I’m getting married this summer. Here’s a
question my fiancée, Sara, and I have been asking ourselves
and each other repeatedly for the last few months: How the hell are we
going to afford this?
All things considered, we’re not bad off. We’ve both got
pretty good jobs and pretty good credit. And we have parents who want
to help, but times are tough all over.
One option for partially covering wedding expenses is to ask for
money from the guests in lieu of all that traditional household crap
people usually give as wedding gifts. Sara and I, like many modern
couples about to marry, have already been living together for a few
years. We’ve already got most of the house stuff we need. As the
guy who washes them, I can tell you we already have way too many
dishes.
(“Well, we could really use a new vacuum cleaner
…” Sara would say.)
There is a whole slew of websites devoted to honeymoon and wedding
funds, like www.buy-our-honeymoon.com,
www.travelersjoy.com and
www.honeyfund.com, where a
bride and groom can register, and wedding guests can give money either
to cover specific expenses, like hotel rooms, or donate to an overall
fund. Most of the websites are geared toward honeymoon costs, but
there’s no reason you can’t also use the money to cover
wedding expenses.
Registering on a website and asking for money might seem tacky, but
it’s less tacky than the “Money Dance,” popular of
late, wherein wedding guests treat the bride like a stripper, stuffing
cash into her clothes.
Sara and I are also considering having a potluck rather than a
catered dinner. I wouldn’t mind just skipping dinner altogether.
My instincts are to have a casual, down-and-dirty wedding with just the
bare minimum requirements for a great party: people, booze and
music.
But Sara points out that a wedding is more than just a party. She
wants something smaller and nicer. To her, cutting costs is basically
synonymous with cutting people. I think the more, the merrier, and we
should save money by cutting frills.
In the end, we’ll have something smaller, because I’ve
learned the hard way that nothing will elicit a withering look like
asking your bride-to-be, “Do we really need flowers?” The
most important lesson I’ve learned as a groom-to-be is that the
bride is always right.
And everybody has an opinion. Some advise prudence. Our hippie
boomer parents on both sides like to remind us of their simplistic,
communing-with-nature weddings. Others root for extravagance. Some of
our jetsetter friends have set some high Joneses for us to keep up
with. Sara certainly feels some “this is supposed to be the best
and most important day of your life” pressure. I keep reminding
her that we need to figure out what we want and forget everybody
else.
But that’s hard to keep in mind when “everybody
else” includes, most prominently, our families and closest
friends.
So what do we want? I have no idea. Which is better in the long run:
Not creating a bunch of unnecessary debt just for one silly day? Or
creating something that we can reminisce about in our autumnal
years?
We might still have a big blow-out wedding and spend way too much
money. We might elope. We might have a small wedding, a medium
honeymoon, and then a big, dinner-less party.
But to be totally honest, I don’t really care what we do,
because the bottom line, for me, is this: I’m not doing this
because I want a big wedding—or any kind of wedding. I’m
doing it because I want to marry Sara Kennedy.