Personally, I don't know why any bride would want to spend that much on a wedding. I suspect my wife isn't a whole lot different than most brides who probably had been planning her wedding day since they were 4 yrs old. I know my wife was involved, or at least concerned, about every little detail, wanting it to be just as perfect as it could be. She had a lot of anxiety over the whole thing, and I've seen other brides do the same thing more often than not, and our wedding was maybe a few thousand dollars. I couldn't imagine a $2M wedding and all that's involved. I know they hire people to oversee it, but still you'd have to figure the bride would still want to be aware of every little detail, and that's a lot of detail. I mean, it is her wedding day.
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I helped Runnin' Buddy do her daughter's wedding 2 years ago. Her daughter's an engineer, didn't have the time to do much more than go pick out her dress. It was a "destination wedding" in St Croix and J pretty much left everything to her mother and I, once she told us what colors she wanted.
35 people came, RB and her husband paid for 9 tickets, and 3/4's of the villa where the wedding was held. She and I shopped for months, getting stuff at Dollar Tree, Big Lots, Walmart, KMart and Target for a lot of stuff, including the flower arrangements that I did for the tables - silk because live flowers there were going to be really expensive.
I did almost all the cooking for the reception dinner, except for some jerk chicken that we ordered down there and the 2 tiered wedding cake, so it was just the cost of the food. They paid for all the meals for the other 7 that they bought tickets for (we were there for 8 days) and she paid for 12 for the brides luncheon that I know was $10 each. She still ended up spending about $12000 and her daughter and her husband spent about $10,000, which included her dress, their tickets and 2 others and their villa.
"Nickel and dime" costs that seem so insignificant at the time, particularly went spent over a series of months, are the budget killers! Real flowers are exorbinate. RB and I did a wedding for a friend's daughter and we ordered the flowers for the bride and 2 bridesmaids and I about choked!! A simple thing of 5 little peace lillies with a couple of pieces of fern was $100!!! And we had to do the damn thing over because it looked like crap! We could have puchased the flowers from Kroger and put it together ourselves for $25!
Brides, or their mothers or their friends, who don't know how do stuff, are at a huge disadvantage and at the mercy of suppliers.
As you said, most little girls start dreaming of their wedding to Prince Charming from the time they are little girls. Weddings have become a huge business...there's a channel on cable tv that even advertises itself as "the wedding channel".
But these days....the costs of a basic wedding are still in the range of a really nice downpayment on a house!! Personally....I think I'd rather have the house. It's a tangible thing rather than an incredibly expensive 1 day event just for pretty pictures, entertain a bunch of people one may or may not care about, and so much stress it's often amazing the bride and groom still go through with it!!!
