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HUMDEEDEE's avatar

Return to sanity? Maybe it's happening. My son's first wedding was like you described. Over the top and stupidly costly, and certainly not what he wanted. The marriage lasted 2 years. For his second attempt, my D-I-L to be, after being driven crazy by her mother trying to engineer an event similar to a royal wedding, decided that she wanted to elope to Vegas. Smart cookie, that one. They did just that. Marriage is going strong after 12 years and 2 children. Her mother, btw, is a Leftist, and we know where they live, right? Fantasyland

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Pikay's avatar

I got married 32 years ago. Even then, I couldn't imagine spending the sort of money on a one-day event that I saw friends and family members spending. We decided to get married outside in a location that we both loved (we didn't try to reserve it or anything, just showed up with friends and did it) ... then we took all our guests out to dinner at a nice steak place. The whole thing cost under $1000. We spent a long weekend at the beach in a nice hotel (about an hour's drive from our house).

Did I wish sometimes that we had done the big formal thing? Yes, a little, in the beginning ... I felt pangs of envy at my sister-in-law's big wedding a year later in a beautiful church, complete with a whole train of attendants and all the matching dresses and such. BUT ... they weren't intense pangs, and the older I got, the more relieved I was that we hadn't wasted that money. A few years later, we'd saved up enough to take a month-long vacation to Australia -- and THAT felt like a honeymoon that was well worth waiting for. We were able to buy our first house much sooner than we'd have been able to if we'd had a long-past party to pay off. And I look back at our beautiful, informal wedding pictures now -- and they are so very *us.* I think now that if we'd actually tried to do the stereotypical wedding, we'd both have felt like imposters.

I've seen a LOT of big, expensive weddings up close in the intervening decades (I play violin professionally and get hired regularly for such events). I always feel genuinely happy for the happy couples, and I wish them the absolute best -- but I can't relate to the pageantry or the expense of any of it.

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