Thoughts on Love, Weddings, and the Weight of Social Accreditation

I've always thought weddings were about love. Two people standing up in front of everyone and God and saying, Hey, world, we choose each other. And in a way, they definitely are. But the more I’ve planned my own wedding, the more I see that a wedding isn’t just about love. It’s about being seen loving each other. It’s about proving something to ourselves, to our families, to society. Last year, I had the pleasure of attending two breathtaking weddings. Each setting set a spectacular bar and feuling my curiosity about the norms, rituals, and behaviors that are celebrated and reinforced during these special occasions. I used to think it was just a matter of tradition. That weddings came with expectations because they’d always been that way. But now I realize it’s more that weddings, at their core, are a form of social accreditation. They're a way of marking a relationship as real, valid, worthy of recognition. And what’s fascinating to me is how much that process has changed. Once upon a time, weddings were mainly religious rituals that were bound to strict social roles and moral codes. Marriage has almost always been about duty, about family alliances, and about securing wealth or social standing. A wedding was never just for the couple. It was for everyone; the family, the church, the state. It was proof that the right people were getting married in the right way.

Now, marriage is (mostly) about love. It’s a choice, instead of an obligation. And that freedom is beautiful. We get to decide who we marry, what our weddings look like, what they mean, what traditions we keep and which ones we discard. But in a world where personal identity is tied to influence and consumption, that means weddings have become more of a product than a tradition. They're not just a ceremony now, but an experience to be designed, curated, and optimized. We’re told our weddings should be unique but tasteful. Intimate but spectacular. Personal but universally admired. We should honor tradition, but can't be boring. Be modern, but not heartless. Stay true to ourselves, but also make sure our guests have a really good time. And if we don’t know how to do it “right”? Well, there’s an entire $78 billion wedding industry ready to step in and sell us the solution.

Nothing has made me feel this more viscerally than making our guest list. We want this to be a day of love and joy, surrounded by the people who have shaped our lives. But when every extra guest comes with a per-person price tag for catering and bar packages, it stops feeling like a celebration and starts feeling like an economics problem. And that feels wrong. Love isn’t something that should be budgeted by the headcount, but here we are, staring at a spreadsheet, trying to decide whose presence we can afford. It’s not just a financial decision; it feels deeply personal, almost transactional in a way that makes my stomach turn. I hate the idea of cutting people out, of reducing our circle not because we want to, but because a chair at our wedding costs more than a week of groceries. I know this is just how weddings work now, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I don’t want to measure our relationships in cost-per-plate calculations, but at some point, the numbers force our hand. And that’s what stings the most... not just the cost itself, but the quiet guilt of knowing that in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to choose.

But at the same time, there’s also a part of me that loves how much freedom we have now. Our wedding is book-themed, because stories are how we fell in love. Because literature is the closest thing to a shared religion that we have. And yet even in making that deeply personal choice, we can feel the weight of expectation. I want people to get it. To see the meaning. To validate it, in some way. Because even when we break from tradition, we’re still looking for accreditation... Just from different sources. Instead of a priest or a patriarchal family structure, we seek approval from our friends, from social media, from our own carefully constructed sense of self. That’s the paradox of modern weddings: they’re more personal than ever, but also more public. They’re not bound by religious doctrine or lineage alliances, they’re bound by aesthetics, by taste, by the social pressure to make them feel meaningful. And here’s what I keep coming back to, what everyone has been iterating: The wedding is one day. The marriage is a lifetime.

I remind myself that the love we’re celebrating already exists. It’s not something we have to perform or display or make aesthetically pleasing. A wedding, no matter how big or small, is ultimately a moment of recognition. But the love that lasts doesn’t need an audience. It's the real thing. And maybe that’s the lesson in all of this. The accreditation, the validation, the expectations, yeah they matter, but only as much as we let them. At the end of the night, when the guests leave and the decorations are packed away, what will matter is what remains.

And what remains is us.

With love, reflection, and anticipation,

Bryant

Check out our wedding website: https://www.zola.com/wedding/foreveronthesamepage