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A wedding's a celebration and symbol of the joining of two people. But when I hear about people getting excited about planning their wedding, and spending a year or more doing it and tens of thousands of dollars, I wonder if some people aren't placing more importance on the symbol (the wedding) than the reality (marriage). Why is a huge or meticulously-planned wedding so important to some people, especially women?
My wife marries people. I won't go into the details, but she is an ordained minister in a real but small denomination (no Universal Life Church routine), though she doesn't currently have a congregation. But she will marry people who approach her and who, after some discussion, appear to be getting married for valid reasons and after due consideration. So I go to several weddings a year, as self-appointed "ecclesiastical support" (gofer).
She marries the well-to-do and the just-getting-by, and the weddings that I remember most are the ones that were done with more love than money. I remember one wedding not long ago: she worked in a deli, he delivered bottled water. They didn't have much. They'd been living together, and had put off getting married until her Mom and Dad could afford to come down (Mom and Dad only lived 400 miles away, so you can see there wasn't a lot of cash.)
So when the parents told them that they were coming, they threw something together in about three weeks. They rented a hall in a county park for a few hundred, got a good cake, and did potluck for the rest. I saw the people who came for the ceremony: not much money, but a lot of pride. The hall was small, but they'd set it up as a church. The bride wore her best dress and the groom his only suit. After the ceremony there was much cheering and everbody went outside for a few minutes.
Then the wedding party and guests came back in, and like some fine-tuned team, tore down the church setup and reconfigured the hall for a reception in about ten minutes. Everybody worked. It was amazing. And a good and non-rowdy time was had by all, although I didn't see much of it since the minister should skip the party unless he/she is an actual family friend or the regular family minister.
My wife doesn't charge a fee. She just says, give what you feel it's worth, or nothing at all. Frankly, those folks had little enough that no money would have been fine. But on the way out, three different people tried to give my wife a few bucks, so as to spare some expense for the happy couple. We took it from the mother-in-law.
Too many weddings spend a lot of money on show; but the best weddings just show the love. Plan for love, not for show, and you'll have a great wedding.
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