Ask any happily married couple about their wedding and they will say the same thing: ‘it is the best day of your life.’ Dear reader, I write today, as this year’s wedding season draws to a close, and on the eve of my own wedding, to expose this lie. Like the Easter Bunny or Gordon Brown’s iPod jam-packed with songs by the Arctic Monkeys, it is a noble myth, a disingenuous redaction, perpetrated to reassure an anxious populace. They don’t mean ‘best day’, these married folk, what they mean is: the wedding process will take an exhausting, shambolic, and ultimately paranoid two months of your life. These long months will be punctuated by hour-long rows about, of all things, table decorations, which will push your formerly supportive relationship to the edge of the abyss. Then, at the end of that, there will be a party. The worst of it is that this whole rigmarole will probably set you back about twenty grand.
Yes, that’s right. Contrary to the Daily Mail’s recent spate of ‘I found my dress in a skip and bought my wedding on eBay for a fiver’ stories, the average cost of getting married in Britain has now swollen to more than £20,000 — the cost of an undergraduate degree. And of course only a very few can afford to pay for this up front. A poll by You and Your Wedding magazine found that the standard couple now borrow £26,000 for the big day at a 5 per cent rate over 16 years. Given that the average marriage now lasts 11 years, in today’s Britain there must be hundreds of thousands of couples suffering the trauma of divorce while the cost of their wedding still hangs around their necks.
These statistics suggest two rather unhappy trends.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in