A FP diary on Sunday by Laura Clawson argued that the run-away expenses of current weddings are equally the fault of the grooms. She is arguing, in part, to an article by Valerie Alexander who wants girls to stop dreaming of weddings and to start considering the next years of the marriage more closely.
Clawson doesn't make her case. In part, that's because her non-anecdotal evidence has little to do with weddings. She writes that adolescent males have more positive views on marriage than adolescent females. The difference between weddings and marriage are, however, the nub of the quotation from Alexander. While Clawson's criticism of expensive proposals are spot-on, they deal with a small fraction of couples as yet. While I suspect the same demographics and the same personality types propose via sky writer as fly to Jamaica for a wedding, proposals are still not weddings.
Come with me now below the jump to the days of yesteryear. We were dirt-poor graduate students, and it has lasted 47 years.
The wedding rings were from Montgomery Ward, gold but quite plain. There was no engagement ring.
Her siblings talked about "Fancy Church Weddings," which always ticked me off a little. Our wedding was in church. Her brother and her sister each had a wedding several years later. Neither was in church, but each was fancier than ours by quite a bit.
She wore a street dress, I wore a suit. (A suit that was getting a little tight in the waist by then.) We didn't have music -- strange because Beth was -- and is -- a musician. Guests were her family and my family. Her grandparents gave a reception, dry by my father's request. The vows were from the United Methodist Book of Worship. Even 47 yeas ago, "obey" wasn't in the standard vows.
She cooked a meal the night before. When her family arrived, she told them that I'd be along in a while. I was doing a laundry.
"Well, you're about to be married. You could wash his clothes for him."
"Oh. He's washing mine along with his."
The highlight of the service was provided by my toddler niece. She wanted to see what was going on down front, and my sister figured that her running around was less disturbing than her crying. So she let Robbie go. At the time Beth and I were kneeling side by side, and I could feel that she was shaking. For a minute, I thought she was crying over the ceremony. When we faced each other, I saw that she was laughing.
We moved into a one-room apartment. The kitchen was literally a converted closet. (It had a sink and a stove. The refrigerator, table, and chairs were in the main room.)
She got her father to make her a kit-built harpsichord for a wedding present, and the harpsichord, the kitchen-style table, and the bed took up almost all of the space in the room.
We got so many towels that we used them up for decades. We'd use a pair until they got ragged; then we'd promote another pair.
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Prestige is entirely a matter of context. That we had had a cheap wedding and were living cheaply was the source of what prestige we had in the church which was much of our shared social life. (I was studying math; she was studying music. Each department had something of a social life, but I was a fifth wheel among her fellow students, and she didn't try, and I didn't urge her to, among mine.)
There are social milieux in which the more you spend and the more you consume the greater your prestige. There are other milieux in which living cheaply and a low-carbon footprint raises your prestige. I have spent more time in the latter than in the former. (And a great fraction of my experience where restraining your consumption raises your respect have been church-related groups.)