Welp, the marriage with the most extravagant wedding ever seen in our financially modest extended family just broke up. Six years.
Similar story with a former co-worker. Mid 90s, things started changing, and she ended up as an independent consultant. They got married so that she could go on his health insurance. My, how romantic. 
Nobody is saying how much Will and Kate’s wedding cost but well over the $20k mark I imagine. Still, they just hit ten years and three kids so they are not doing too badly:)
The Royal Wedding Ceremony at Westminster Abbey - YouTube The Royal Wedding Ceremony at Westminster Abbey - YouTube
We accidentally attended a wedding in Jackson, Wyoming back in 1985. Every night they put on a fake stagecoach robbery. Dunno how things usually proceeded but that evening, they were threatening to hang the robber, when someone yelled “How about a fate WORSE THAN DEATH. Let’s make him marry the SCHOOLMARM!!”.
So right there, the couple got married in front of a few hundred cheering tourists.
Dunno what that couple did for a reception for their real friends afterward, but the outfits (being costumes for the show) were paid for. Hopefully they’re still hitched!
At the time we got married my wife was a (low level) judge. I used to tell people that marrying her was a condition of my parole.
…
33 years and counting.
I’m curious, did she or another judge pass that sentence? Either way it seems… interesting.
[there are some really bad taste jokes I could insert here but I’m holding myself back!]
The unstated implication of my joke was that she made the decision to release me into her “custody”.
The reality of course was much more ordinary and mundane. And in fact I was the one who asked her to marry me.
Well I knew that. But there are all sorts of more interesting and equally funny possibilities!
Yes there are. It never failed to get a laugh. What was funny was the frequent way two members of a couple reacted; Lots more was implied than they probably intended to reveal.
Excellent!
My understanding is that it’s not the cost of the wedding per se, but the amount of planning involved, which is itself correlated with the cost of the wedding.
The issue is that for many brides planning elaborate wedding ceremonies, the planning itself becomes a major focus of their lives for a long time, and when the wedding is over and done with they therefore face an empty space in their lives. This emptiness itself can put stress on the marriage, as the marriage needs to replace that pre-wedding excitement, which can be tough.
By contrast, someone planning a cheaper low-key wedding was likely never as absorbed with the planning to begin with, and more focused on the marriage rather than the wedding.
'Zactly. For many people, it’s by far the biggest thing of any kind they’ve ever planned. So it can become all-consuming by their amateur standards of event management.
Here’s a slightly different take …
Little girls were (historically at least) encouraged to fantasize about their weddings. It became a chance to play “Princess for a day” even as a young (or not so young) adult. Which is all good clean fun. The tradition of wedding gifts includes things like fine china that most folks have little practical use for; it’s an aspirational good they’ll end up almost never using. Said another way, it’s a lifestyle marker for a lifestyle they might aspire to, but will probably not actually adopt even if they’re lucky enough to eventually have the income / assets to do so.
The problem comes when somebody confuses having a “Princess for a day dress-up party” with “Henceforth I am a Princess with the lifestyle to match”. Only a ding-a-ling or somebody marrying extreme money or real royalty would think that in a calm intellectual sense.
But it’s all too easy to have that become an emotional expectation, not a rational one. The reality that the servants won’t be bringing breakfast in bed while also saddling your pony for today’s ride sinks in quickly and sinks in hard.
One shortcoming of folks who “think” primarily with their emotions is that personality type usually has very little insight into itself. “I feel what I feel and that’s it; It’s the incontrovertible indivisible Truth. It’s genuine, sincere, and not subject to conscious influence.”
Wide-ranging disappointment that can’t be pinpointed often follows.
One of the women in my DnD cell got married and we were standing, looking over the two tables that held the couple’s wedding gifts. “You really ought to get married,” she told me. “Lookit all the loot you get!”
I had a similar thought looking at my haul lo those many years ago.
Then again, at the time I also thought “Gee, if I’m typical, I’ll give away a similarly sized & priced pile of gifts over the years at other people’s weddings.”
Funny enough in the event that’s about how it worked out. Some of them were even the very same gifts, just with new wrapping paper. 
And whose sentence and parole condition was it, really? /d&r
Now you see, Mama, I wasn’t going to go there. But you just had to…
This makes me wonder: When did that sort of thing become an expected wedding gift? I mean, I would imagine that prior to, say, Victorian times, most wedding gifts were a lot more practical - while luxury goods like fine china, silverware and crystal was given either not at all, or mostly among the fairly wealthy - but I freely admit I have no clue.
My mother, and both my in-laws, came from somewhat well-to-do families. Not gazillionaires, but comfortably off with household help etc. And my mother got china, crystal and silver as wedding gifts, as did my in-laws (we happen to have all of the crystal, and we have my aunt’s china and silver). Those weddings took place in the timeframe from the late 1930s (my aunt) to the mid 1950s (my in-laws).
Friends who got married in the 1980s did have crystal and china registries, and they all came from comfortable families but more solid-middle-class, white-collar families - perhaps a step down from my parents’ generation. I don’t recall if any of them had silver registry, though I do know that two of my daughter’s teachers, about 20 years ago, did (we got them each a sugar spoon “for a sweet teacher”).
Us: As noted above, we skipped the big wedding, which meant the whole registry thing was never an issue. I finally found a stoneware pattern I like (and that my husband could agree on) and received a few place settings of it - just before they discontinued it, of course. THAT, we got quite a lot of use out of - still have a couple of pieces of it, actually, though most has broken over the last 35+ years.
And the shmancy china and crystal? Gets used perhaps twice a year. I am not comfortable putting it in the dishwasher (ditto the silver) and so we have to hand wash it, and while it’s a pleasure to use it and think of the family members we inherited it from, I could certainly live without it. I actually like the silver, and one of the sets of crystal - the other stuff is simply not to my taste.
My stepmom was bizarrely invested that we register for China. Like do you even know us? We’re hippies. When would there ever be an event at my home where regular plates wouldn’t suffice?
The way I’ve heard it is that every woman gets to have the wedding she’s always wanted; one generation removed. She gets to force her daughter to have the wedding that her mother wouldn’t let her have, and so on down the generations.
Yeah - my mother sort of feels she got screwed by that. She had the wedding her parents wanted, because they paid for it and my siblings and I had the weddings we wanted because we paid for them. She didn’t seem to understand the relationship between paying and planning.