Originally Posted by
The Guardian
Oh happy day
In 1950, the total cost of the average wedding was the equivalent of £600. Yesterday it emerged that today's guests are expected to pay £300 each just to attend. How did something that is meant to be a celebration of love become a nauseating carnival of excess, asks Tanya Gold
Tuesday August 23, 2005
The Guardian
Dear friends, do not invite me to your wedding. I will be in Antarctica, or outer space. I will not send flowers, good wishes, something old or a crystal rose bowl. When my sister got married, to embark on a life of wearing matching tracksuits and having shepherd's pie crises, I gave her some batteries and a plug. It seemed appropriate - and not just because I'm bitter. Everyone bought her bedding and bread bins; who would buy her a plug?
You might be single, too; or you might actually be married. But everyone has got them, and here are some of mine - my personal nuptial horror stories. My sister spent so much time being congratulated by strangers at her wedding that the food disappeared and her husband had to take her to dinner at KFC. (McDonald's was closed; she wore her Droopy & Browns wedding dress.) I spent the ritual (I wore black) keeping my (divorced) parents apart to stop them recriminating about their own wedding, and taking drugs in the car park to recover from the experience. At my wedding before that, an ex-boyfriend's wife put her hands around my neck and tried to strangle me. I have heard of punch-ups at weddings, riots at weddings and one particularly disgusting anecdote about a bride, a best man and oral sex in an alleyway. And that sounds to me like one of the better weddings.
There used to be a decent, British way of marriage: quiet, demure and necessary. Until the 1950s it was ubiquitous and basic. In the words of Andrew McCarthy in the 1980s film St Elmo's Fire, marriage began as "a concept invented by people who were lucky to make it to 20 without being eaten by dinosaurs". The ancient Israelites viewed marriage, pragmatically, as a contract. The Romans tossed engagement rings into the mix (without beginning or end - yes, it's eternal). The Christians, damn them, invented sanctity and the Victorians created those hellish white frocks that I am continually astounded that any woman with a sliver of self-respect should ever consent to wear.
The global nuptial cauldron steamed and belched and, eventually, produced the humble English wedding. It took place in church, starred a vicar and some hats, the congregation retired to the village hall to drink tea and eat sandwiches. In 1950, the average cost of such a happenstance was, in today's terms, about £600. Objectively, it was only faintly offensive. (People in love, of course, are almost always offensive - they lick each other in restaurants and think it's cute - but the ritual itself was downbeat and the nausea was manageable.)
No more. Although our desire to marry started to plummet in 1972, this blessed trend is over. We are beginning to get married again and the privilege is swallowing more of our cash then ever before. When you've finished admiring Monday's pictures of BBC newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky's happy day (lucky fellow: Justin Bower, a banker; fabulous gown: crystal embroidered cream satin by Dana and Liliana Kruszynska), pause to consider that it costs on average £17,000 to wed today.
Which is fine for those who have chosen - God knows why - to stand with gurning face-ache in the centre of those wretched photos. What about those of us who happen to have gone to college with them, or to work with them, or be related to them, who are obliged to take out a small mortgage on account of their "happy day"? It emerged yesterday that the average wedding guest - guest! - spends £300 attending a wedding. They will spend £55.60 on a gift (knives? crockery? a Batman toy?), £32.75 on alcohol, £9.20 on underwear and exactly the same amount on a hat. It now costs almost as much to marry as it does to get divorced (as about 39% of the newlyweds currently shagging contentedly on Bermudan sandbanks will, inevitably, do), but at least when my friends are divorcing they don't ask me to contribute to their alimony.
The wedding beast, I fear, is swallowing us all, and Liz Savage, the editor of Brides Magazine (circulation 68,000), confirms it. The British bridal industry is worth £5bn a year and growing, and Savage cites a faintly nauseating buffet of factors. First, people are increasingly paying for their own weddings, thus unleashing a torrent of Personal Romances-style fantasies on us all. "Fathers of the bride are no longer automatically footing the bill," she says. "Couples have more money to spend and they want the wedding to be an expression of their personal style."
The key driver, it becomes clear, in the excess of the modern wedding is pseudo-sophistication and grisly one-upmanship. "Our tastes have become much more sophisticated and glamorous," says Savage. "I got married nine years ago and there was none of this fuss over the menu and what we were drinking. Then you wouldn't have dreamed of turning your nose up at the wine but today we are putting ourselves under far more pressure ... Our readers spend more time thinking about the reception than anything else. The attention to detail is amazing - the choice of napkin ring, how they are going to tie the napkins and how are the place settings going to look. It doesn't matter if they are traditional or getting married in winter or abroad, our readers want to surprise and delight their guests. People are much more creative and imaginative today. They want their wedding to be talked about and to give their guests the best they can. They really want the wow factor."
Check out the magazine section of a WH Smith near you. They are all there, smiling happily: the bestseller Brides, but also Wedding, Cosmopolitan Bride and my personal favourite, For the Bride. (It is unlikely, yet, to stock the American title Obese Brides.) They all offer a pornographic array of treats for your big day: polyester dresses so vast that if you dropped a match on one your bride would explode; silly hats; bouquets run mad with self-importance; insurance; diets for brides; ice-sculptures in the shape of dolphins; shoes (stiletto or pump); groom chic, best-man chic, pets-invited-to-wedding chic. And there is one, great theme pounding through. Yes - modern British brides, even the ones approaching (age-wise) the mid 40s and (size-wise) the high teens, want to be forever a princess. Most of the dresses in these magazines wouldn't look out of place on Queen Victoria, who - well, really! - had an unfashionably downbeat wedding to Prince Albert at the Chapel Royal, St James, with only family and friends invited.
And these princesses insist on their castles. There is a glut of these sad old stately homes in England's shires, reborn after the rules were relaxed in 1994 into a vast marble scrum of palaces waiting to welcome you and toss you and your beloved a canape and a glass of (the height of aristocratic sophistication) fizzy plonk. You, too, can be posh for a day. Our wedding fantasies aren't so much retro as reactionary.
One vicar, who asks politely not to be named, has tied the knot for nearly a hundred couples and he thinks he knows who to blame for these atrocities: the inventor of the video camera. "The focus of the marriage should always be the love of the two people and not the spectacle," he says. "I don't allow videos and flash cameras during the service because it turns everything into a performance. A wedding ought to be the living experience. Filming it is as daft as having a video record of your first kiss. But weddings are becoming mini media events - everyone flashes their cameras and people get hooked on the fanfare and the colour rather than the actual commitment. Loving creatively should not be expensive."
Is there a tiny pocket of hope in this smothering sea of tulle? Savage mentions one faint, but perhaps growing, new trend in the world of wedding hells, just sticking its head over the parapet: an urge for smaller weddings. Fashion and commerce love to back-flip and roll (so they can roll back again) and it is just possible that we will get bored of the excess of excess, chuck out the dolphin sculptures and the dresses in the shape of puddings and start to have more humble treats instead.
I doubt it. A wedding awakes the five-year old in every girl, and have you ever tried to reason with a five-year-old? So for now, we can all endure the love call of today: "We love each other. We have reached the golden apex of transcendental love. Please buy us a bread bin."
This September, Britain will see its first gay wedding. All I can say is: Run gays, run.
Wedding anyone? (c&p alert)
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all so true 
(well, in most cases, anyway...)
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