You probably know by now that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will be marrying on May 19. Many Americans are setting their alarms in order to watch the wedding. Some are flying to London just to be there.
There will always be those who say that nothing matters.
But royal weddings do matter. The wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840 influenced the expectations Americans held for their weddings.
I examine how weddings, honeymoons, and engagements have evolved from simple affairs to extravagant, expensive events in my book Romance and Capitalism. The majority of Americans are not married, but we would all like to be. Marriage is a wedding. It’s a ceremony where everything has to be perfect. This standard was shaped in part by the weddings of celebrities and royals.
Disney movies are a great example.
Victoria chose a white wedding gown instead of the traditional red one. In a few short years, American women’s magazines began to be promoted as a symbol of purity and innocence.
Victoria’s marriage was the first celebrity wedding. The wedding received a lot of media attention. Stories were sent by telegraph and magazine to newspapers around the world. After reading about the trumpeters, the music, and the glittering décor, the readers were able to imagine what the perfect wedding would look like.
Queen Victoria famously chose a white wedding gown instead of the traditional red. Royal Collection
Queen Victoria wore an engagement ring as well. The diamond engagement ring, like the white wedding gown, would become an almost mandatory item in a perfect love tale. De Beers’ clever marketing over the years also played a part.
Fast forward to the wedding of Charles and Diana in July 1981. After decades of social revolution and a sexual upheaval, the divorce rate in the U.S. reached.
Charles and Diana’s wedding was a Disney fairy tale, from Diana’s arrival in a white dress with a href= “https://us.hellomagazine.com/imagenes//brides/2014090120744/princess-diana-wedding-dress going home/0-110-274/diana1 — –z.jpg”>a 25-foot train/a> to Charles’ Prince Charming like a href= “https://c Diana arrived in a white gown with a 25-foot-long train, and Charles wore a military uniform that was reminiscent of Prince Charming.
Lady Diana Spencer waves from a horse-drawn carriage on her way to St. Paul’s Cathedral the day before her wedding. AP Photo
Seven hundred fifty million people watched the vows around the world. The U.S. began spending more on weddings.
It’s difficult to say whether the increase in wedding spending in the U.S. was linked to the royal wedding, but perhaps couples wanted to emulate, in some way, Diana’s and Charles’ dream ceremony.
A prince can marry any little girl.
The next royal wedding in 2011 took the fairytale narrative to a new level when Prince William married “commoner Kate Middleton.” Kate was from an upper-middle-class background. This was the central element of the media narrative.
When I was in London to attend the wedding of Kate and William, I did research for my romance book.
Almost everyone in the crowd I spoke to that day said the wedding had given them hope in difficult times. Many of the people that I met were Americans. One young American woman said she had come all the way from the States to London to watch the wedding because she wanted a happy end.
She said, “I won’t watch a film unless I am sure it will have a happy end.” “I won’t read a novel unless there is a happy ending.”
A young American student at Oxford said to me: “It is a real-life fairytale. “A commoner marries a prince.”
Prince William drives Kate, Duchess, from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey after their wedding. AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza
The couple’s story was a classic fairytale romance: A woman living in poverty is rescued by a handsome prince.
Meghan Markle, an American, is set to marry Prince Harry. Another fairy tale plot twist will be in the works. Meghan, with a white mother and a black father, shows that any little girl – regardless of their race can marry a Prince.
This royal wedding is a fitting celebration of the 50th anniversary of Loving V. Virginia, which ended interracial marriage bans in the U.S.
Happily Ever After… or Not
What’s the end? Not quite. The truth is quite different.
When we marry, even though Americans may claim that love blinds them, they continue to marry people with similar backgrounds, education levels, and earnings.
Even though Americans are paying more for weddings than ever before, fewer and fewer actually get married.
Many people put off marriage because they can’t afford the “perfect” wedding. I have interviewed couples who are already living together and may even have children, but they have not yet married. Why? They wanted to afford the wedding of their dreams.
It seems that the money, time and energy we spend on weddings doesn’t make us happy. Research shows the more money a couple spends on a wedding, the greater the likelihood that their marriage will end in divorce.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist from the World Happiness Report 2017, wrote in the report that Americans are looking for happiness “in the wrong places.”
It might be a mistake to try to emulate the pomp and circumstance of royal weddings as if this would somehow negate all the hard work required to make a marriage successful. It won’t deter many Americans.
