What are weddings nowadays?
Just when I thought weddings were on the way out and the idea of marriage wasn’t a priority for the younger generations, I have been bombarded with wedding invites in recent months.
More so now than I can remember — and I’ll admit that maybe I had an inaccurate view of what weddings were — but it seems a wedding is about making money.
Many people are foregoing the traditional wedding because it is boring for guests to sit and listen to sappy readings and the blah, blah, blah that generally puts you to sleep or makes you groan as you sit and sweat during a long, drawn-out summer ceremony in a church with no air conditioning. (You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been to one.)
My impression was that the social was always the fundraiser for the couple. The drinks, the prizes, the tickets — it all went towards paying for the wedding, or at least the start of the couple’s life together.
But it’s a little strange these days when the couple already lives together, doesn’t have a ceremony that, really, anybody is going to, but still talks about “losing money” on the wedding.
I understand that people invited to a social aren’t necessarily those who will be attending the wedding, but when the closeness of your relationship to the couple pretty much makes you an assumed guest, it’s a slap in the face when you later find out that you aren’t invited to the wedding after all. In a sense: we wanted your fundraising dollars but you didn’t make the cut for the big day. Did I mention I had a hand in planning one of the weddings?
One couple actually thought of having a second social because they lost money (or at least didn’t “break even” on the first) and wanted to suck more money out of the first round of guests again — or at least try to boost the attendance to profit from it. That’s right, they wanted a do over!
Maybe the sappy ceremony and lovey-dovey schmaltz is cheaper than the unique memorable weddings that are costing people so much that the focus has gone from being “the bride’s day” to “the couple’s bank account’s day.”