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Comment by kop316 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is also due to the high cost of the actual marriage ceremony. A (cheap) engagement ring can cost over $1000, and can easily jump to $5-10K. Then a traditional ceremony can easily be over $10K, with no upper bound on how expensive it is. This was the cause of me no longer being with an ex, they were already in debt $80k from school, but still wanted a ceremony that could have easily cost $40K. I had no debt, and was unwilling go into that sort of debt for a ceremony.

I think a lot of people see that as well, and realize they simply cannot go into that sort of debt for a wedding ceremony.

EDIT: My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married. Wedding ceremonies can certainly be done affordably, and I think it is smart to do that.

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This is an arbitrary and invented baseline. The actually baseline for a wedding is much closer to $0. My wife and I spent $60 for the license and paperwork, and we splurged about $500 for two plain, gold bands. I wonder what the correlation is for money spent on a wedding and divorce? I know I have my hunch of what it is.

EDIT: Saw your clarification. I totally agree. It is sort of a toxic expectation that can impact the marriage or someone's desire to get married, in my opinion.

Perhaps those are the weddings we focus on and we forget all the cheap ones? I've known quite a few people (myself included) who did it for a few hundred quid (turned out Tuesdays were cheaper so we did it then at town hall).

Of course, it's cheaper if no family come. Remember, all those gifts they give you are a social debt for which they will want to collect.

> Remember, all those gifts they give you are a social debt for which they will want to collect.

I feel that is a bit of a sweeping statement. I certainly don't expect anything back for the gifts I've bought for friends and family for weddings, I would be shocked if I were a unique case.

I know people who say they felt guilty about getting wedding gifts and whatnot. They said it felt like they were forcing their friends to buy them things... which I guess is what it is.

If someone gets you a gift, and then invites you to their own wedding a year later, some non-insignificant percentage of the population will be offended if you don't get _them_ a gift.

Of course, gifts are terrible if you just don't really want more stuff in your life (I'm happy to take a pint...), and a massive exercise in value destruction, but that's beside the whole social indebtedness bit of it.

I'm really fun at Christmas.

The average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is around $30k.

Lots of people do it at City Hall and it usually costs about $50. Throw a nice dinner in for a few of your closest friends / family and you're talking about a decent wedding for a few hundred bucks. No need to go crazy.

I completely agree. My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married.

Fair enough!

The social pressure there is off the chart. People don't have a wedding ceremony for themselves it feels like, they have it for everyone else.

When we got married, people tried to pressure us. "You have to have a big ceremony so you can invite X, Y, Z and their kid and their parent and their cousin and blah blah blah".

We put our foot down. We did it for ourselves. We had <10 people over, it happened at a high end resort where we had plans for US (and told people they could do whatever the f* they wanted). Including hotel, plane tickets, the rings (while we did have the diamond ring, most of the cost went into the metal. Yanno, the thing that cannot easily be produced in a lab without a particle accelerator), and the clothes, ran us $11-12k (and maybe its because I wasn't always this privileged, but even that much felt absurdly expensive to me). That's even though we're quite privileged and could have easily spent 10-20x time if we wanted.

We just choose not to. People around us were pissed. Whatever.

You're highly biased because those are the weddings you see. The average wedding cost is a very small fraction of these numbers. I know a number of people who could afford to throw large weddings but just had a ceremony in their backyards instead.

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my comment. My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married. Wedding ceremonies can certainly be done affordably, and I think it is smart to do that.

It cost me 1RMB to get married. That was less than £0.10, at the time. I still have the receipt...you know, just in case ;)

We -- that is to say, our parents -- did splash out a bit more on the reception(s), but nothing excessive.

> they were already in debt $80k from school, but still wanted a ceremony that could have easily cost $40K

In fairness, "working class" people are usually not asking for $40k wedding ceremonies (or carrying $80k in student loan debt). This sounds like a valid reason for you to not want to marry your Ex, but I don't think this is a significant contributing factor for most working-class people, who don't generally plan absurdly lavish ceremonies.

As a countepoint, my fiancée’s sister and her husband have been married over 10 years and spent less than $1000 on the whole thing. A marriage certificate in my town costs $100. You can still get married on the cheap.

(We are spending less than $10k on ours all in)

> This was the cause of me no longer being with an ex,... but still wanted a ceremony that could have easily cost $40K.

This probably means that she valued having a ceremony more than she valued having you.

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