Wedding wallet worries

Everyone loves a wedding. A chance to celebrate love with friends, family, and strangers you’ll end up drunkenly dancing with, never to see again until a baby shower, second wedding, or funeral.

But they’re also a minefield of cultural expectations and financial pressures.

There’s the dress code. A couple this week copped online flak for demanding guests don “formal attire with old-money, timeless-elegance feel”, including, erm, black jeans. But this is still better than the dreaded ‘smart casual’, a term that has defied definition for decades.

There’s the wedding registry. With couples now often living together for years before the big day, a new toaster has apparently been replaced by everything from a peloton, Labubus, and in one case, a lifetime supply of avocados. It’s not immediately clear if that particular couple specified whether they had to be Haas or Shepherd.

Then there’s the cost of the day itself. A Brisbane couple made headlines for splashing out $450k on a Squid Game wedding, which in fact buries the lede on how they met. 

Highlights include Anthony going “all in” on Olivia by “using his very first Superlike”, and then kicking off the conversation by asking how much his future bride lifts, and then how much she weighs. Romance ain’t dead.

The average Australian wedding now costs $35,315, which is almost 29% more than most couples estimate when they start planning. It turns out that on this front, marital bliss requires a degree of blissful ignorance.

Clearly, weddings are expensive, stressful, and require a PHD in diplomacy. But at the end of the day, they’re still well worth it, a moment of unfiltered joy in the banality of the everyday.

After all, you wouldn’t want to waste that first Superlike.