Cost of the wedding and cultural aspect

mahool · February 28, 2014, 8:38pm

Re: Cost of the wedding and cultural aspect

If a couple is having a large wedding with the sole intention of showing, I think the reason is the same as with any other culture. People want to outdo the last wedding they attended and keep up with the Jones. I think materialism also plays a part in this.

I don’t think this is entirely the reason for costly weddings in the Pakistani culture though. I think a factor that adds to the cost of Pakistani weddings is the numbers of guests as Pakistani weddings often have a large number of guests. This greatly increases the costs as it can be rather costly to seat and feed a large number of guests. However, this is not always done to show off. Many people have large extended families and many acquaintances that they would like to invite to their wedding and would feel uneasy if they invited some people but not others. Another factor that adds to the cost of Pakistani weddings is the tradition of giving gifts to the families, often to the entire families, of the bride and groom. I’m not sure if everyone does this, but I’ve noticed that is quite common.

My wedding was neither simple nor an extravaganza. I would say that it was quite nice but not over-the-top. We planned it in way that allowed us to include and invite all those we wanted at our wedding but did not go great lengths to invite every single relative on both sides or every person we ever met in life. Unfortunately though, certain aspects of our engagement party and wedding did end up becoming rather costly. One of these was that we had many overseas guests as most of my family lives in Denmark and much of my husband’s family lives in Holland. In our culture, if you have invited someone to your event and they are coming from out of town, you MUST put them up yourself. The reasoning for this is that as YOU have invited them to attend YOUR event, they are considered to be in YOUR care for the duration of their visit and you must treat them hospitably.

Costly weddings are not only a Desi thing. However, different cultures have costly weddings for different reasons. In my culture, something that can make weddings costly is the emphasis placed on the engagement. I mentioned in another thread that engagements are quite important in my culture and that these are often as large as weddings with as many guests. Based on personal experience with a couple of close friends, I’ve noticed that costly weddings are also common among Arabs. They also place much emphasis on the engagement party. Also, although they don’t have the tradition of giving gifts to between the bride and groom’s families, they do have the tradition of gifting particularly large gifts to the couple themselves (ie. one person I know was gifted the down payment for a house a wedding gift). Overall, I think the size of weddings depends on the couple themselves and what they are inclined to.

^ One of the Pashtonwali code…