Nathan Jolly writes: How not to waste a motza on your Big Day

I RECENTLY got engaged, which of course means everyone who has ever been married, been to a wedding or watched Love Actually has tracked me down with explicit instructions on how best to plan our big day. The advice varies wildly, aside from one key element: everyone is absolutely correct.

You don’t want your wedding to be too big, as it becomes too impersonal, but you don’t want it too small either, as this is your one big day, and why not make it a large celebration? They use their own wedding as the litmus test for how big or small is too big or small, insisting their day was perfect. To them, it was.

People who talk to you about weddings suddenly become stoic philosophers, offering circular meditations like “it’ll cost what it costs”, “this day only comes around once” and “it will be perfect, even if things don’t go perfectly”. Perfect.

Choosi released its Cost Of Love report last month, which clocked the average price of an Australian wedding at $24,660. MoneySmart has it at $36,200, which jives with most of the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard.

Both figures seem unreasonable to me and Choosi’s findings suggest I’m not alone in this thinking, with 90.7 per cent of those surveyed claiming the cost is too high. Yet, that’s the average cost. That’s a serious disconnect between what people think and what they do.

The actual day itself is just one element, too. There’s a buck’s party, a hen’s party, a bridal shower, an engagement party, a rehearsal dinner, a post-wedding brunch, a honeymoon, the flash mob Thriller dance, rehearsals for the flash mob Thriller dance, hiring someone to choreograph the flash mob Thriller dance. The list goes on.

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It’s not just the happy couple who are feeling the pinch either. For example, the Choosi report states $513 as the average cost of a hen’s or buck’s party. If you have a destination wedding, there are travel costs, time off work, plus those three cans of Red Bull you need to stay awake through the actual ceremony.

In short: weddings are expensive.

An article ran on this website last Wednesday in which a bride spoke of the cost of her Byron Bay wedding blowing out from $35K to $50 large. (Sorry, weddings make me talk like a ’30s mobster.) Despite this 43 per cent blowout, she mostly seemed pleased they didn’t go into debt, rightly stating: “At the end of the day it’s only one day and you don’t want to be having to pay that back for years and years.”

This is true — going into that much debt for a wedding seems like madness. So does spending $50,000 on a single day, regardless of how pretty everything will look after being shrunk into a phone-sized square and washed out with the Nashville filter. In the aforementioned article, the bride referred to herself as a “huge saver”, which just means she prepaid for years and years. It’s the same thing.

My fiancee was given some smart advice regarding the brutality involved in culling a guest list: break the costs down per head, then decide if that person is worth, let’s say, $150 of your own money. This will help separate the wheat from the chaff, but such mathematical valuing of your loved ones could cast a pall over the entire day as you see invisible dollar amounts hovering over the heads of your guests like an energy bar in a video game.

It seems people regard the money spent on weddings as being in a separate currency with a different exchange rate. Flowers are suddenly thousands of dollars, napkin rings are worth dropping half a week’s wages on, and shoes that will be completely covered by a wedding dress are worth the GDP of a small landlocked nation.

The entire industry is set up to bleed you of money, under the hard-to-argue premise that this is your special day. The amount of pressure put on the happy couple to spend up big is substantial. Cutting corners on your wedding day seems ominous somehow, like a dark distillation of how much you value the marriage itself. It is also an industry where there is considerable pressure to match the weddings of those around you. There is pressure to spend a truckload of money, then to downplay how much you actually spent. Seemingly throwaway decisions take on seismic proportions, as now you are planning a $50,000 event, and so everything has to go smoothly. Not smoothly, perfectly. See how the wind is blowing the tablecloth corners up so the bare wooden legs are now visible? That’s because you were too stingy to fork out $900 on the diamond-plated tablecloth weights.

Now the wedding, and by extension the marriage and your future-children’s job prospects, are irrevocably destroyed.

We won’t be burdening any of our parents for money to pay for our wedding, as it is no longer 1955 (despite what our bridal-twist dance may suggest), but many couples still expect the bride’s parents to fork out for the pleasure of watching some dude in an ill-fitting suit marry their daughter in a church that cost more to rent than their first house was to buy. I’ve known people whose parents took out a second mortgage on their house to facilitate a party for a marriage that lasted just over a year. They’d have been better off investing in ostrich farming, or Nokia ringtones.

Here’s an outrageous fee I’ve only just learned exists. How much do you expect to pay for a wedding cake? Regardless of how high you punted that number in your head just then, it’s actually a lot higher as, according to mywedding.com, a lot of venues “require a cake-cutting fee that ranges from $1-$7 per guest”. Keep in mind, this site is American, making that higher-end figure $9.60. You invite 200 guests and you’re looking at $1920 extra just for someone to divvy up the cake in those tiny, square, fun-sized portions. (Some restaurants do this too and call it “cakeage”, which would be cute if I wasn’t fuming at the concept.) This is on top of the cake cost, which starts at $650 for one of those three-tier types. You know, the one that the guy dives through in the November Rain clip. If I ever see a bride at a wedding glaring furiously at some little kid whining about how he doesn’t want his cake, I will know why.

Doltone House runs a venue hire and catering company in Sydney. They offer a number of reasonably priced wedding packages, one of which includes the hire of a mirrored wishing well and a crystal chandelier. There also seems to be an undue amount of importance placed on the table centrepieces; Doltone offers a consultancy service for this element alone. Not wishing to be outdone, Ava Event Styling offers up a Pinterest board featuring the 642 Best Wedding Centrepieces and all I see are different variations of flowers in kettles, all presented on white table-clothes that look like oversized doilies.

Because weddings seem to exist in this parallel universe that reflects in no way the actual value of items, services become a lot dearer, too.

I have played in bands over the years and worked as a music journalist, so I know how much musicians are paid in the real world. In weddingland, however, a band can charge $5000 for three 45-minute sets. Those are covers sets too, so you’re not paying a premium for the fact you hired You Am I or anything; these are people playing the same 40 songs you hear at any wedding — or any RSL club on a Thursday night for that matter. As Charles Dickens once wrote: “No wedding is so classy that it can’t be spoiled by an off-key cover of the Goo Goo Dolls.” Want a DJ instead? First of all, you know it’s just a guy playing songs off his iPhone, right? Secondly, that will cost you $3000. And he won’t even have MMMBop.

The Cost Of Love report found the main place people cut costs was on a videographer, with 58 per cent of people highlighting this as the area they most scrimped on. The main areas of scrimpage seem to be those that can be replicated with technology: photography, videos, invitations and entertainment were all in the top rung of areas where people cut costs; all of which can be crowdsourced from phone-toting guests, or done through the wonders of email.

Our wedding isn’t for another year or so, which means we have plenty of time to think about what’s important to us. Mainly, it’s people. We’ve already decided not to waste money on things that don’t mean anything to us, while making sure everything is as photogenic and pretty as possible. Luckily, beauty and taste don’t equal dollars. The most expensive weddings can often look garish and cheap, while a simple garden fare with tea-candles and a small group of people who cherish each other can look and feel a million dollars.

At the end of the day, no matter what type of wedding we land on, whether it rains, or hails, or gets shut down by the police because we forgot to put the permit in, we know we will be deliriously happy with the end result. We will arrive separately, and leave married. Which sounds like the perfect wedding.

Nathan Jolly is a Sydney-based writer who specialises in pop culture, music history, true crime and true romance. Follow him on Twitter @nathanjolly

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