Weddings Are Expensive. They’re Also Worth It.

This is Emotional Investment, Joel Anderson’s column about money and how we think about it. To suggest a subject, or get in touch, email emotional.investment@slate.com.

Over the past few years, I’ve started marking the end of winter not by the buds on the trees or the change in temperature, but by the number of wedding pictures that start popping up on my social media feeds.

These are weddings both new and old—many of the posts are from old friends now reminiscing about their years of wedded bliss (or … something like that). The new ones are from much younger professional acquaintances who carefully share curated glimpses of their recent nuptials, from picturesque beach getaways to semi-formal brunches to rustic adventures. You’ve surely seen these pictures: The newly betrothed couple walking back down the aisle, the bride and groom graciously taking in their champagne toasts, a few dizzying iPhone videos from a crowded dance floor.

Now that I’m a middle-aged father and most of my friends have aged out of splashy wedding celebrations, I can finally appreciate this ritual. Where a cynic might see a terribly cliché and gaudy display of narcissism, I—a hopeless romantic—see a treasured milestone that you will remember fondly in your golden years. A wedding really is a celebration of love and connection meant to reinforce the couple’s bond with family and friends. I feel this way in large part because I remember how I felt on the day I got married in April 2017.

Something I can’t remember ever talking about—or maybe even thinking about?—during the build-up was the immense feeling of adoration and gratitude that would sweep over me for the 120 people who attended our wedding in Sausalito, California, a Mediterranean-esque waterfront town just three miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. At the time, we didn’t have much savings, and put most of the expenses on a credit card (with a generous points program), but we’d hoped the day itself would prove to be an investment that went far beyond eventual free flights. We were trying to invest in the relationships in our lives. Today, I know for sure that we made the right choice.

And as someone who’s spent most of this year thinking about how we spend our money and how it makes us feel, from housing to sports gaming to our aging parents, I wondered why I’d never heard or seen much about the benefits of going big on a wedding. Instead, the internet is full of laments about how sprawling and expensive weddings are. The rise of micro weddings, and the pared-down events that became the norm during the height of COVID and still persist, suggest a lot of engaged couples are looking to keep costs down.

But I’m not so sure a wedding is the time to worry about money. I stumbled across a couple of obscure studies that trumpeted the value of all of the wedding rituals, from the bridal shower to the honeymoon. “Their popularity is due in part to the connection they facilitate between couple members and the culture at large,” said a somewhat predictable conclusion of a 2014 study titled Till Death Do Us Part?

In another 2014 study, a neuroeconomist flew to a small village in southwestern England to take 52 blood and saliva samples from a bride and groom and their families and friends before and after the wedding. After examining the samples, Claremont Graduate University professor Paul Zak found a meaningful spike in the hormone oxytocin among the wedding attendees. The results, Zak wrote, showed that “We are social creatures and marriage is perhaps our most important social activity because it is where we see and feel that most human emotion, love.”

But even if the science and data make the case for weddings, financial advice continues to downplay them. Even buried in the conclusion of the first study was another defense of spending less: “Couples who espouse a ‘less is more’ approach to wedding rituals had a longer lasting marriage compared to those who enacted more expensive and extravagant celebrations,” wrote the researcher Tiffany Diane Wagner.

The penny-pinching around the big day continues, especially in listicle form: “10 Best Ways to Save Money on Your Wedding Expenses”; “32 Genius Ways to Save Money on Your Wedding”; “47 Easy Ways to Save Money on Your Wedding.” (Surely some ambitious writer managed to get up to at least 100 ways to save money—if they did, please email it to me.)

So I started asking the people who I knew had recently gotten married, including Slate’s executive editor Susan Matthews, how they felt about what they had spent on their weddings. Over Labor Day weekend, Susan and her partner Zach welcomed 125 guests to a lake house in New Hampshire, where several of his family members had gotten married, too. As someone who’d never thought much about having a wedding, Susan told me, she has been surprised that she didn’t end up lamenting the cost afterward.

“I felt like it was worth it,” she said of the three-day affair, which she estimates cost about $30,000 total. “If you want to think about what you’re spending your money on in big ways, I can say it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and surpassed expectations.”

And it’s not like Susan recommends people get fiscally reckless for weddings; in Slate’s Say Yes to the Mess series last year, she argued against the time-honored tradition of wedding presents.

Another co-worker, Shannon Palus, hosted a wedding last year for 30 guests in Brooklyn. She tried to keep the expenses low but still ended up spending enough that she became “uncomfortable” as the costs kept rising, even for her purposefully small ceremony. When it was over, though, to her surprise, she didn’t fret much about the spent money at all.

“The idea that I could have not had that experience because I was trying to be frugal or because we weren’t doing it ‘right’ is sad,” Shannon told me. “I am so, so happy that we splurged on things that mattered to us, like having it in Brooklyn, even though holding it outside of the city would have been cheaper or allowed us to have a bigger party for the same price.”

I was reminded of the dilemma facing me and my then-fiancée in 2016 as we pondered our options. We talked about a destination wedding, which we ruled out almost immediately because of the mobility limitations of our fathers. We briefly considered a couple of towns that were special to us—Boston, where my wife’s mom’s family is mostly from, and Washington, D.C., where we had last lived before moving to California—but decided against them, too. It seemed as if we had settled on a small ceremony at the San Francisco City Hall and brunch with a handful of family members and friends. But as we talked with vendors and calculated the costs, we realized we couldn’t settle on an appropriately small guest list—and wouldn’t be getting much bang for our bucks. Plus, we realized it’d still cost our guests $1,000 or more to travel to a low-key event. And that didn’t seem fair.

So we decided to throw a slightly bigger affair with all of the ubiquitous touches, from a Champagne-and-Sausalito-cookie happy hour to a dessert bar with tiny strawberry-rhubarb cobblers and tequila Key lime pies. At the risk of sounding goofily cliché, it was one of the best days of our lives. We’ll always have memories of that splendid spring afternoon, from our friends gustily singing the inappropriate but undeniably irresistible “Where I Wanna Be”—it’s a song about a man who wants to leave his longtime girlfriend because he’s not done carousing—during the reception to our fathers giving exactly the sort of touching but long-winded toasts we expected from them.

Today, we constantly find ourselves cooing at the pictures from that day as a way to familiarize our toddler son with our closest friends and family members, and to reminisce about some of the delightful surprises, like my uncle and aunt from Colorado—who I’ve seen in person only a handful of times—showing up in spite of my father’s insistence that they likely wouldn’t want to come.

It’s not the side of the story most people tell about their weddings. Often, even those who fondly look back on that day almost apologize for such personal extravagance. “I Had a Big, Expensive Wedding. Here Are 6 Things I Regret About the Day,” read the headline on a Business Insider listicle, which, for example, bemoaned the cost of apparently randomly getting married in notoriously pricey Santa Barbara, California. “Had we done more research and found a different location in a more affordable city, we likely could’ve saved a ton of money,” the author wrote.

And sure, they definitely should’ve done as much research as possible before booking a venue in a city recently dubbed “the most expensive U.S. city to be happy.” But … what about the gorgeous backdrop of the Pacific and the Santa Ynez Mountains? What about the details from the day itself, which provided the author with “some of my fondest memories …just seeing my closest friends and family all together in one spot”? She still gets to keep those, forever, even if there were a few more bills after returning from the honeymoon.

My wife and I remain on the same page about this. Recently while scrolling X, I stumbled across a post from a finance author and influencer who was offering the typically stern warning: “Going $35,000 in debt to pay for a 5-hour wedding is crazy to me.” My wife texted me her response to the tweet: “The next time people are going to come together and wish you the best like that is probably your funeral! … I mean it’s definitely not worth financial ruin but don’t act like it’s just a random expensive party.” Seven years and one kid later, I can tell you—nothing has even neared it in terms of anything we’ve hosted.

It took us little more than a year to pay off the nearly $25,000 we spent on wedding expenses. I wish I could remember the day we paid off all of that debt. But I don’t. By then, we already knew we’d gotten our money’s worth.