4 Reasons I’ll Never Have A Wedding

1. Weddings are pretty meaningless now

I’d love to celebrate being in love with someone, and have an excuse to tell other couples how great it is that they’re in love and are happy. I think this was the original point of weddings, but now they are only tangentially related to actually being in love. Now, a wedding is a finish line for people who want to be an adult or it’s something that you just do, because everyone does it.

How many weddings have we all been to of couples who divorced afterwards? Or, where it seemed as if the couple was taking this step because it’s a thing you are supposed to do, not because they had spent a lot of time thinking about spending their lives together?

A wedding today is more of a status symbol about having reached a life milestone and less of a celebration of any kind of love.

2. I’d be embarrassed if people thought I cared about table settings

I don’t know how this is something other women embrace so easily, but I can’t do it. It feels like admitting defeat to have to have an opinion on something like this. Tell me I’m a terrible feminist all you want, but I have a sinking feeling that the second I start talking about color combinations and corsages, people are going to stop asking for my opinion on anything that’s important or substantial.

3. The wedding industry has an entitlement problem

I have a few friends who are wedding photographers and talk all the time about people trying to weasel their way out of paying them, or avoid paying the thousands of dollars it costs if you want high quality wedding photos. I’m not surprised people try avoid paying thousands of dollars for photos, but that’s a widely accepted price for gorgeous photos.

Similarly, for bridesmaids dresses, you don’t buy off the rack, even though that is a process that works perfectly fine for all our other life events. You need to order a dress months in advance. The dresses don’t adhere to the clothing industry standards as a whole, so it’s a nightmare to figure out, and then they basically need alterations without exception. And you’ll never wear it again.

It’s fine that both of these examples are standard within the wedding industry, but it should then also be fine that I plan to bypass the industry completely because that’s just ridiculous.

4. There is no longer a classy way to have a wedding

Yes, celebrate yourself and your life–celebrate being in love, celebrate getting an amazing job or running a marathon or whatever you feel proud of yourself for. That’s healthy and important. But it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment to get married anymore, so the whole fact that you’re celebrating seems backwards. I would feel uncomfortable making such a circus for having achieved the “accomplishment” of coupling up, which is, in human history, probably the most common thing, ever.