Penny counting time
I’ve now come to the realization that a lot of things in life are expensive, but they’re worth it.
Darren and I finally sat down and wrote out exactly how much (estimating where necessary) this wedding was going to cost. We have geen doing our best to be as frugal as possible, cutting out things that are unnecessary while maintaining the elegance and ambience that we want in our wedding.
So we added up the cost of the reception, ceremony, attire, entertainment, flowers, aesthetics, transportation, photography, honeymoon … everything we could think of. When we totaled it all up, we were astounded by how expensive this event had gotten.
Darren’s mom’s reaction, after seeing the itemized list and the total was, “That’s a cheap wedding.” I felt 2 things at that moment. The first was, “Wow! I guess we did do a good job of keeping it reasonable”, followed quickly by, “But if this is cheap, what are other people paying???”
Through the entire wedding planning process I have tried to keep things in a somewhat long-term perspective. By that I mean, I’m willing to pay a little more for things that we will remember in the long term. But it didn’t always work out that way. Our photos, for example, I think are very important in terms of longevity, but we’ve hired a reasonably-priced but good amateur photographer. My wedding dress, on the other hand, which I will likely never wear again except for the pure fun of dressing up at home on occasion, costs more than a month’s rent (and that wasn’t even an extravagently expensive one).
The usual response when I talk about how expensive a wedding becomes is “You only get married once.” Well, the other day Darren’s dad went one step further. After telling us how much he’d like to contribute to the cost of our wedding he said “Now, I’m only paying for this once. In fact, let’s say this is a loan. You never need to pay it back as long as you’re together.”
After looking over the wedding expense list again, I’d say that would be one expensive divorce.