Ugh:

There is another, overlooked reason that low-income individuals are less likely to get married these days: they can’t afford to. Weddings are a form of conspicuous consumption. Couples, and their parents, are judged on everything from their attire, to the venue, to the flowers. As Zoe noted recently, the average wedding now costs around $27,000. Committed low-income couples could simply go get married at a courthouse, but settling for a low-cost wedding violates cultural expectations and announces the sorry state of your finances to immediate friends and family. It’s little surprise that many lower-income couples opt for no wedding rather than a dirt-cheap one.

Marriage has many intrinsic benefits, but the increasing cost of a wedding partially explains why, statistically speaking, married couples are better off than non-married couples. Being the type of person who has $27,000 to spare, or has parents who can foot the bill, undoubtedly increases the likelihood of success in all facets of life. If you compared households with $27,000 cars to those without any car, I imagine you’d find that owning a such a car likewise correlates with greater economic potential, physical health, and various other desirable traits.

I think this is completely wrong. Yes, the average wedding costs $27,000. But that’s not some kind of requirement. My wife and I had the means for a bigger wedding, but chose a smaller $10k affair. I’ve had friends, relatives and co-workers who had the means but chose a weddings that were under $1000. And that’s among a group of upper middle class people. For people living in poorer circumstances, big expensive weddings are not even on the radar.

One thing to notice: I’m not sure if the data sets are the same, but the last estimate I saw for the *median* wedding was was more like $15-18k. That means the average is being dragged up by mega-expensive weddings. I would love to see a distribution of the data. I suspect that a lot of cheap weddings are taking place and that the data are being driven by a big group of weddings in the $10-20k range and then a small group in the $100+ range. A wedding is the ultimate conspicuous consumption and it would only make sense it follows the same skewed distribution other consumption does.

Frankly, this point crosses me as a middle income misunderstanding of a lower income problem. I think that, if you are of low-income, the dearth of marriage-worthy men is MUCH more important. If your only spousal options stink, you’re not going to spend a red cent on a wedding.

(As a side note, our tight wedding budget was actually a good thing. We found a huge number of ways to save money. Rather than hire a professional florist, we went to a whole saler, bought tons of flowers and I spent a few days arranging them — a talent that neither I nor my wife suspected I had. We bought our cake from HEB and it was wonderful. We hired a friend’s band and they were great. We hired some high school kids to be a string orchestra for a processional and they were fine. We went with a friend of a friend for photography and got great pictures. I couldn’t sleep the night before so I went to Walmart, bought a color printer and spent the night making place cards for the tables. All told, these things cut the cost of our wedding by at least a third and probably in half. At normal prices, it would have been at least a $15k wedding, right in the heart of the bell curve. And if we’d done it in Atlanta instead of New Braunfels, it would have cost twice as much.

There’s no reason to pay $27,000 for a wedding when you can get the same bang for a LOT less buck with just a little bit of work.)