Why Extravagant Weddings Are On The Rise At The Same Time Marital Rates Are In Decline

Commitment requires costly signals

Marriage itself used to be a costly signal of commitment. Today, extravagant weddings serve this purpose.

Recall that costly signaling theory states that if you want to show you’re serious about something—your strength, your loyalty, your commitment—you have to incur a cost that’s hard to fake.

Anyone can say they’re brave. But jumping into a river to save someone is a costly signal. Your actions (putting yourself at risk to rescue someone) are the signal of the underlying attribute (courage).

In human relationships, costly signals are often about time, money, or risk. A guy buys an expensive ring not because the diamond is functionally useful, but because it’s not. It’s very impracticality shows he’s invested.

What makes a signal effective is that it’s hard to fake. If it’s easy to pull off, it’s not a signal—it’s just noise. That’s why so many modern status displays are about waste. Burning money in public, whether through designer handbags or six-figure weddings, says: “I have so much to spare that I can afford to throw some away.”

Costly signals work because they separate the people who truly possess the underlying attribute (courage, wealth, commitment, etc.) from the ones who don’t.

Back to weddings. Today, even working- and lower-middle-class families are spending sums that once would have seemed unimaginable for a single event.

People often say, “Well, of course fewer people are getting married—it’s so expensive.”

But getting married isn’t expensive. You can do it for fifty bucks—just sign a few forms and pay a clerk at a government office. What they really mean is that weddings are expensive: the ceremony, the reception, the spectacle. That’s what people now associate with the idea of marriage.

The belief that marriage requires a lavish event has become so deeply embedded in our culture that it now acts as a bottleneck. For many, if you can’t afford the wedding, you don’t feel entitled to the marriage. As a result, marriage is increasingly the domain of the elite; those who can still afford to pass through this costly gateway, now encrusted with social expectations.

In the past, a wedding didn’t need to be extravagant to show commitment, because the marriage itself signaled permanence. So people in the past were more likely to have small ceremonies with family and friends to celebrate. Today, when everyone knows a marriage can begin one year and end the next, how do you show you’re serious? You burn lots of money in public. An expensive wedding becomes the proof: Only someone truly committed would be willing to spend this much. Today, if you only spend 50 bucks for the marriage certificate, there is a worry that people won’t think you’re serious enough.

In other words, costly weddings have come to signal what marriage itself used to convey—that you're in it for the long haul.

People no longer trust the institution of marriage to signal commitment on its own, so they feel the need to stage it. In the past, marriage came with clear expectations—social, religious, and legal—that gave it weight and a common understanding of permanence. That’s no longer the case. So now, couples turn to performance. The wedding isn’t just a celebration. It’s a production. Outfits, lighting, music, a curated guest list. The whole thing is designed to prove, to everyone watching, that this is real. This is serious.

Interestingly, this ends up punishing the very people most in need of the stability that marriage can offer. Not because they don’t want to get married, but because the cost of looking committed keeps rising.