to reduce the fanfare to the absolute minimum. Neither of these is the way. 

When I got engaged, I kept getting advice like, “don’t go for broke, you’ll regret it.” Or, “put a down payment on a house–it’s a better investment than a wedding.” I understood these arguments intellectually but was at a loss. One day, my cousin Jason called me. I remembered his wedding almost twenty years earlier. It was on an estate in Louisiana. The crawfish bisque they served in tiny cups as we entered the reception remains a Top 5 culinary experience of my life. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation between us went, but he congratulated me on getting engaged and then I said I remembered he had a great wedding. He then told me the exact thing I needed to hear that day. 

“Yeah man, the truth is that cost us a lot of money, but I’m so glad we had that big wedding. Everyone was trying to get us to cheap out and do something less, and it took me a while to pay off the expenses, but it was the best day of our lives. We still get so much joy out of those pictures and videos. Plus getting everyone together was a great way to make sure that some of those people stayed in my life for years after that.” 

The lesson I took away from that call wasn’t that I needed to spend money for a big wedding, but that I needed to be intentional about the wedding we were going to have. I wrote this essay because, after five years of marriage and hundreds of conversations with friends about wedding planning, I’ve realized how few people get the reassurance that comes from a phone call from cousin Jason. So I wrote to talk about how much I love weddings. But also, I hope to help people who need to give themselves permission to make the unorthodox choices that feel right to them. 

This can mean being cheaper than normal or it can mean going into a bit of debt. A good marriage is more than the sum of its parts, and so is a good wedding. Some of the things in life that make the most financial sense do not show up well on a balance sheet. So do the weirdest thing that feels right, splurge where you feel the urge, and savor what could become one of the best days of your life. 

---

Postscript: Don’t spend money you cannot reasonably pay back. My wife and I got financial help from both sets of parents and both had steady jobs when we got married. So even though were spending money we “didn’t have,” we were confident we’d be able to pay it back. I’m in favor of people being deliberate and intentional in their spending since a good wedding will be one of the best things they ever do. I am not in favor of recklessly spending for no reason.