Is This the End of Weddings?
By Lucy Vine
It’s been six months since my wedding, and I’m still not sure if I’m allowed to call it a wedding. After all, none of the usual wedding-y stuff happened. I had no family in attendance, no dad to walk me down the aisle, no vows (unless you count reciting random lyrics from Elvis songs). There was no sit-down dinner afterwards, no wedding cake or speeches, and there definitely wasn’t an awkward first dance with everyone watching and wondering if they should post it on YouTube.
I got married in Las Vegas, with just my partner, David, and our two best friends, Sarah and Fred, there to celebrate with us/sing along with the Elvis impersonator. A week later, we threw a small party with friends and family, where everyone wore wedding dresses and posed with Elvis cardboard cut-outs. It was weird and silly and barely resembled a wedding at all. And yet it seems like I’m not alone in ditching traditional wedding rituals.
As we head into peak nuptials season, increasing numbers of people are turning their back on traditional weddings—and all the drama and expense that come with them. Research has found a huge shift in the way people are planning their special days, with an increase in wedding-moons, wed-cations, micro-weddings, or, alternatively, marathon weddings. Religious celebrations are increasingly out, with a record-low one-fifth of us tying the knot in a church or other place of worship. In fact, more and more people are forgoing a wedding at all, with the marriage rate in America falling by 60% in the last 50 years. In the U.K., where I live, it’s similar, with 1.2 million more single 25-35-year-olds than ten years ago.
Jess Martin, a wedding planning expert at Ginger Ray, says she’s seeing a huge shift in trends. “People are definitely thinking outside the box more and more when it comes to their day,” she tells me. “More couples are choosing to have destination weddings, and ‘wed-cations,’ where they turn their event into a short holiday. We’re seeing more natural weddings, be it in a forest, beach or meadow. In fact, searches for ‘outdoor wedding’ have increased by 107% in the past 3 months.”
As for the why of it all, a lot of it comes down to expense, with the average cost of a wedding at an all-time high of $44,105 and the destination wedding market set to rise from $21.6 billion in 2021 to an estimated $291 billion by 2031. Jess continues, “Weddings can be pricey and combine that with a cost-of-living crisis, it’s clear why wedding trends are changing. Modern couples are taking the plunge and ditching traditional wedding elements in favour of money-saving alternatives. It’s why we’re seeing sit-down dinners replaced with food trucks, or wedding cakes replaced with desserts like cupcake towers and doughnut walls. I’ve even seen cheese boards turned into tiered creations.”
As we head into peak nuptials season, increasing numbers of people are turning their back on traditional weddings—and all the drama and expense that come with them.
For my wedding, I didn’t want to spend an exorbitant amount on one day, but it was also about the exhaustive planning and the drama and potential fallouts with family. Mostly though, weddings never felt very me. I love attending other people’s big days, but I never wanted one of my own. I’m not a very romantic person, and I’ve always felt resentful of the way society expects a woman’s end goal to be marriage and children. From a young age we tell girls they should grow up dreaming about a happily ever after with some prince. It’s infuriating.
At our wedding party in England, we focused on fun above all else. We had an adult ball pit, karaoke, a photo booth, cardboard cutouts of David and me (and Elvis, of course), a fish and chips van outside, and table tennis. Yes, I wore a wedding dress, but so did everyone else. I also wore a personalized leather jacket from a company called Bewilderly that read across the back, “Still Lucy Vine”.
After the photos posted online, I got so many messages from women telling me about their own zany plans for a non-traditional big day or from others saying they wish they’d done something more fun with their nuptials. I chatted with a woman recently who’s planning a movie-themed wedding, where all the tables are assigned a different film and everyone has to dress accordingly. One friend of a friend just returned from Croatia, where she and her partner eloped. A former work colleague booked her special day in a treehouse! (I’m still trying to figure out how that’ll work.) Even as I’m writing this essay, my Instagram feed is full of photos from a non-wedding my pal attended last weekend. The couple threw a beach party, arriving together on pink scooters and wearing outrageous green and yellow outfits. There was an ice cream buffet and a sandcastle cake, and the whole thing gave me more FOMO than any regular wedding ever has.
All these months later, I can honestly say I have no regrets about how I got married. It was such a joy to do something different—something that was purely for me and David. Ultimately, my biggest problem with weddings is how often they become about everything and everyone except the bride and groom. It’s high time we reclaimed what a wedding is supposed to be, whether that means climbing up a tree (how else does one get into a treehouse?) or having something more serious with all the traditions included (no judgement!).
First and foremost, everyone should feel free to make their own choices—and have the best day of their life.
Lucy Vine is a writer, editor, and the bestselling author of Hot Mess, What Fresh Hell, Are We Nearly There Yet? and Bad Choices. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages around the world, with Hot Mess optioned for a TV series. She has been nominated twice for the Comedy Women In Print Award and hosts the podcast and live event series Hot Mess Clubhouse, celebrating funny women. Her journalism has appeared in international publications, including Grazia, Stylist, heat, Fabulous, New, Now, Marie Claire, Glamour Online, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, and The Mirror. She lives in Cambridgeshire. Seven Exes is her latest novel.