The Cost of Marriage

...there, that's got you reading on hasn't it? What's been going on in the vicarofdidley's household? Actually nothing of excitement or intrigue....but I did read this article on the BBC website, with marriage being the subject of a new green paper.

There's so much in there that I could talk about. Labour seeing any "stable and lasting relationship" as a good basis for child welfare, versus the Tories arguing that marriage helps keep couples together for the benefit of the children. I'm with the Tories on this one.

They then go on to talk about tax breaks for married couples, something which has been slowly pulled apart by the last few governments (of both flavours), but it's at this point that I start to fall asleep. However, there's something else they don't expand upon, which surely is a major obstacle for getting married, and that's the perceived cost of the wedding day itself.

The current figure for the 'cost of a wedding', based on newspaper and magazine articles that I've read seems to be around £30,000. Now I don't know how much my own wedding cost, as I only paid a small part of it (the bits that the groom traidtionally pays for), and it was 15 years ago, but I'm sure it was nowhere near this. Only a couple of generations ago a wedding reception was a simple meal back at home. Now it's been turned into an industry of 'essentials' that are mostly superfluous trimmings.

The actual cost of a church wedding = the ceremony, registration fees etc, is around £300 - 1% of that £30,000 figure. How do people manage to inflate it so much?

I'm going to enjoy meeting and preparing engaged couples for their marriage. I'll do everything I can to encourage more to get married, maybe by attending local wedding fairs (most people don't realise they are entitled to get married in church) but there's little I can do about the things people tack onto the side of a wedding, that build a huge financial hurdle that will burden somebody for a long time.

And finally, the Tories green paper will suggest "the offering of relationship advice at civil ceremonies". That sounds awfully like a wedding sermon by another name. The last time I went to a civil ceremony the mention of God was banned, so I wonder on what basis that relationship advice will be given?