Don’t spend all your worldly goods on wedding

Another article with a consumerism dimension, this time in relation to weddings. I must admit that I share a huge disquiet at the kinds of money being spent on weddings. Now I know how people want it to be a special day and all that (though given the high incidence of divorce I have to say that I'm a little puzzled at the rate of wedding inflation), but it does seem to me that a spirit of conspicuous consumption has taken over.

With the average price of a wedding in Britain estimated at £17,000 and the bride’s dress alone costing more than £800, the Rev Andrew Body, a former Relate counsellor, believes that the Church has a duty to “blow the whistle” on growing commercialism.

Needless to say in as far as this is to do with mythical images of weddings, fairy-tale endings, celebrity emulation and so on we really should blow the whistle. THe pastoral problem is always going to be to do with seeming to be a killjoy. And yet, I come at it from the side of the poor and indebted: how can they aspire to such a wedding, and indeed does this increasingly extravagent event not become oppressive and dissuassive of marriage for those who are more realistic about the difficulties of staying married in our society and who are being given the impression that a less-extravagant version is actually somehow not romantic enough, not a sufficient demonstration of earnestness in love ... not really worth doing unless you can afford the bill; so why not simply live together? What strange reversal is it that couples live together as if man and wife until they can afford the fairy-tale version of a wedding? Our notions of romance are contributing to the erosion of the true romance, the "prosaic heroism" of committed loving that the archbishop of Canterbury spoke of only a few weeks back.
Don’t spend all your worldly goods on wedding, says vicar-News-UK-TimesOnline: Filed in: consumerism, weddings, marriage, Church, debt