Bridezilla or How You Too Can Be Paris Hilton For A Day

There's a great article in the Times today about weddings:

About a dozen years ago, an old friend of mine was told by his daughter that she was going to get married. This suited him fine, but he balked at pouring untold thousands of dollars down the drain of a full-dress wedding. "I'll tell you what," he said to her. "I'll give you a choice: You can have a wedding, or you can have $30,000 to help you get started on your new life." Without a moment's hesitation, she astonished him -- and me, too, when he told me the story -- by replying, "I'll take the wedding."

This, mind you, was no "Bridezilla," defined by Rebecca Mead as "a young woman who, upon becoming engaged, had been transformed from a person of reason and moderation into a self-absorbed monster, obsessed with her plans to stage the perfect wedding, an event of spectacular production values and flawless execution, with herself as the star of the show." No, this was a young woman of reason and moderation, a sensible person who nonetheless had been caught up in an early wave of the phenomenon that -- all unknown to her father and me -- was beginning to sweep across America: the rise of the wedding industry, "shaped as much by commerce and marketing as it is by those influences couples might prefer to think of as affecting their nuptial choices, such as social propriety, religious observance, or familial expectation."

The already out-of-control wedding thing gotten even worse. And for what?

Who got the better of my friend's deal I do not know, as it seemed impolite to ask, but he hinted that even his daughter's relatively modest wedding cost more than the $30,000 buyout he'd offered her. Inasmuch as the marriage didn't last much longer than the wedding itself, it certainly seems to have been money down the drain.

Parents are a large part of the problem. First off, offering $30K for a wedding seems a *bit* excessive. Second, why did this guy pay more than 30K for the wedding? How about, "hey, here's $xxK, have a wedding or don't.

This whole excessive wedding thing is just another example of the excesses of our bubble economy. Everyone's ego gets so wrapped up in the "things" that they lose sight of the purpose. And since we have so much cash sloshing around, it just demands being put to work.

Where will it all stop? And perhaps as important, when?