Every year, I look forward to The Knot’s Real Weddings Study with an embarrassing eagerness.
This is because the Real Weddings Study is the only credible survey of my industry. Why the wedding industry is not better surveyed when it makes somewhere between $55 billion to $72 billion a year in the U.S. alone, I couldn’t tell you but whatever the reason, the result is the same: There is a complete and utter dearth of information about one of the largest purchasing decisions of many people’s entire lives. If you want hard numbers (and I want hard numbers), the only option is the Real Weddings Study. This is why I get so excited.
Every year as soon as the study comes out, I write about it. You can read my 2019 edition to get a sense of the usual flavor. Last year, I called The Knot “pandering” and “desperate.” I included a GIF of Amy Poehler winking at Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls. “I’m not like all those other wedding websites,” I said of The Knot. “I’m a cool wedding website! Promise!!” In this particular example, I characterized The Knot as “panting.”
All to say, I regularly rip into The Knot Real Weddings Study because I am appalled at how the world’s largest wedding company portrays $30 grand spent on a single day as not only normal but actually, kind of cheap.
I find this irresponsible and hurtful not to me, a wedding vendor, but to my couples. It is the normalization of this kind of information that regularly makes people planning weddings say troubling things like, “I feel so behind. I know that I’m missing something. I just want it to be over already.”
These are deeply upsetting things to hear from people about an event that is fundamentally about joy. I hate this reality and I blame it, in part, on The Knot.
And so I write my article. It’s a stone thrown at Goliath, I know, but it’s the best way I know to channel my rage into something positive.
Which brings us to this year
Every morning this month, I’ve started work by checking the internet for signs of The Knot 2020 Real Weddings Study. I was particularly excited to see this one because this year’s study reports last year’s data, i.e. this would be the study that talked all about COVID and weddings.
Then, today, I finally got the news: It’s here! The Knot 2020 Real Weddings Study has arrived.
I read the results and you know what I felt?
Exhausted.
COVID is mentioned, thank god, but the pandemic is portrayed as an obstacle that couples need to get around rather than what it really is: a complete game changer.
This is from the opening paragraph of the study:
While the vast majority of weddings had to be modified in some capacity due to COVID-19 (96%), the good news is that for nearly 93% of engaged couples, the pandemic didn’t cancel their wedding celebrations altogether.
The use of the word “cancel” is interesting to me. The study makes it sound like canceling a wedding is akin to shooting your grandma in the face. It is quite literally the worst thing you can do in this world so please, dear couple, do not even consider it!
You know why they say this? Because in the wedding industry, a canceled wedding = lost revenue.
Let’s talk about money
Lost revenue is no joke in my industry. If not for PUA, two rounds of PPP, a government grant, and the enormous privilege of my husband not losing his job, I wouldn’t be writing this. I would have had to close up my business and start a whole new career because I could not afford to do otherwise.
And that’s just the past 11 months. I won’t even get into all of the revenue I plan to lose or, more likely, never book at all because COVID has made my job both unsafe and untenable. The vast majority of my inventory (i.e. Saturdays in the summer) have necessarily gone to 2020 couples, summer 2021 isn’t looking much better safety-wise than summer 2020, and there are all of the weddings I will never book, can never book, and will never book because of COVID.
So I get it. Cancellations are scary. They mean I’ll never get paid those balances and couples may even want their nonrefundable deposits back. This is money I can’t afford to lose, particularly after last year.
And yet, I refuse to celebrate what The Knot reported so triumphantly: “For nearly 93% of engaged couples, the pandemic didn’t cancel their wedding celebrations altogether.”
I won’t celebrate this because there is very little indication in the study of how these couples opted to celebrate their wedding celebrations during COVID. Yes, there are statistics including this interesting breakdown of the various options couples choose:
There is even a whole section titled “Health and Safety Measures Were Top Priority.”
But then there is language like this (I added the emphasis):
Couples were “even supplying masks that doubled as favors.”
“Nearly 50% of all couples were forced to reduce and/or limit their guest count”
“And if reducing guest size isn’t hard enough, roughly 40% had to uninvite some guests.”
These are not small sacrifices that couples are making. Couples are dealing with huge financial losses. The average cost of a wedding was still $19,000 last year (down from $28,000 in 2019). That’s a lot of money to invest for an event that didn’t happen as planned.
Couples are also dealing with unquantifiable emotional losses. It is no easy thing to uninvite your mom to your wedding.
But language like “even,” “forced to,” and “isn’t hard enough” muddy the waters. The Knot makes it sound like it’s those damn risk-averse rulemakers who are making us change our wedding when we all actually know what’s at fault: it’s a virus called COVID and I’m sorry it happened the year you wanted to have a big wedding.
Why this matters
So yes, I take issue with a report from the wedding industry’s biggest player when that report celebrates the fact that couples didn’t cancel their weddings because you know what? They probably should have.
They should have canceled not because they don’t want to get married or don’t love each other anymore. They should have canceled because weddings are superspreaders.
At least, weddings are superspreaders when we make them that way. Because here’s the thing that rarely gets talked about by mainstream wedding media: You can still have a wedding during COVID. You can still start your marriage. You can still experience joy.
You just have to do the hard thing: You have to change your wedding plans because the wedding you’re currently planning will probably kill people.
Am I being too hard on The Knot?
Perhaps. In many ways, The Knot has done us all a favor. They have told us with cool, statistical precision that “over 75% of couples say the health and safety of guests were the most important aspects of planning their wedding during the COVID-19 pandemic,” which is reassuring until you realize that nearly 25 percent of couples didn’t say that.
Based on what I’ve seen in the past 11 months, I’m not surprised but damn, I’m disappointed.
So if you are a couple planning a wedding, please don’t forget about the pandemic. Please remember that one of the best ways you can show people you love them is to care if they’re safe.
There are many ways you can do this and still have a wedding during COVID. In fact, based on what I’ve heard from my couples and my vendor friends, the couples who have made the most radical changes to their wedding are also the happiest. It seems counterintuitive until we remember that it is much easier to feel joy when we also feel safe.
If you don’t know where to start, try this list of free resources. The prioritization worksheet and the COVID safety policy are the two I recommend most often. Pull these up, sit across from your partner, and talk to each other. Ask yourselves the most important question in wedding planning: Not when, not where, not how much, but why. Why are we having a wedding? Why are we having a wedding right now?
As you consider these questions, please also remember your vendors. We are human beings, not Scrooge McDuck. We are not trying to stiff you when we don’t give back your deposit or ask to maybe, just maybe, be paid for part of our balance. If you have bought not one but two or maybe even three dates from us for the price of one (and at a price set nearly two years ago), we may ask for a little more money. This is not because we want to hurt you. You are already hurting so much. It is because we want to make it to 2022, too.
So, in a way, thank you, The Knot 2020 Real Weddings Study. You’ve made me realize why, every day, I answer at least one email from a couple who is currently planning a wedding that is likely illegal and most definitely unsafe.
They are not doing this because they are bad people. They are doing this because wedding industry authorities like you tell them that changing their wedding plans is the worst possible thing they can do. Unfortunately in nearly all of these cases, the wedding they’re planning is from a time before COVID and that, I regret to inform us, is nothing but dangerous.