Many people spend over a year planning the details of their wedding and even longer dreaming about it. Lavish weddings of the rich and famous are televised and scrutinized events, and engagement rings have become a social symbol worthy of being professionally photographed so that they can be posted on Facebook. However, new research may show that these sorts of wedding expenses can actually shorten peoples marriages. The study, which was performed by researchers at the Emory University Department of Economics, found that expensive wedding rings and ceremonies were correlated with an increased divorce risk.
What the Study Found
The authors of the study surveyed over 3,000 people from the U.S. who either were currently married or had been married at one point. The researchers found people with similar relationships and demographic details like age and geography, and compared the length of the marriages as they related to ring expense and wedding ceremony expense. The studys authors reported a variety of interesting findings. For instance, people who spent between $2,000 and $4,000 on the engagement ring saw a 30 percent increase in their risk of divorce. Conversely, people who only spent between $500 and $2,000 on the ring had a lower risk of divorce as compared to the general population. The findings were even more striking for the wedding expenses as a whole. People whose weddings cost over $20,000 were 350 percent more likely to get divorced than people who only spent between $5,000 and $10,000.
Additionally, these findings are not as clear at lower levels of expenditure. People who spent less than $1,000 on their wedding did still experience a lowered divorce risk. Yet, people who spent less than $500 on a wedding ring were more likely to divorce than the middle expenditure group of $500 to $2,000.
Possible Explanations
The authors of the study looked at the data and tried to determine the reason for this correlation. The current explanation is that these sorts of large expenses around the wedding are usually financed, at least in part, by debt. This forces the marriage to start off down in a financial hole on top of any other debt that the new spouses may have been carrying. This can lead to stress on the marriage that ends up causing more of the couples with lavish weddings or rings to end up getting divorced. This may be especially likely to be true because of the fact that financial troubles and stress are one of the leading reported causes of divorce.
Divorce can be an emotionally difficult process with many different causes. If you are considering filing for a divorce, you do not have to go through it alone. Contact an experienced Naperville divorce attorney today to learn more about the process.