I haven’t totaled up the cost of our wedding quite yet. I still have a few receipts from the final week to add into the spreadsheet. I will update you on that soon.

Until then, one of my favorite Web sites www.boundless.org, had a great article about “The $18,000 Wedding Myth.” The author quotes Little Women and I love it:

There’s a scene where Meg, the oldest of four sisters, is about to get married. Her (very proper) Aunt March comes in the house to find Meg helping her intended, John, refasten a garland that had fallen down.
“Upon my word, here’s a state of things!” cried the old lady, taking the seat of honor prepared for her, “You oughtn’t to be seen till the last minute, child!”
“I’m not on show, Aunty, and no one is coming to stare at me, to criticize my dress, or count the cost of my luncheon. I’m too happy to care what anyone says or thinks, and I’m going to have my little wedding just as I like it. John dear, here’s your hammer.”
Mr. Brooke didn’t even say, “Thank you,” but as he stooped for the unromantic tool, he kissed his little bride behind the folding door, with a look that made Aunt March whisk out her pocket handkerchief, with a sudden dew in her sharp old eyes.
Later, Meg’s very wealthy friend observes to her husband:
“That is the prettiest wedding I’ve been to for an age, Ned, and I don’t see why, for there wasn’t a bit of style about it.”

The author goes on to say that the $18,000 wedding “average” really isn’t an average at all, but rather a number perpetuated by the wedding industry to increase consumption. The $18,000 figure comes from TheKnot.com who polled 21,000 couples who opted in to the site, which is full of people who are planning big weddings anyway.

I know from experience. When I signed up for TheKnot.com right after got engaged and entered in our wedding date that was five months away, the site immediately sent me a long list of overdue to-dos — that they could help me complete through the links to services on their site.

I unsubscribed after I got that list.

The Boundless article also points out that in 2007, 40,000 people were married by the New York City clerk’s office — where a ceremony costs just $35.

If women are told repeatedly that weddings cost $18,000, $25,000, $40,000 or more, they will begin to think that’s just how it is. They call this “idealized consumption,” where we look at what the people around us spend money on and then follow suit.

It’s tragic. People go into so much debt for one day and forget to focus on the important thing – the lifetime they will spend together as a married couple. When a couple enters the marriage as these idealized consumers, that will certainly follow them into their financial decisions as a married couple. It will mean they make financial decisions based on what the world is doing and not what is Godly.

I hope our wedding was beautiful for those who attended. I pray they heard the word of God and that it stirred their heart. Our photographer wrote us after the wedding, “Thank you again for having me document your day for you! It was amazing you and Sarah are a true testament to how a covenant of marriage should be held and formed.”

And, as Brett Arends writes recently in a Wall Street Journal article on wedding costs, “People who spend more aren’t more married at the end of it.”