Just in case you want some data: https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces - it varies a lot by country.
22 years here
Thank you, very interesting data indeed!
Aye. Happily married for 16 years now. No regrets.
We didn’t have a hugely expensive wedding. Small church and venue. Immediate family and friends. Save your money for a nice honeymoon. Still the best holiday ever.
The cliche is true, you have to work at a marriage but this would be true of any long term relationship. Respect and communication, emotional intimacy, shared experiences - these have shored us up well so far.
If I stay with my current SO (which I hope), we probably won’t do the one big day. Families come from two different countries, we live in a third, it would be a logistic headache, and we want to avoid to have to leave people behind.
Besides that, I’ve also noticed in my friends circles that less and less people are getting married (like 1 out of 10 more or less), mostly because people prefer to get houses first and those are quite hard to obtain. Also the prices of those things is quite high, I’ve seen weddings from 30k to 60k euros.
I can’t imaging spending that much on a wedding. I know people who have and got divorced a few years later. At least if the money is invested in a house you get half of it back.
Seems a bit crazy to me too
It’s YOUR day regardless of how important your families consider it to be for themselves. My wife and I kept ours small but still kinda capitulated to both our moms when it came to the ceremony. We’ve since discussed that if we could do it again we’d just go sign the legal papers at a courthouse and call it good. We got married in the fall with a small reception in our town and then planned a bigger reception the following summer around where I grew up, would you be able to do something similar in both your hometowns? My family lived several hours away but we were close to hers so the logistics of everything weren’t as bad as yours but they still kinda sucked. If you two wanna get married then get married in a way that both of you will enjoy and cherish over time, make it a ceremony for you as a couple as not as a ceremony for everyone else. If you both want to keep it small, simple, and affordable then just be practical and do it that way so you can more easily buy a house in the future
Thank you for your comment, very interesting.
We have definitely been thinking about having two parties on each of our sides, that might be an option.
You definitely have a good point about that day being about the couple and not the other people. One of my friend got a nice sum of money from his future in-laws to finance the wedding, but then had to compromise on a few things to make them happy.
In a long term relationship of over 10 years and a kid. No plans on marriage. We get the same legal benefits here regardless of whether you get married or not.
Yes, at 22, coming up on 12 years now.
Got married at 27, spouse was 25. We were the first of both our friendgroups to do so.
Yes, but I’m quite a bit over 30. Mid 50s in fact.
It doesn’t have to be about conspicuous consumption though. Ours was deliberately a small scale thing: registry office and then a handfasting with a couple of dozen close friends and family in our back garden. The whole thing cost around £1000 and the biggest single expense was hiring the gazebo. My sister catered.
Your family situation sounds very different, but I only invited mine because they were close (my SO went no-contact with hers a long time before).
I was rather surprised to find that I wanted to (get married, that is) - it had not really crossed my mind in my previous long-term relationship - but I found myself wanting to make a bigger commitment this time, and it was all about that commitment to my SO rather than wider family or anyone else. I would still have wanted that regardless of my family situation, I think.
Your wedding seems to have been a great day.
I definitely get the commitment aspect, but as I said, the main issues for us is having people taking planes to come where we live for the wedding. We both have large families, and it would be nice to have them around for that day, which makes the whole thing a logistical challenge.
What we might do is two smaller scales celebration on each of our sides.
Yes, twice. Was 22 the first time… 13 yrs before our different views on how we should treat each other and our children lead me to leave her. 19yrs with second wife… what a difference… best decision. Unfortunately my family has a high percentage of failed marriages… not hopeful there. Current wife’s family has much better success rate. I agree that bringing an attitude of low maintenance compromise (men can also be high maintenance) seems to be key in the successful cases.
I got married at 19, still together over 20 years later.
Yes. We got married a little over 3 years ago. We originally were planning to get married in the spring of 2021 but Covid changed our plans from being a larger wedding to one with just immediate family.
Then the venue we picked for the new wedding plan decided to close until the spring due to Covid about two weeks before the day.
We threw together a home wedding, just us, our parents and our siblings with their families. We loved our wedding though, it ended up being perfect! We were both in our 30s already and smaller just ended up being right for us.
We did keep our original wedding date and hosted a reception type of gathering for friends and family at a nearby park. That way we still got to party with extended family and friends.
Sounds nice!
