Who Traditionally Pays for the Wedding: Why and How Much?

Offbeat Bride wrote about this in an article talking about the tradition of dowries:

"[T]he responsibility of a bride's parents to pay for a wedding. I've never been especially fond of this tradition, because I think in some circumstances all it does is foster an attitude of entitlement in those brides who would condemn their parents for choosing not to finance their extravagant tastes. That, or parents end up killing themselves (figuratively!) trying to earn the money for their child's wedding out of a sense of obligation, whether it's practical or not.

In the end, why?…

Because hundreds of years ago, women were considered chattel and the bride's family used to have to pay off the groom's family in the form of a dowry to take their daughters off their hands. After dowries went out of style, there was still the trousseau (the bride's dress and accouterments for the wedding, in addition to stuff like cake, etc.), usually hand prepared by the bride's family. Now that we have wedding vendors to make cakes and dresses for us, the trousseau has also gone out of style for the most part, and instead the bride's family just ponies up the cash....

We no longer live in the times where marriage was essentially a way to ensure that women were taken care of. Love wasn't always a factor (and still isn't, in some cultures). Teenage brides weren't uncommon, because people just didn't live as long. Girls who were practically still children themselves got married and started having children right away, because culture and religion dictated it be so. The dowry and trousseau were a necessity of those times, because they ensured that a groom would have the things he needed to support his new wife and their children to come. This is no longer the case, for the most part, as most couples who get married had acquired quite a lot of crap of their own-they don't need the "starter kits" that couples used to need."

Photo used under a Creative Commons License. Taken by Flickr user 401(K) 2012. Available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/68751915@N05/6355351769/

How often does this tradition actually continue? The 2015 survey from the Knot said this: 

"Tradition lives on, with parents paying for a large portion of wedding costs, but today’s couples are happy to contribute. On average, the bride’s parents contribute 44% of the overall wedding budget, the bride and groom contribute 43%, and the groom’s parents contribute 12% (others account for the remaining 1%).  In 2015, 12% of couples paid for the wedding entirely by themselves, and 9% of couples don’t contribute any finances to the wedding budget.

In nearly half of all weddings, the bride pays for professional hair and makeup. Forty-four percent of brides, along with her parents, contribute to the costs for professional hair-styling, and 41% contribute to professional make-up for their bridesmaids. The average cost of professional bridal party hair and makeup services are $70 and $68 per person, respectively."

Photo used under a Creative Commons License. Taken by Flickr user Tax Credits. Available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/76657755@N04/7027595009/

However, these statistics do only represent the type of couples and weddings that are using the Knot, which is one reason I take many of the claims of this survey with a gigantic grain of salt, such as the statement that the average wedding cost in the US is $32,641 and that the average cost of a wedding in Chicago is $61,265. That seems....unlikely to be representative of all people actually getting married. I would also like to point that every single place listed on their "Top 10 Most Affordable Places to Get Married" has a higher average budget than my wedding (I also fully intend to stay under budget because I am ultra competitive and cheap; I've already told my sister that I will beat her budget. :D She supported this completely. Fortunately, we're actually already on track to meet this goal).

I had a bit of trouble finding non-traditional wedding market statistics. I did see one statistic from a Splendid Insights market research report in an older Offbeat Empire post stating that 43% of nontraditional couples pay for their own weddings (about 20% of the wedding market identified as "offbeat" in this particular research round). Also, according to this research 48% of these nontraditional couples had wedding budgets of $10,000 or less. Offbeat Bride's own 2011 reader survey found that over 60% of their readership had budgets of $10,000 or less -  4.8% of their readership had budgets under $1,000, 13.5% had $1,000-$3,000 budgets, 18.1% had $3,000-$5,000 budgets, and 28.3% had $5,000-$10,000 budgets.

Royal Wedding Memorabilia

I found this book in the library of the assisted living facility where my theater troupe rehearses! I enjoyed looking through it very much; everything was just so delightfully 80s. 

This "How Stuff Works" article - "10 Wacky Pieces of Royal Wedding Memorabilia" - also quite entertainingly features several pieces of memorabilia made in honor of various royal weddings, including cups, thimbles, frisbees, and rubiks cubes! I will confess to owning a few small plates of royal memorabilia myself - for Charles and Diana's wedding and I believe King George V and Queen Mary's coronation - which I have used as soap dishes.

Bonus Material: 15 Most Gorgeous Royal Wedding Gowns of All Time, InStyle, By Mehera Bonner, July 1, 2016. These are AMAZING, I think my favorite is number 3 (Queen Rania of Jordan) and number 12 (Princess Victoria of Sweden- I adore her cameo crown!).

Review: One Perfect Day - The Selling of the American Wedding, by Rebecca Mead

What is this book about?

This book takes an in-depth look at the wedding industry, traveling from Disneyworld and wedding chapels in Gatlinburg, Tennessee to wedding planner and videographer conventions to wedding dress factories in China. It really looks at the goods and services offered to brides, the "traditions" behind them, and asks how the American wedding industry came to this point.

As a former journalist, I naturally loved Mead's approach to this book. Parts of it are quite poetically written; the prose is gorgeous. It is easy to read; I read through it considerably faster than the previous academic books I've read for this project. 

Who would love this book?

People who like knowing the story behind the curtain and don't mind learning about the dark sides of things as well. Like people who enjoy VH1's Behind the Music.

My Favorite Parts

This is a wonderful book but it's not exactly a happy one; it often points out the extreme cynicism at the heart of most wedding professionals. There were several parts that made me go "ooooooooo" in the sense of a voyeur finding out something secret and scandalous. For example, one interview subject stated about bridal registries: "'It is very simple...Eighty-five percent of brides who register with your brand will remain loyal to your brand for the next fifty years.' The bride...'is a marketers' target. She is a slam dunk." (side note: I wonder how true this still is today, with the advent of online shopping changing the entire way your average person consumes goods). 

Mead herself also has a hilarious style, such as this sentence about her visit to the Chicago bridal dress market: "After a few hours I was overcome by a condition known among retailers as "white blindness," a reeling, dumbfounded state in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between an Empire-waisted gown with alencon lace appliques and a bias-cut spaghetting-strap shift with crystal detail, and in the exhausted grip of which I wanted only to lie down and be quietly smothered by the fluffy weight of it all, like Scott of the Antarctic." 

She also made this witty observation after an encounter with a New Age wedding officiant who had examined her aura. "Hours later, at home, I realized with a start that she had neglected to zip up my aura again, and I had been walking around with it open all that time." 

The book ends on a lovely and progressive note that made me wistful and happy: "What would the American wedding look like if all Americans approached their weddings with the same consciousness as that demanded of gay couples? What if getting married was not simply something the average American-having found a suitable spouse-could do when he or she pleased and in the manner he or she desired, but was a right that had been argued over and fought for? What if every wedding was a cherished victory won?"

Does it talk about marital surname changes at all? 

No - It's really more about the wedding industry than the marriage or couples involved themselves.

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day-Selling-American/dp/0143113844

#WeddingHashtagsAreAwesome (But I Can't Have One Because #JohnWillDivorceMe)

I really, truly love puns to the bottom of my being. They're one of my favorite things. Because of this, I love the heck out of wedding hashtags and would love to have one (in fact the idea of getting to come up with a wedding hashtag about taking his last name is so entertaining to me that that is actually a point in that option's favor), but.....John? Not so much. The following conversation has actually happened:

Me: "If anyone ever calls me 'Mr. John LastName' I will divorce you on the spot."  (this is a whole 'nother issue that will be discussed in a future post)

John: "If anyone uses a hashtag for our wedding, I will divorce you on the spot." 

We were both kidding, but also were pretty serious about our strong objections to both things. So. There you go. I suppose we're not having a wedding hashtag. However, they are pretty interesting, so I'm going to talk about them anyway.

"Ace of Hashtags" by Roberta Cortese (satyrika on Flickr), used under a Creative Commons License. https://www.flickr.com/photos/satyrika/8093127848

The Origins of Hashtags

The symbol itself - formally known as the Octothorpe but also called a number sign or pound sign, dates back to ancient Roman times. A New Yorker article called "The Ancient Roots of Punctuation" states:

"The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or 'pound weight.' Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde... And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #... Though it is now referred to by a number of different names—“hash mark,” 'number sign,' and even 'octothorpe,' a jokey appellation coined by engineers working on the Touch-Tone telephone keypad—the phrase “pound sign” can be traced to the symbol’s ancient origins. For just as 'lb' came from libra, so the word 'pound' is descended from pondo, making the # a descendent of the Roman term libra pondo in both name and appearance."

The specific use of the symbol in a recognizable "hashtag" way is a lot older than you might think! A Lifewire article on the topic noted: "The metadata tags have been actually been around for quite some time, first being used in 1988 on a platform known as Internet Relay Chat or IRC. They were used much then as they are today, for grouping messages, images, content, and video into categories. The purpose of course, is so users can simply search hashtags and get all the relevant content associated with them." According to Lifewire, a resident of San Diego started using the hashtag #sandiegofire on Twitter (which launched July 15, 2006) to inform people about the ongoing wildfires in August 2007; other articles indicate that the first suggestion of # as a tracking tool to Twitter came from Chris Messina. This blog post by Stowe Boyd is believed to be the first one to actually coin the term "hashtag."

You can now use hashtags to track or group posts on a common theme on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. I'll admit that I mostly use them sarcastically (as in the above headline or in my commonly used #blessed), but I do actually use them on my personal Instagram to track my ongoing photo chronicling of all my nail polish shades via #naileditproject (however, you'd have to be friends with me to see those, so it's really for my own personal use rather than to commune with others).

"Hashtag Coffee #coffeelover" by DoSchu on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons License. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/doschu/28908948920/

Here Comes the Hashtag

Buzzfeed attempted to track down the first people to use a wedding hashtag, and concluded from researching old twitter posts from June 2008 that it was a man named Jon Bohlinger. A few more mentions were made of the trend in 2008, then it started taking off more in 2009. A Pinterest spokesperson told them that there was a more than 800% increase in pins featuring "wedding hashtag" on their site between July 2015 and July 2015.   

I used this blog as an excuse to reach out to Ariel Meadow Stallings, the publisher of one of my favorite websites, OffbeatBride.com. She said she first started really seeing wedding hashtags back in 2013, first with Twitter (pointing me to http://offbeatbride.com/seattle-boathouse-wedding/  as an example) and then with Instagram (http://offbeatbride.com/wedding-instagram-hashtag/).

If you can't come up with your own brilliant hashtag, there are a million wedding hashtag generators out there now (according to weddinghashtagwall I could use - #RachaelLovesJohn #AdventuresofRJ or my fave #DicksonandLorenzenMerger, or ooo since we're both lawyers we could be #DicksonLorenzenLLP BUT I WON'T BECAUSE JOHN IS A GRUMP*). Someone even started a business creating custom wedding hashtags for people. Offbeat Bride has a fantastic article talking about ways to come up with more unique hashtags that incorporate those awesome puns I was talking about earlier.

They really are a pretty powerful tool at this point - Several websites exist now to track hashtags and provide you with various analytics on them. I just used keyhole.co to search #weddinghashtag and got the following results for the past two weeks - 69 posts with 55 users using it, reaching 160 unique users. If you're keen on conglomerating your posts leading up to your wedding and all your guests' posts and pictures in one place, using a hashtag and a service like this would help you pull from all the various websites your guests might post on. 

Also, just for your entertainment, this article "Best Wedding Hashtags Ever" from Brides.com is pretty hilarious. <3

*Actual photo of my fiancé.  

I do not own this photo. Please don't sue me.