(Ozy) – Before and after, there’s the bachelor/bachelorette party, the rehearsal dinner and the day-after brunch. There’s the photo booth, which is a definite necessity these days. And what couple doesn’t have a website designed to share with the world the first time they laid eyes on each other?
The sane person will certainly agree with sociologist and sexologist Dr. Pepper Schwartz when she says, “The whole thing has gotten way out of hand.” The whole thing being the never-ending list of costly accompaniments that now come along with planning a wedding.
Couples spend $30,000 on average planning their Big Day … but the more you spend, the shorter your marriage is.
Yet until Emory University economics professors Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon decided to organize a study last year, no one had paused to question whether this out-of-control spending was having an impact on, well, the actual marriage. Spoiler alert, it does. And it’s not a positive one. Francis and Mialon surveyed more than 3,000 people — all of whom have been married just once — and found that across income levels the more you dish out on the Big Day, the shorter the marriage. Now, that’s a raw deal.