I’ve been thinking about today’s Thought for the Day on Radio 4, which I heard as I drove to my new job in appalling weather. It was about the rising cost of the average wedding – something I have long felt very uncomfortable with. I have been married for 3 years, & our wedding was everything I wanted it to be – relaxed, informal, enjoyable for everyone. We married in the Register Office & had afternoon tea reception in a hotel 2 minutes walk away so guests didn’t have to travel, then went to Paris for 4 days for our honeymoon. The whole wedding including my dress & the honeymoon cost about £3000. Admittedly the Register Office is cheaper than Church (I think) but we deliberately kept costs as low as possible for a wedding – obviously £3000 is no small amount of money to spend, but when compared to the £20,000 cost of the “average” wedding I think we did pretty well. We achieved this by making careful choices – I had no bridesmaids, the only flowers were my bouquet of calla lillies & myrtle and a handful of buttonholes & corsages, the afternoon tea was cheaper than a sitdown meal, the guestlist was limited to very close family only & friends, the person who made our cake, the photographer & DJ for the evening reception were all friends of friends, did own makeup. We also paid for the entire wedding ourselves so were under no pressure to invite anyone we didn’t truly want to be there. We even printed the invitations ourselves. This was not done in a spirit of meanness, I had my dream wedding dress (a beautiful Jenny Packham design called Claire) & all our guests had a fantastic time, it was just that we both felt strongly that the marriage was what mattered in the longrun, not the wedding day, & we would rather not be saddled with masses of debt before we’d even started. A very close friend married last year in a beautiful venue – but the cost to hire that venue without any catering or decoration was very nearly twice what we spent on the entire wedding/honeymoon! Far too much thought goes into the wedding, & very little to the marriage itself. I have even heard of people becoming depressed after their wedding, & finding a void where the “wedding planning” was filling their time before. My mother-in-law told me that her own reception was in a village hall hired out for 2 hours after their wedding and this was standard then – about 35 years ago. I found the wedding magazines incredibly unhelpful as well as expensive (I’ll admit here that I do lack the wedding planning gene, & found lengthy dicussions about the minutiae of even my own wedding quite tedious). The best advice I found was in the wonderful book Janie of La Rochelle by Elinor M Brent-Dyer (Elizabeth’s wise words on the eve of Janie’s wedding). Friends who have married in Church have found the marriage courses very helpful. At my close friend’s wedding the vicar deliverd a lovely homily about marriage, & each person putting the other first . Once all the gloss of the wedding is over, that is when the hard work begins, but also the incomparable feeling of always having someone on your team, whatever happens, which is very special indeed.
