On July 20, 2023, The Atlantic published a piece with the titillating headline “Why Can’t We Quit Weddings?”
It’s a good question. As a wedding planner for the past seven years, I often ask myself the same thing. In fact, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a wedding vendor who hasn’t asked themselves this question since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unfortunately, the question misses the forest for the trees. It’s not so much that we need to quit weddings. It’s that we need to reinvent them.
The July 20 piece is best paired with another Atlantic story published five weeks earlier on June 16, 2023. That one is called “The Fake Poor Bride” and is a tell-all from former luxury wedding planner and current Atlantic staff writer Xochitl Gonzalez.
Read together, the articles present a dire picture of the modern U.S. wedding industry (or, as I was gratified to see as a fellow user of this term, the wedding industrial complex).
If you want to have a wedding these days, it seems you have one of three options:
Option 1: You can be a rich asshole, as documented in painful but I have no doubt accurate detail in “The Fake Poor Bride.”
Option 2: You can be a debt-ridden wannabe as explored in “Why Can’t We Quit Weddings?”
Option 3: You can be a courageous but lonely pioneer who leaves all trappings (and loved ones) behind and elopes.
Which is too bad because all three options dismiss the very reason why we can’t quit weddings: Weddings are one of the very few opportunities in modern U.S. society that allow us to gather with the people we love best in the world to celebrate something happy.
The importance of that ritual will, I think, immediately resonate with anyone who’s survived the pandemic. Three years after the first cases were reported in the U.S. and I still find myself in awe that I can be in the same space, relatively safely, with my family and friends.
Vendors get this, too. Myself and my coworkers are, by and large, underpaid, overworked service industry professionals who keep coming back to weddings not because it’s easy money but because there is something about weddings that we just can’t quit.
I am, of course, talking about joy.
Gonzalez, the author of “The Fake Poor Bride” and a related book called Olga Dies Dreaming, understands this. She gets that the feeling — the joy — doesn’t come from how much money you spend. It comes from interacting with other humans whom you love and who love you in return. Or, as she puts it, quoting a luxury wedding designer named Rishi Patel, “billionaires buy experiences; they don’t buy things.”
Unfortunately, our current complex isn’t set up to help people appreciate — let alone achieve — the goal of experiencing joy without first spending a shit-ton of cash. I agree with Gonzalez when she writes that wedding vendors who, again, often make minimum wage and “ate a lot of soup during the recession” are the ones wrongly blamed for the expenses of hosting a wedding.
That’s a simple answer to a complicated question, which leads me to the question you, a person planning a wedding, should actually be asking.
Ask yourself: “Why am I having a wedding?”
“Why?” unpacks the answers to so many other questions: Where? When? How much?
Modern wedding planning advice fails us because it skips to the second step without acknowledging the first. We get so caught up with the where and the when of a wedding that we spend our whole budget before we even realize what’s happened.
Taking 15 minutes to figure out why saves time, money, and heartache. I know because I did it myself. I know because my clients who do this are happier people.
If you want to have a wedding, you’re not fated to become an asshole, a wannabe, or a lonely pioneer. There’s a fourth option: You can be an intentional human adult.
It’s an option that I wish more people talked about because just because we’re frustrated with something, doesn’t mean we have to nuke it.
Do I have something to gain from this? I do. It’s not what you might think (for one thing, I don’t get any royalties from you buying my book).
I make my living from coordinating other people’s weddings so while yes, I want weddings to keep happening, I’ve also learned that the only way I will weather this industry is if I work with clients who feel the same way I do about what we’re doing together.
That means clients who ask themselves “Why?” and who get, as Gonzalez says near the end of her interview in “Why Can’t We Quit Weddings?”, that a good wedding is not the same thing as a good marriage.
My argument isn’t as sexy as quitting something entirely. It’s not as noteworthy as a bride who lied about being rich. But it is the way I believe we can take all that is good about a wedding (and really, there are some very good parts) and align it with who we are now.
And in doing so, we can get what we actually want: to feel, for one glorious day, pure joy.