Recently, I looked back at the preliminary wedding budget my fiancee Joe and I had come up with it about six months ago after approximately 16 seconds of internet research. Now, I’ve realized that it was all so horrifically off-base, it might as well have been written in ancient runes. It was like when you ask a toddler how much money they think their parents make every year, and they say something sweetly stupid like, “$20!” because they have no concept of money whatsoever.
Looking back at our practice budget, I almost envy our distance from the whole circus. I was just a girl then, dutifully paying rent and my student loans and blowing the rest of my money on cocktails with pink peppercorn in them, not having any idea you literally can’t find a photographer that doesn’t make you look like someone who got pregnant at the age of 17 for less than $3500. And now, as the quotes roll in and the vague fog of our future wedding begins to take shape, I’m realizing more and more that I may never know how much my wedding will cost me until that very last dollar is dropped on the table.
Our budget was naive and contextless, the result of some giddy googling by two people who were so excited to be engaged, they were blind to the harsh financial truths of the wedding planning world. Eight-hundred dollars for cake was pulled out of someone’s butt, along with a paltry $1,500 for dress and alterations (the latter of which actually can cost up to a stomach-churning $700, it turns out), just $1,000 for photography, and, to the hilarity of no one at all, a mere $6,000 for food and drink. That last one was a real kicker. Even if we’d gone with the polarizing pizza-truck idea, that would still only leave about $3,000 for 150 people to get recklessly drunk. Which is not at all enough, especially when one’s belly is thickly padded with all-you-can-eat pizza.
The mystery of the cost of weddings has been apparent—and annoying—to me since almost the very beginning. When I cursorily began searching for venues one day in March, and realized none of them had general pricing on their websites so I’d have to, ugh, call—it was just the beginning of a long, arduous trek of sending saccharine emails riddled with smileys into the void, calling weird voicemail boxes that I imagined were just perched alone in empty log cabins in the backwoods of Maine, and lots and lots of question marks in the budget spreadsheet. All this to get something so simple, so essential, yet so enigmatic: Some real fucking prices, so we could make a real fucking budget.
Go ahead, give it a whirl. Google your favorite wedding dress designer and see if there are prices listed under each gown the way they are under each blouse on the Gap website. Google “wedding barns” in your town and see if the info page gives a general rate estimate for the 2016 season. Google DJs, photobooths, planners, florists, rental companies, see what you find. It’ll probably be a big fat fucking nothing. I had an easier time figuring out the name of some random actor I was trying to make fun of at dinner the other night (search terms: “brunette actor creepy professor topanga boy meets world college years”) than I ever did trying to figure out what a pole tent would cost me (I still don’t know, I’ll never know—$10? $10,000? Who knows?). In the same way that a lifetime of not being engaged does nothing to prepare you for the fever-nightmare that is wedding planning, the wedding industry does nothing to make budgeting for your big disco anything close to easy or straightforward.