It seems that once you hit your mid-twenties, summers spent lazing on the beach, frolicking in the lake and sipping gin and tonics on the porch become punctuated with the ever-increasing burden of going to weddings.
Quite frankly, I’m getting a little fed up of giving up my weekends camping to be in a stuffy dress, making stuffy small talk and stuffing my feet into high heels.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing friends and family declare their love for one another.
It’s just that summer weekends are precious.
And more importantly, I just can’t afford the sheer expense that most weddings these days entail.
My closest friends, my cousins, girls I haven’t spoken to since high school, and my boyfriend’s friends are all putting me in the poor house.
And it’s only going to get worse as more and more friends and family fall in love and get the itch to tie the knot.
It all starts off with that one little innocent phone call.
On one end of the line is giddiness and desperation to share the news in minute details of how the proposal all came about.
Meanwhile, on the end, you take a fleeting glance at VISA statements, overdue loans and a pitiful balance. It’s obvious that the balance is already buckling under the too heavy load of trying to eke out a meagre existence of some simple food and shelter and maybe some new snowboarding gear for the coming season.
From that first phone call comes the never-ending stream of expenses.
First there’s the engagement card and present (usually this only happens if I’m organized enough).
Then there’s the shower present (hopefully you’re only required to go to one) followed by the gifts for the hen night, including something suitably raunchy and embarrassing for the bride-to-be. Then all you have left to buy is the actual wedding present.
Wait, that’s not all.
As the "big day" draws closer you usually have to figure out some way of getting to the wedding. This, more often than not, involves a plane ride.
And etiquette demands you can’t wear the same dress to weddings with the same group of people.
The new outfit, complete with heels, bag, nylons and sometimes a hat, can be recycled, thankfully, among different groups of friends.
I was recently sporting a very recycled dress (it’s seen six weddings to date, none with overlapping guests) at a wedding in Ontario.
Gallons of alcohol were consumed. Plates were scraped clean of elegant meals. The bridesmaid’s dresses had their moment of glory; their one day in the sun, knowing all too well that their fate lay at the back of some spare room closet.
And the flowers, so pretty and fresh at noon, were wilting just like the ladies by the time the last song came on.
You can’t help thinking of the sheer excess of weddings when your table is on their 15th bottle of wine and you’re just starting your sixth course.
It was just one day. It was just one party after all.
Granted it was a very special day. Weddings always are but it was just one of the hundreds of weddings taking place over the August long weekend in southern Ontario.
The average Canadian wedding, based on 10-year-old figures from Statistics Canada (the earliest I could find), includes a $10,000 reception, $855 flowers, $3,000 photographs and videos and $2,295 on the wedding dress and the brides’ miscellaneous items, like make-up and lingerie.
The figures put the cost of an average wedding at $20,000. These days the trends call for bigger and flashier affairs and I would say 20 grand is a very conservative estimate, barely enough to cover the reception.
When multiplied by the 150,000 weddings in Canada alone each year, the simple act of saying "I do" has turned into a $3 billion industry.
There are wedding planners to help you spend your money and there are Martha Stewart wedding books to help organize spending the money.
It’s a farce. It has become a marketing gimmick.
Don’t get me wrong – we had a blast at the last wedding.
We looked good and felt good. We caught up with old friends.
We ate and drank to excess, welled up when the father of the bride warbled through his touching speech, made sufficient asses of ourselves on the dance floor and slurred through the congratulations and the thank-you’s.
Then silk dresses and custom-made suits wound up in a crumpled mess in the bedroom floor, only to be rushed to the dry cleaners two days before the next inevitable wedding.
It was all over so quickly.
With summer drawing to a close there are no more weddings on the horizon for 2002.
There are three very close friends getting married in Ontario next year. One is in May, one is in June and the last is in August. Even if I was rich beyond my wildest dreams, I just don’t have the time to go to all of them.
And not to be pessimistic but $20,000 on a wedding when over a third of all marriages in Canada end in divorce?
What a scam.
