Why marriage should be inexpensive in post-Covid situation

    

First of all, are extravagant weddings even necessary? The answer is as obvious as one could think.

I recently attended one of my cousin's wedding, in his living room. The wedding,
which was originally supposed to take place at a lavish resort with accommodation
of hundreds of guests, now took place at his home with close family members
gathered to bless the newly married couple.

The sudden outbreak of the corona virus has taken a toll on almost every industry
in the world and the Indian wedding industry which is estimated around 50 billion
dollars, has now come to a halt. A number of couples have taken the wiser road
towards their marriage by spending lesser on materialistic wastefulness and
investing more into emotional values.

The big fat Indian wedding constitutes spending millions on wedding planning,
food and drink, clothes and jewellery, flowers, photography, music and all the
other shenanigans that we think are “must- haves” for our big day. According to
the Emory study, this is almost exactly wrong. The researchers found that in
general, the couples most likely to stay married were those who spent the least on
every aspect of a wedding. However, there were a couple of notable exceptions to
this rule – cases in which spending more money actually gave a couple a better
chance at a lasting marriage.

More often than not, middle class people also get sucked into this vortex of
extravagance, and take loans from the bank only to spend a copious amount of
money on their weddings. This leads to a debt crisis and consequentially a debt
spiral, thereby significantly damaging their financial stability in the long run. A
recent study concluded that an average Indian wedding could cost between 20 lakh
to 5 crores! Imagine spending that amount of money on complete strangers and
that too for one night! Imagine the amount of savings that were never saved!

Weddings are considered an epitome of reputation, a status symbol and people
leave no stone unturned to make their weddings as extravagant as humanly
possible. One needs to drill a hole in one’s pockets to avoid criticism by society.

We
sacrificed the sanctity of marriage and its rituals to transform
weddings into an economic affair that determines our social standing,
into an event choreographed

for the judgment– and later approval or rejection– of others.

However, now things have changed quite a bit and this change can be used to
ponder on whether spending so much money on these frills even necessary or not.
It should make us realise if we even need to spend a fortune on trying to please
people we don’t even know us and relatives who don’t even care or not.

It appears that if one wants their wedding to be the start of a long and happy
marriage, the best kind of wedding to plan is big but not fancy. It’s much better to
invite all the people you care about, even if all you can feed them is sweets and
soft drinks, than to serve filet mignon to a handful of people in a luxurious resort,
only for them to complain about the food later.

A wedding is an important day and a significant moment in time. It signifies the
day we commit the rest of our lives to another human being—to love, cherish, and
honor until death do us part. It is a commitment we make in front of friends and
family and often represents the joining of two families into one.

Marital happiness has nothing to do with your wedding ceremony. It has
everything to do with the weeks and years and life together after.
That’s why the simplest weddings are often the happiest.