Wedding lunacy

[TheAmusedQuail]

I just don't get throwing money at weddings. Marriage is the important bit. Not the getting married.

The dress, the suit, diamond rings, bridesmaids, groomsmen, flower girls, pageboys, button holes, bouquet, wedding reception, tablescapes (WTAF), favours, DJ, stag, hen, hair, makeup. Not to mention bridezillas and almost completely detached grooms. It's like a one woman celebration with the man just signing on the dotted line.

I've seen so many weddings where a fortune was spent and 4, 5, 6 years later the couple are either unhappily married or have split up.

WHY as a culture do we participate in this craziness?

People who come out with unimaginative aphorisms to justify judging other people rather than having an original thought?
Just off the top of my head, the beckhams/queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip seem to contradict the saying...

Op there's a thread atm asking about people who are unable to imagine anything outside of their own (narrow) lived experiences which seems to apply to you. You seem to have been involved in (or perhaps just heard of from social media) one or two expensive weddings where the marriages have ended or are unhappy and extrapolated it out to the entire world. Is is so hard for you to imagine that there are lots of people who had expensive weddings, have happy marriages and don't regret a penny they spent?

although from your op you don't seem able to envision that weddings could be anything other than heterosexual with very traditional gender based roles, so maybe your limited world view isn't that surprising.

I'm not married and wouldn't want a big wedding so no skin in the game - but I'm also able to conceive of people with different priorities to me not necessarily being wrong.

Out of interest, OP, what else do you judge other people from spending their OWN money on?

Apart from anything else, "big" weddings put millions into the economy every year. If everyone decided to just do a basic registry office job that would be hundreda of thousands of florists, caterers, hospitality staff, dress shops, beauticians, photographers, etc out of business, lots of venues shut down, as many of them are old buildings this would inevitably mean they can no longer afford to be run and will eventually be demolished, leading to even more loss of our social and architectural history....a huge net loss for something that DOESNT AFFECT YOU IN THE SLIGHTEST!

You really want thousands of people to lose their jobs just because you disagree with someone voluntarily spending their OWN money on having a celebration? How lovely you sound.
Not to mention if people did stop having big weddings you'd have to find something else to feel morally superior about....

I completely agree OP and i definitely judge people who do this! However im sure they couldn't care less about my judgement and if they want to waste all that money then thats up to them.

I can see both sides. When I married exH, I got too caught up in what I thought the wedding should be like. Some of that came from my mum too. Really, I’d have preferred something smaller and less formal. It cost more than I was comfortable with, but it felt a bit like an obligation.

My friend has a huge wedding but it was exactly what she wanted. So in her eyes, money well spent.