At first, Shanel Carter was looking forward to the wedding season. The pandemic was winding down, her best friends were getting hitched and she was ready to celebrate.
Then, the invitations kept coming.
“My excitement morphed into dread and anxiety,” said Carter, 34, who has already been to two weddings in 2021 and plans to go to four more in the next year, plus three bachelorette parties and two bridal showers. She recently backed out of a seventh wedding. “I had to turn down a bridal shower, I had to turn down a bachelorette, because I’m in the process of buying a home, and so money was the first thing that crossed my mind.”
She’s budgeting for weddings in Barbados, Charleston, Chicago and New Orleans, and bachelorettes in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, and estimates it’ll all cost about $9,000. And that’s before extra meals, outfits, out-of-pocket expenses while traveling and the time off from work that she has to request.
As the pandemic abates, couples who got engaged during Covid-19 lockdowns are planning to tie the knot, and weddings that were postponed in 2020 are moving forward. Marriages in the U.S. are set to rebound by more than 50% this year after slumping about 40% in 2020, according to data from The Wedding Report, an industry research firm. The rising trend is expected to persist into next year, when almost 2.5 million weddings are expected—the most since 1984.
To be sure, large swathes of the population are still reeling from the economic devastation sparked by the pandemic and related lockdowns, leaving many couples without the means to have a wedding celebration, even if they wanted to. And even as Covid vaccines are being administered, and economic activity has picked up and white-collar workers return to their offices, millions of Americans still remain unemployed—reflecting a myriad of factors including child care challenges and lingering coronavirus concerns.
But for those couples who can afford it, the excitement of finally being able to get hitched is providing the impetus for grand plans. That means potentially more expenses for their guests—who might have to spend thousands of dollars on travel, lodging, gifts to attend a slew of events: bachelorette and bachelor weekends, bridal showers and engagement parties.
A third of bridal party members took on debt for a friend’s wedding, according to a survey by online lending marketplace LendingTree. Those that went into debt included 43% of maids of honor, 38% of best men, 35% of bridesmaids and 30% of groomsmen, the survey found. Bachelor and bachelorette parties, wedding attire, travel to and from the marriage were some of the biggest expenses.
The number of wedding websites published on The Knot in June 2021 was 48% more than the same month in 2019. Gift purchases on The Knot Registry, meanwhile, more than doubled in the second quarter of this year compared to the first three months of 2021. Couples are also inviting more people—there were seven times as many invitation purchases in June, compared with March.
“Many of the weddings from last year that rescheduled moved to this year, and if you layer on top of that those that typically get married in a year, that’s what you really see as the surge,” said Shane McMurray, founder of The Wedding Report. “I think next year will be more of a surge than this year.”