The cost of marriage- financial and otherwise
When we got married, Denise and I visited with our pastor, underwent pre-marital counseling in his study, and met briefly the day before with the organist. A few weeks before, we had notified my best man, a few close relatives and the membership of our astronomy group. When the big day arrived (seven years ago this week, as it happened), we simply did the deed.
The small wedding party went to a favorite seafood restaurant for dinner afterward. Our reception was a sheet cake and pop affair at Ashton Observatory the following Saturday. We decorated the cake ourselves with various knick-knacks suggesting astronomy, the Cubs, the Bears, and the Blackhawks.
The other day well-known Lutheran journalist and blogger M.Z. Hemingway sent me a link to a review she did in the Wall Street Journal of a recent book on the subject of contemporary matrimonial mores. Rebecca Mead's One Perfect Day demonstrates just how out of step my bride and I were with the culture.
Good.
Apparently the average engagement now lasts a year and a half- and a veritable industry has arisen out of getting people married. And it is a lucrative business: the average wedding these days apparently costs $27,852- more than half, as Ms. H points out, of the median income of U.S. households!
And to think we got it done with a few bucks for the pastor, the cost of a Hy Vee cake, and a restaurant dinner for ourselves and five other people. However did we manage?
We didn't have a wedding planner- unless the pastor and the organist count. I wore a suit (admittedly rented), and my wife wore a dress already in her closet. Today, the typical bride wouldn't be caught wed without a fashionable- and expensive- wedding gown.
Marriage, Mead observes, is no longer a rite of passage to adulthood; rather, it is merely a transition to life as a different kind of consumer. One Perfect Day is a critique of the economic exploitation of the contemporary bride. As far as that goes, huzzah.
A white wedding gown, Mead observes, "does not represent the purity of the bride... but substitutes for it." Mead, Mollie H. observes, positively gushes about what is really another modern phenomenon which is the occasion for similar economic excess: gay "marriage," a development which has even less to do with the most basic of human social relationships than the currently fashionable, self-indulgent exchange of vows considered binding only as long and only to the degree those making them find them congenial. Gay "marriage" (an oxymoron; no court, no legislature, and no level of public opinion is capable at a whim of modifying a relationship as old as humanity to serve the demands of contemporary political correctness) is even less binding than most kinds; sexual exclusivity is so rare among even long-term gay partners that the status of same-sex "marriage" as a tool for mainstreaming homosexuality rather than a mechanism of social commitment is self-evident.
But after all, it's all about form, rather than substance, isn't it? Contemporary weddings- no matter the gender of those involved- are remarkably expensive as an entree into an institution regarded so cheaply. The substance- the commitment to another marriage involves at its very core- is a lot more expensive. It requires the expenditure of the very self.
As a straight, married man currently separated for the second time in four years, I'm in no position to be smug or self-righteous about these matters. But maybe Mead is wrong. Maybe the problem is not that people pay too much to be married these days.
Maybe they aren't willing to pay enough.
The small wedding party went to a favorite seafood restaurant for dinner afterward. Our reception was a sheet cake and pop affair at Ashton Observatory the following Saturday. We decorated the cake ourselves with various knick-knacks suggesting astronomy, the Cubs, the Bears, and the Blackhawks.
The other day well-known Lutheran journalist and blogger M.Z. Hemingway sent me a link to a review she did in the Wall Street Journal of a recent book on the subject of contemporary matrimonial mores. Rebecca Mead's One Perfect Day demonstrates just how out of step my bride and I were with the culture.
Good.
Apparently the average engagement now lasts a year and a half- and a veritable industry has arisen out of getting people married. And it is a lucrative business: the average wedding these days apparently costs $27,852- more than half, as Ms. H points out, of the median income of U.S. households!
And to think we got it done with a few bucks for the pastor, the cost of a Hy Vee cake, and a restaurant dinner for ourselves and five other people. However did we manage?
We didn't have a wedding planner- unless the pastor and the organist count. I wore a suit (admittedly rented), and my wife wore a dress already in her closet. Today, the typical bride wouldn't be caught wed without a fashionable- and expensive- wedding gown.
Marriage, Mead observes, is no longer a rite of passage to adulthood; rather, it is merely a transition to life as a different kind of consumer. One Perfect Day is a critique of the economic exploitation of the contemporary bride. As far as that goes, huzzah.
A white wedding gown, Mead observes, "does not represent the purity of the bride... but substitutes for it." Mead, Mollie H. observes, positively gushes about what is really another modern phenomenon which is the occasion for similar economic excess: gay "marriage," a development which has even less to do with the most basic of human social relationships than the currently fashionable, self-indulgent exchange of vows considered binding only as long and only to the degree those making them find them congenial. Gay "marriage" (an oxymoron; no court, no legislature, and no level of public opinion is capable at a whim of modifying a relationship as old as humanity to serve the demands of contemporary political correctness) is even less binding than most kinds; sexual exclusivity is so rare among even long-term gay partners that the status of same-sex "marriage" as a tool for mainstreaming homosexuality rather than a mechanism of social commitment is self-evident.
But after all, it's all about form, rather than substance, isn't it? Contemporary weddings- no matter the gender of those involved- are remarkably expensive as an entree into an institution regarded so cheaply. The substance- the commitment to another marriage involves at its very core- is a lot more expensive. It requires the expenditure of the very self.
As a straight, married man currently separated for the second time in four years, I'm in no position to be smug or self-righteous about these matters. But maybe Mead is wrong. Maybe the problem is not that people pay too much to be married these days.
Maybe they aren't willing to pay enough.
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