4. Having a big wedding, instead of investing that money for the future.
...
Marketers are good at separating people from their money.
And it works so well!
You convince people they need a huge, blowout, $100k wedding or their marriage isn't valued. So, they put it all on credit cards and such, borrow money, the works.
Then, because one of the major stresses in a marriage is finance, you've saddled a newly-wed couple with tons of debt, creating stress, and stress in marriage, often enough, leads to divorce.
SO, then, clearly, the wedding just wasn't big enough to prove that the marriage would be solid, and you get to sell the new couple an even bigger wedding!
Do it right, you can get a couple big weddings out of the same person!
Done wrong? Some little, "discount wedding on a budget" sort of thing, you might only get to sell it once if they stay married. Bad for business, you know...
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The wedding industrial complex is crazy. If you can dream it, someone sells it as an "essential part of the wedding."
Ours was nice and low stress, we pretty much let the place we had it at do the planning, under the "Whatever you think is reasonable and cheap" approach. They did it 4-5 times a weekend, all summer long, we planned to do it once and didn't really care what the table centerpieces looked like. :) So far, so good!