Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Have things changed so much or gotten so expensive that some people feel that it's normal to charge people like a fee to attend their wedding like a club? Like, I don't know. That's so tacky. Sorry. There's been a lot of reporting over the years about how costly weddings are for couples. But recently, I've also seen a lot of chatter about just how expensive they are now for the guests.
Here's Annie Joy Williams, assistant editor at The Atlantic.
I interviewed a woman who had been to 20 bachelorette trips.
20?
I know.
She wrote an honestly harrowing piece about how much people are spending on other people's weddings.
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Chapter 2: What are the financial implications of attending weddings?
She had spent so much money and gotten into so much credit card debt during that process that when it was her turn to say, I do, her husband and her sat down and they said, we pay off the credit card or we have a wedding. And there was really no option to have the wedding at that point. So they paid off the credit card and they eloped.
Annie Joy herself says she spent almost $20,000 over the years. And it seems like this experience, it's a little too common. A survey by LendingTree found that 31% of people who'd been to a wedding in the past five years had accrued debt to attend. But what's driving up the cost of weddings for guests? How has the culture around weddings changed?
And what makes it so hard to say no to these expenses? I'm getting into it with Annie Joy. Thanks so much for having us. And Allison Reese, Senior Analyst at trend forecasting firm WGSN.
Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here.
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. All right, let's jump right in. What is the most you've ever spent to go to someone else's wedding?
The most I ever spent was probably around $5,000. That's including a flight to Italy. So my friend is Italian and he and his wife decided to get married in Bologna.
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Chapter 3: How have wedding costs changed for guests over time?
It was totally worth it. I was nine months postpartum. It was expensive, but it ended up sort of being this like little vacation that I would have never taken otherwise.
The most I've probably spent on a wedding was one of the weddings that I was a maid of honor for. I spent around $4,000, I would say, all in. All the weddings I've been in have been in like rural America. So these are the cheapest places you can get married and it's still costing this much for the guest and the bridal party.
Where do these guest expenses come from? I know there's a difference between going to a wedding versus being in the wedding as a member of the wedding party, but both of those things can add up.
Yes.
Chapter 4: What personal experiences shape our views on wedding expenses?
So obviously there's the cost of actually going to the wedding. So there's flight and hotel. And usually it's like a block of hotels where you're able to get a special rate. I'm doing air quotes at the moment. It's a special rate, but it's still maybe like $500 a night for a hotel. And sometimes people have an engagement party and a bridal shower and a bachelorette party.
And so if you're very close with the bride, you're then expected to attend all of those things if you can. But For a bachelorette party now, there's the unwritten expectation that the bride pays for nothing.
Right. It depends on the situation, but that is definitely a thing.
Right. That's sort of like a gift maybe. But if the bride is concepting this, then they know what things cost, you know? One of the things that we've talked about quite a bit on WGSN is just the level of personalization that happens now with these events. So like you're not going to Party City anymore and buying like 10 trucker hats that say bridesmaid.
It's like these deep levels of personalization, whether it's like pajamas or... tote bags. There's like this merch culture now.
Bachelorette trips and bachelor trips, those are also things I don't really think were that common when I was a kid. Like people used to just, you would have a party, you'd have a bachelorette party. But now it's like, we're going to go to Miami, Nashville, Scottsdale, or wherever. Night one, everyone's wearing wigs. Night two, everyone's wearing latex.
Night three, every day is like a different theme and there's all this, you know, it's a whole drama. One thing that I'm thinking about, a lot of this discourse revolves around bridal parties, but I'm curious about the grooms and their crew. Like, you know, do the guys have the same kind of expenditures? Like, is there a gender element we're seeing at play here? Or am I delusional?
Like, am I just making that up?
No, you're definitely not delusional. And when I was writing this article, I kind of was thinking the same thing. I was like, okay, why are only women spending so much more money? Data from The Knot from 2023 would suggest that's actually not the case. Men are spending almost the exact same on bachelor parties. My jaw has dropped. Oh, my gosh. Oh, yeah.
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Chapter 5: Where do the costs of attending weddings come from?
And the funny thing is you have the least access to money probably when you're 21. And so when you have the highest level of FOMO, it lines up when you have the least money a lot of times. And so once you become more sure of yourself and just grow up, it's way easier. Like I can now be like, why did I say yes to that girl? We're not even close.
People who are having a wedding, they want certain friends to RSVP, no? So that they also will not have to pay for them.
Oh, yeah. Because, I mean, every guest is a dollar amount. Exactly. I wonder, is it possible to be a good guest or support your friend without spending so much money? Or is there a cultural idea that spending this kind of money is how you demonstrate the depth of your friendships?
I think that you can, you know, show friendship and love without this big hoopla. But again, I say this as someone who like didn't register and so maybe I have a different experience. But things have become so transactional.
I always think of like the apps and stuff now used for like planning and like there's Venmo and there's Splitwise and there's all of these things that just make everything so transactional. It's just like this passage of money between people. Yeah. And you can see the amounts and you know what it's for.
Yes. It's all like, yeah. It's so finite. They're line items, yeah.
Yes, these line items. Exactly. That's like such a great way of putting it. I think that what has happened is that we've made everything so expensive. And so it's like there's this expectation of like, well, you're going to come to my wedding and then you're going to give me this certain amount of money back.
Yeah.
Right. Like through the gift or paying for the batch trip or contributing to the honeymoon fund.
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