Special day has become one big brawl
Sunday June 03 2007
MY HUSBAND haggled over the price of my engagement ring, and I might have harboured doubts about our engagement had he not. With some bothering of shop staff, he got 20 per cent off and I left the shop as happy with him as with my first diamond.
You can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to this. Some think it horrifically unromantic, to seek money off something so sentimental, while others say it's a fitting start to a marriage. The shopping around for the ring was romantic, and the future husband proved a solid investment by keeping the cash in our pockets. I didn't feel less loved - and he might have harboured doubts about our engagement if I had.
Had we got engaged today, we might have done things differently. In the nine years since buying the ring, eight since saying 'I do', being a bride has become big business. It's reached the point where the marriage is not the point, the wedding is what matters.
Weddings are planned to out-class those of every relative and friend who went before, they regularly cost more than the couple can afford, with pride being taken in who can be the most freaked-out bridezilla imaginable.
If couples believe the fuss and expense around the wedding will prove a measure of their future happiness, the poor, out-of-pocket divils will suffer a hard landing on return from their honeymoon. That's the now-obligatory three-week honeymoon, of course.
The price of Irish weddings has doubled in the last decade, and last week, a British survey unveiled "competitive wedding syndrome". Conducted by wedding planners, TK Weddings, the survey found that couples are willing to go into serious debt for this single day, that their impossible aim is to create an occasion better than anyone else's and that ludicrous celebrity spectacles have an effect on expectations.
In the Ireland of 2007, the average price of a wedding is €30,000. But some are spending a lot more. Any glance through a wedding magazines provides abundant proof of this. The essential components - dress, venue, dinner, drinks - are the backdrop to the extras, to which there are no limits.
Gifts for the guests, dedicated wedding stamps for the invitations and thank-you cards, personalised napkin rings, table decorations, heart-shaped sugar lumps for the tea and coffee, birds, dedicated guest books, biscuits with the happy couples' initials, outfits for their pets, honestly, you'd be tempted to invent something. Because brides, it seems, would buy anything.
You'd wonder how everyone can afford these hyper-weddings - given most of these couples will also want a house at some stage - and the fact is that many can't.
We've been convinced that to have a less than spectacular wedding is to be a less than spectacular person. So couples are out-doing each other, remortgaging the house to book a castle no one's ever heard of and sinking five grand (really) into a honeymoon somewhere (always tropical) where they'd never dream of holidaying normally.
Hen nights have become hen weekends, and not in Kilkenny on the tear anymore, somehow they've morphed into spa breaks that cost guests an arm and a leg in accommodation and treatments, and stag dos increasingly require use of a passport. The modern wedding is big and brash and even slightly bullying. Be certain, it's a serious business.
Obviously, though, there are people capable of stepping back and taking a sane approach, and then there's the backlash gang. They're the sorts who gripe about the Celtic Tiger on a regular basis and crank it up a notch as their wedding approaches. They look smug when informing you that it's a small event they're planning, with twigs instead of flowers, a home-dyed nightdress for a gown and a dinner cooked by one of their mothers.
In their own way, these people are as competitive as those who spend €30,000 - reportedly borrowing about eight grand of that - in that they equally seek to make a statement on their status through the nature of their wedding day.
Planning my own wedding, my determination was to arrive at the day with the minimum of stress and the ability to enjoy the so few hours it would last. We picked a hotel that would allow for a big group for the day and plenty more to the afters.
It was the Shelbourne and it was lovely. They did the food and we decided against the hassle of bringing our own wine. My aunt made the cake and her friend iced it. My granny bought me my wedding dress. A colleague recommended the florist who did her wedding and I went to her house, once, and made my selection. It was as stressful and difficult as we made it - and we didn't make it stressful or difficult at all. We had a great time and the chunk saved on the engagement ring helped towards the honeymoon.
That day, everyone seemed have a good time and while you'd always go back and do things slightly differently - like not break up the best man's relationship with your wedding speech, like remember to offer that second cousin a drink at the afters - and I could go on. But it was what it was. A day out, a lot of family, a lot of laughter, some dancing, some messiness, a few tears. It started, I suppose, as we meant to go on - and owing no one.
- Sarah Caden
