A CYNIC'S GRAVITY LAW. "The likelihood of a marriage failing increases in proportion to the gaudiness of the wedding." Via Newmark's Door, an investigation of the wedding-consulting industry (or is it a sector of the household services industry?) offers anecdotal confirmation, not drawn from the outlier set of celebrities and royalty.

Who got the better of my friend's deal I do not know, as it seemed impolite to ask, but he hinted that even his daughter's relatively modest wedding cost more than the $30,000 buyout he'd offered her. Inasmuch as the marriage didn't last much longer than the wedding itself, it certainly seems to have been money down the drain. But it was very much an American wedding of our day, replete with that once-in-a-lifetime bridal dress, bridesmaids fetchingly fitted out, gifts for attendants of both sexes, an elegant luncheon and, of course, champagne -- and, at the end, a nice fat pack of bills for dear old Dad.

There's a more serious point when the positional arms race comes up.

"If a bride has been told, repeatedly, that it costs nearly $28,000 to have a wedding, then she starts to think that spending nearly $28,000 on a wedding is just one of those things a person has to do, like writing a rent check every month or paying health insurance premiums. (Or she prides herself on being a budget bride and spending a mere $15,000 on the event.) She is less likely to reflect upon the fact that $28,000 would have more than covered a 10 percent down payment on the median purchase price of a house in 2005 and would cover the average cost to a family of a health insurance policy, at 2005 rates, for a decade. The bride who has been persuaded that $28,000 is a reasonable amount of money to spend on her wedding day is less likely to measure that total against the nation's median household income -- $42,389 in 2004 -- and reflect upon whether it is, in fact, reasonable for her or for anyone to spend the equivalent of seven and a half months of the average American's salary on one day's celebration."

It's not as if spending $28K on a wedding is the same kind of insurance as dropping $200K on college to reduce the risk of exposure to Rate Your Students fodder on the seven year access-assessment-remediation-retention track.