- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
I have been doing some research on who pays for weddings in America. There is nothing much on Mormon weddings, which are unusual. Given the emphasis on weddings in LDS culture, and the fact that some of you might end up being asked to foot a pretty big bill for a wedding at some point, I thought I would share the research I did…
Basically, times are a changing. As people are getting married older, and the concept of a dowry has fallen away with greater equality for women, most of the couples pay for the wedding themselves. 20% of brides’ parents pay the wedding, and often, who pays is a mixture of the bride’s parents and the couple getting married. Sometimes all three entities (groom’s parents, bride’s parents, bride and groom) pay. Here are the stats from a large scale study I found at the end of this article.
Quote:
TRADITIONS SHIFTING ON WHO PAYS FOR WEDDING Rohan, Virginia . The Record ; Bergen County, N.J. [Bergen County, N.J]24 July 2016: BL.1.ABSTRACT “First and foremost, we’re seeing the brides and grooms are taking care of the budgets themselves,” [David Tutera] says. “Second, we’re looking at parents of the bride, who are chipping in but rarely taking over the full responsibility of the budget, and the third is a collection of all three of the participants – bride’s family, groom’s family and the couple.” “As with so many traditions that surround marriage, a lot of it has to do with the sort of transfer of the woman as a possession from her father to her fiancee and husband. And that came with a dowry,” [Lauren Iannotti] says. “So, the tradition of the bride’s family paying was part of that transfer. And obviously, it’s modern times and a lot of that stuff has changed, happily and much for the better. But certain traditions sort of still linger … We see a lot of brides’ parents only still paying we see 20 percent — so that’s a tradition that’s still kind of holding on.” “She said, ‘Daddy, you just do it for me,’ ” Manzo recalls, adding that Lauren had great participation when it came to the flowers and lighting, but left food-related and other details up to him. “Lauren said, ‘You know what I like.’ ”
FULL TEXT
Albert Manzo remembers the days at The Brownstone, his Paterson reception venue, when parents would come in to make all the arrangements for a daughter’s wedding. Back then, Manzo would typically not even meet the bride until the final planning meeting before her big day. “The bride would look through the cake book, would maybe get to pick the colors for the tables that she wanted,” recalls Manzo, adding that the parents would decide on everything else, even tell the bride how many friends she could invite. “It really was the parents’ party … I go back 36 years, and 36 years ago there was no such thing as a bride and groom paying for their own wedding, unless they were mature.” But times have changed — and so have the hands that hold the purse strings. “The daddies don’t pay anymore the way they did,” Manzo says. “I see a lot of couples where the parents have zero participation in the wedding.” Today, the cost of the average wedding is $32,600 (according to the popular wedding-planning site The Knot) — a budget many would find difficult to stick to in North Jersey — and couples are entering first marriages roughly half a decade later than they did in 1990. And not surprisingly, many families have been revisiting, and revising, the old traditions. “Generally speaking, we’re seeing a lot more couples pay for their own weddings,” says Lauren Iannotti, executive editor of Brides magazine, who cites figures from the 2016 Brides American Weddings Study. “The statistic we have is that 48 percent of couples getting married, the couple pays entirely for their wedding. In 2014, it was 43 percent. So, it’s definitely on the rise, and when you break down how people are paying, the largest group is the couple only paying.” What’s more, Iannotti says, the study, which Brides conducts every other year, found that in 2016, 74 percent of couples contribute to the wedding even if they’re not footing the whole bill.
Building a nest egg
The 2015 Real Weddings Study by The Knot — the popular online wedding-planning site and magazine — found that on average, the bride’s parents still contribute the largest percentage of the overall wedding budget, 44 percent. The bride and groom were not far behind, at 43 percent (with the groom’s parents contributing 12 percent). “Tradition still lives on where parents are paying for a large portion of wedding costs, but the bride and groom are contributing a pretty substantial chunk to the overall budget,” says Kristen Maxwell Cooper, executive editor of The Knot. “We’re definitely seeing that couples are a little bit older when they’re getting married, so they’re definitely a little bit more established, and there isn’t this idea anymore that the parents are giving away the bride. It’s two adults who are making this decision together.”
According to The Knot and Brides, the average age of couples marrying for the first time is now 29 for the bride and 31 for the groom. By comparison, statistics from the U.S. Bureau of the Census show that in 1990, the median ages of first-time brides and grooms were 23.9 and 26.1, respectively (20.3 and 22.8 in 1950). “
We think that because couples are waiting longer, they’re kind of building their nest egg before they get married,” Iannotti says. “They’re also a lot more independent from their families, because they’ve been off on their own and working for a while, and they want what they want, so they pay for it themselves, so they don’t have so much weigh-in from parents and in-laws.”
In North Jersey, wedding planners confirm this trend. Ketura Jerome, owner of Belle Soiree in Fair Lawn, has also seen a “drastic change” in how weddings are paid for. “Before, normally, the majority would be paid for by the bride’s family, and nowadays we’re seeing that the bride and groom are paying for the majority of the wedding with [some] help from their families,” she says.
Celebrity wedding planner David Tutera, who hosts WE tv’s “David Tutera’s CELEBrations” (and “My Fair Wedding”), advises countless couples at his Your Wedding Experience events throughout the country. He says that today, he basically sees three types of financial arrangements. “First and foremost, we’re seeing the brides and grooms are taking care of the budgets themselves,” Tutera says. “Second, we’re looking at parents of the bride, who are chipping in but rarely taking over the full responsibility of the budget, and the third is a collection of all three of the participants – bride’s family, groom’s family and the couple.”
It’s a huge shift from the “old-school tradition” that was long espoused by socialite Emily Post and her descendants at the Emily Post Institute, Tutera says. “The Post family really looked at it as if the bride’s family were responsible for everything other than, typically, the rehearsal dinner, which would be the groom’s family, and then sometimes, in the more modern-day version – now, we’re going back 10 years ago – the groom’s family would take over if there were to be a day-after brunch. And also, the groom’s family in past traditions had the financial responsibilities of sometimes the church.”
Those old traditions had evolved out of the dowry system. Some traditions linger “As with so many traditions that surround marriage, a lot of it has to do with the sort of transfer of the woman as a possession from her father to her fiancee and husband. And that came with a dowry,” Iannotti says. “So, the tradition of the bride’s family paying was part of that transfer. And obviously, it’s modern times and a lot of that stuff has changed, happily and much for the better.
But certain traditions sort of still linger … We see a lot of brides’ parents only still paying we see 20 percent — so that’s a tradition that’s still kind of holding on.”
Last year, Manzo orchestrated just such a throwback event at The Brownstone when his daughter, Lauren, married Vito Scalia on July 18 — a wedding seen last season on “Manzo’d With Children,” a Bravo spinoff of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” “She said, ‘Daddy, you just do it for me,’ ” Manzo recalls, adding that Lauren had great participation when it came to the flowers and lighting, but left food-related and other details up to him. “Lauren said, ‘You know what I like.’ ” In an interview with The Record last August, newlywed Lauren Manzo Scalia, now 28, talked about that “fairy tale” wedding, which included nuptials at the Church of Sts. Cyril & Methodius and St. Raphael in Manhattan, followed by a reception for 400 at The Brownstone, which her dad and uncle own. “My dad pulled out all the stops. He had so many things that I didn’t even know were happening,” she said, citing “two different cigar rollers in two different rooms” and “a man-cave room with leather couches and a scotch and whiskey bar … We had, like, lights and flowers hanging over the dance floor. It was really beautiful.” Says her dad: “We turned the clock back a lot. We went back 35 years for Lauren’s wedding.”
Sidebar: Who’s ponying up for the nuptials Traditionally, a bride’s parents paid for virtually everything when a daughter got married. But times have changed. The 2016 Brides American Weddings Study, which polled 900 couples, found various financial arrangements nowadays.
Here’s a breakdown of who’s footing the wedding bill in 2016: Couples only: 48% Bride’s parents only: 20% Combination (couple and one or both sets of parents): 25% Both sets of parents only: 3% Other: 4% Source: Brides Credit: Email:rohan@northjersey.com DETAILS
People: Manzo, Albert Iannotti, Lauren Tutera, David
Publication title: The Record; Bergen County, N.J.
First page: BL.1
Publication year: 2016
Publication date: Jul 24, 2016
Section: BETTER LIVING
Publisher: North Jersey Media Group Inc.
Place of publication: Bergen County, N.J.
Country of publication: United States
Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals–United States
Source type: Newspapers
Language of publication: English
Copyright 2017 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.
When I got married, we had 2 receptions. (I got married in my 30s.) My reception was a few days before and was a luau with Hawaiian dancers. I paid for everything. My wife’s reception was held at a golf course. Her parents paid for that. My parents kind of chipped in on the wedding luncheon, as I recall, but that was about it. I think the custom is for the bride’s wife to pay for most, but I didn’t know and didn’t care.
My wife’s parents said that they had a budget of $3k. If we went under that we, got to keep the difference. If we went over that, we had to chip in the difference. Several things about the wedding were influenced by the in-laws. I remember that they wanted me to wear a white tuxedo (which I did “whatev’s”). I also remember doing a wedding line despite my feeble protests.
In my experience, Mormon weddings are very inexpensive compared to many wedding norms outside the faith.
Bride’s parents pay for the reception. Groom’s parents help the couple for the honeymoon, paid for a lunch or dinner to get families together day before, and maybe an open house in their area.
That’s how we covered it when our girls were married. Budgets can vary, and quick and short engagements can be smaller scale budgets…but if the couple want to move ahead without much planning but the necessities…that can be discussed and agreed. Both my daughters were fine with it…they just wanted to be married…didn’t care so much about some elaborate stuff.
Heber13 wrote:
Bride’s parents pay for the reception.Groom’s parents help the couple for the honeymoon, paid for a lunch or dinner to get families together day before, and maybe an open house in their area.
That’s how we covered it when our girls were married. Budgets can vary, and quick and short engagements can be smaller scale budgets…but if the couple want to move ahead without much planning but the necessities…that can be discussed and agreed.
Both my daughters were fine with it…they just wanted to be married…didn’t care so much about some elaborate stuff.
That’s how I was — I didn’t care about our reception, the dress, all that stuff. I wanted to get married and start building a life together. All the expenses associated with getting married were obstacles to getting started. but I did it because I valued everyone’s happiness who wanted the fixins. Our reception was simple, and we did it all cheap, thank goodness.
Heber13 wrote:
Bride’s parents pay for the reception. Groom’s parents help the couple for the honeymoon, paid for a lunch or dinner to get families together day before, and maybe an open house in their area.
That’s what I heard, and what (sort of) happened for my wedding. My parents chipped in 1.5K for the honeymoon, and since my in-laws were tight on cash, we did depend greatly on the mercies of the RS, as well as a few caterers from the Stake.
SilentDawning wrote:
That’s how I was — I didn’t care about our reception, the dress, all that stuff. I wanted to get married and start building a life together. All the expenses associated with getting married were obstacles to getting started. but I did it because I valued everyone’s happiness who wanted the fixins. Our reception was simple, and we did it all cheap, thank goodness.
TBH, that’s exactly how I felt. We were happy to be married, and sure grateful for all the gifts, etc. But all we wanted was a small wedding, family only, and maybe a luncheon. When you’re first married, who wants to stand in a line for two hours, while everybody goes off and eats cake? All the fluff, the food, the guests, the dancing was all to make everyone else happy. And we were fine with that; it’s the polite, diplomatic thing to do. They might be the focus, but the wedding expenses are not really for the bride and groom.
Sometimes I think eloping would just be easiest…just be together…no big party needed. I wonder how many couples are doing it because they feel obligated…and so we spend thousands to do something just to follow tradition when we don’t care that much about it. Lotsa money that could just go to the couple to get started in life. Heber13 wrote:
Sometimes I think eloping would just be easiest…just be together…no big party needed. I wonder how many couples are doing it because they feel obligated…and so we spend thousands to do something just to follow tradition when we don’t care that much about it. Lotsa money that could just go to the couple to get started in life.
When I read this, the first thing that came to my mind was the De Beers Diamond Co scam, which is still ongoing. Who needs a house anyways?
Traditionally? The bride’s parents. In practical terms? Whoever can and is willing to do it.
In our daughter’s case, she did it.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.