In Defense of Big Weddings

Bring on the photo booth, the wall of donuts, and God forbid there's cold butter.

When my now-husband and I had been together for several years, I started to get antsy about him proposing. He knew that was what I wanted, and we had talked about it, but despite handing him some extremely proposal-friendly opportunities (a Christmas vacation with both of our families?? Come on!) it didn’t happen. When I complained to people—both in real life and online—I was told the same thing over and over again—that there wasn’t really any good reason to get married, it was “just a piece of paper,” and accusing me of “just wanting a wedding” instead of a husband. They insisted that if I really loved him, I wouldn’t actually care if he proposed or not. They chided me for even prioritizing marriage, given that I was only twenty-three (we had been together for four years!) The irony wasn’t lost on me that many of the people who said this were happily married themselves.

Once we got engaged, the shift switched to unsolicited wedding advice, but in a similar vein. I didn’t have my heart set on a massive princess wedding with a horse-drawn carriage and a bridal party of twenty fawning friends (lol, I didn’t even have five friends!) I did, however, want a wedding, and not one that skimped on everything, especially when there was no need to skimp. But when I told people I was planning my wedding, they would tell me that I should save all our money (or my parents’ money) and “rent out a back room in a nice restaurant and have a big casual party with our friends.” In fact, I got this advice from at least five separate people. No hate to those who want a super-casual restaurant wedding, but anyone who has met me knows that’s not my style. I’m a little bit traditional, I love anything fancy and dressy, and I’ve made a physical photo album for every year with my husband/family starting in 2012. I watch Bridgerton. When I was a little girl, I would walk around restaurants with my little faux fur jacket open so everyone could see my dress. Do I seem like the kind of person who wants to have a wedding at Pizza Pizzazz?

I ignored the weird advice and started planning our wedding. I am not going to lie about this part—our parents (mostly my parents, per tradition) were paying for it. They offered, and we accepted, and I’m pretty sure we’re not the only ones who had this arrangement. I think people generally don’t admit this despite it being fairly common. We also got married on the young side, and we didn’t have the money to avoid anything other than the aforementioned Pizza Pizzazz scenario.

Because I didn’t have a lot of real-life friends, I found myself talking to Reddit about my wedding planning more than anyone. And one thing I noticed is that Reddit is borderline pathological about weddings. Even married Redditors seem to hate weddings. People love elopements, childfree destination weddings where five people and three pitbulls are the only people in attendance, and backyard Harry Potter themed weddings where a cake is cut with a broom. But Reddit does not like your traditional, puffy-dress, three-tiered-cake wedding. Perhaps such an event embodies all the features that are antithetical to Reddit—the characteristics that make up Reddit’s anti-hero:

1. Woman

2. Religious

3. Materialistic

4. Formal

5. Self-centered

Of course, I could just…not listen to Reddit, but…okay, look, if you’re the kind of person who reads my articles and concludes *annoying voice* “She should just log off” then you are probably not right for my audience. I will never log off.

Besides, it wasn’t only on Reddit. Although I didn’t really complain about wedding planning—I largely had fun with it—a lot of the time when the topic came up in real-life conversations, people would interject that they thought weddings were kind of a waste of time, and it’s only one day, and that money would be better spent on a house. Like, dude, I didn’t ask about that! Stop trying to suck the fun out of this!

Ultimately our wedding wasn’t even that big. Fewer than 100 people, small venue, and we didn’t opt for every luxury. We didn’t even have a DJ—my husband set up a playlist on an iPod and obsessively kept changing the songs every few minutes. But even our setup was still considered lavish by some, especially on the Internet where women seem locked into a perpetual game of one upmanship over how casual and low-key their weddings were. Look up and r/AskWomen thread about weddings, and the top comment will inevitably be “we eloped, who has time for that shit? I just wanna read books with our cats and go to bed at 8 PM!” or “We actually got married in my living room while playing Monty Python on TV!” Like…girl, I know what you’re doing. It’s annoying. Stop.

Look- it’s fine if people have small weddings, or don’t care about weddings. The wedding industry is predatory and insane, and things are more expensive than they need to be. But it’s also crazy to tell a woman like me, who as a little girl thought about her wedding and her husband and her beautiful dress—that she’s “not actually in love” if she wants to bring some elements of her childhood dreams into reality.

Also, let me just say—there is zero correlation between loving your husband and not wanting a big wedding. Who the fuck started this? Does it mean you don’t really love your child if you have a big first birthday party for them? Does it mean you didn’t enjoy your time at school if you have a big graduation party? Some people just really love parties. Not to mention, your wedding is the only, or one of the only times, that you will have all your loved ones in one place. That might not be terribly important to some people, but it’s very important to others, and they might want to go all-out for such a day. And assuming they and/or their family can afford it, what’s the problem?

Of course, it’s “wasteful.” But I’m not a big fan of that line of reasoning. For one, everything is wasteful. Cars are wasteful. Going out to eat is wasteful. Air travel is wasteful, despite the fact that people who complain about “materialism” don’t seem to have any problem polluting the environment with their traveling “experiences.” And by the way, I’m not here to judge anyone who loves to travel or enjoy the treats that life has to offer. I would just love if people understood that their idea of a “reasonable” thing on which to spend their money is not going to be universal. Everyone has the option to live on the bare minimum and donate everything they have to charity, and almost nobody does this.

Although I’ve focused mostly on the hatred of large weddings from the “not like other girls” female contingent, there’s quite a bit of hatred coming from men too. These are generally unmarried men who are either uninterested in marriage or not getting any takers (frankly, both are usually the case simultaneously.) They associate women who care about their weddings with the “Bridezilla” label, and believe any woman who cares about having pretty centerpieces is destined to divorce her husband because she suddenly realizes he’s only 5’10”, have an affair with her personal trainer named Declan, and inevitably wind up “alone with cats.” (Cue the Reddit women: “What’s wrong with dying alone with cats? Better than dying around CHILDREN!”)

And that brings me to my next point: the Bridezilla label. I always thought this label made sense for the women who do things like refuse to let their trans sister wear a dress to their wedding, or who demand that bridemaids delay their pregnancies as to not “ruin the photos.” A Bridezilla is a woman who commands unreasonable things from the wedding party, or wedding guests. A Bridezilla is not a woman who says things like “I really want a pretty cake and I don’t want it to be smashed in my face.” I was pretty easygoing with my bridesmaids and wedding guests. There was no outrageous dress code, my bachelorette party involved no travel and was extremely low-cost and low-commitment, and I let my bridesmaids pick their own dresses, which were from Etsy and not expensive. However, I earned the label of “Bridezilla” when a massive thunderstorm was predicted to happen on the day of my wedding and I declared my wedding “ruined.” Would a thunderstorm actually ruin my wedding? Well, actually, YES! It was an outdoor wedding and there wasn’t enough room indoors for all the guests or for the ceremony. So, like, yeah. Of course, people chided me for “not actually caring about my husband” because I didn’t want a crowd of dampened anxious guests crowding in a small indoor venue while thunder clapped overhead and all the electricity went off.

As it turned out, the thunderstorm barely passed over us and we were okay. We had a beautiful outdoor ceremony and I got to wear my pretty dress—a candlelight white lace mermaid hem dress with cap sleeves, which is exactly what I wanted. My husband got to incorporate cardboard cutouts of his favorite athletes in the wedding dances. My dad and I even shared our father-daughter dance with Lebron James. And it was awesome. Although it wasn’t a massive, six-figure bonanza, I’m still glad we went as “all out” as we did because the memories and the photos still live in my heart. Some of the people who attended the wedding—my husband’s grandmother and one of our friends—have passed away. That was the only time we were ever going to all be together. So I’m glad we did it the way we wanted to do it. I’m glad we had fun and I’m glad we didn’t turn it into just another casual cookout. Here’s to having the wedding you want!