New York
Times
article
by
DEVAN
SIPHER
“MISS MORTON Didn’t Elope” was a headline in The New York Times of May 24, 1914. One supposes Miss Morton could have made the article even more newsworthy if the elopement had, in fact, taken place.
“Once upon a time eloping was scandalous,” said Rebecca Mead, the author of “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding” (Penguin Group, 2007), but, she pointed out, that era was before the average American wedding cost close to $30,000. “There are a lot of people wanting to get married who don’t want to put down the equivalent of a down payment on a house.”
In a time of tightening budgets, some wedding professionals have seen an increase in elopements as couples consider it a practical alternative.
It’s an age-old option. Romeo and Juliet did it. And, though it didn’t turn out so well for them, it worked for the poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. They, too, were circumventing parental disapproval, but nowadays the primary motivations are convenience and cost.
“A wedding doesn’t have to be a life-absorbing planning process, and it doesn’t have to take up a year and a half of your lives,” said Karla Neville, 27, who decided to elope with Gabe Evans in July while they were on vacation in Portland, Ore.
They had initially intended to have a more traditional event, but found themselves resenting the money and effort required. “We promised each other when we got engaged we wouldn’t let the process of planning a wedding stress us out,” said Mr. Evans, 42, who is an art director and graphic designer in New York. Instead of marrying at a sit-down dinner for 70 people in New York, they wed on a mountaintop overlooking the Columbia River Gorge with only a minister and a photographer present, both of whom they found online.
“I liked the fact that it was just about Gabe and I,” said Ms. Neville, an events assistant at Pernod Ricard, the wine and spirits company. “We were able to say heartfelt things to each other without thinking of hundreds of eyes on us.”
Elopement can be a more intimate and romantic experience than a traditional wedding, according to Lynn Beahan, an author, with Scott Shaw, of “Let’s Elope” (Bantam, 2001), a compendium of elopement information. “It’s you declaring your love to somebody else just in front of that one other person,” said Ms. Beahan, who eloped in Vermont in 2001. “As a married couple you don’t spend the rest of your life making big decisions in front of an audience.”
In fact, having a large audience for a wedding is a relatively modern idea. Church weddings, for example, were not even an option for most people until the 16th century.
“Formal church weddings were generally reserved for aristocrats,” said John Witte, the director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He said that for those of lower rank many couples “simply declared themselves to be married” with or without a public component.
Ms. Beahan said that “until the late 19th century, most weddings were held at the bride’s home. ” And as late as the 1930s, it was common to have only a ceremony without a reception, according to Ms. Mead’s book.
That being said, Leslie Mesnick-Uretsky, 35, and her husband, Jonathan Uretsky, 34, had been saving for their wedding until they realized that “unless we excluded people, it would be very large,” she said. Neither option appealed to them.
“The 50-person wedding would have been something very nice to do, but it’s difficult to do without offending people,” said Ms. Mesnick-Uretsky, who works in New York as an environmental impact consultant.
The couple were married in January at the Municipal Building in New York — with their immediate families present. Ms. Beahan’s book refers to this as a “hybrid elopement,” and it’s increasingly popular, allowing couples to choose simplicity over extravagance without creating rifts in their relationships with their parents.
“I spent only $190 on my beautiful J. Crew wedding dress, which was less than any of the bridesmaid dresses I bought over the years,” Ms. Mesnick-Uretsky said. The couple, with some assistance from the bride’s father, also treated their families to a weekend at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, N.Y. Yet their wedding, including a two-week honeymoon in Japan, still cost less than $10,000.
When Ted Flinter and Karine Morency eloped in May after living together for almost seven years, they did not include or even tell their parents. “We didn’t tell anyone,” said Mr. Flinter, 39 and an owner of a security company in Abu Dhabi. “We got engaged on a Thursday and went to Vegas four days later.”
Once there, however, “Karine did call her sister about five seconds before Elvis was about to marry us,” Mr. Flinter said. His soon-to-be bride asked her sister to be the maid of honor and “put the cellphone on the podium so she could listen in.”
Mr. Flinter said that including gambling losses the wedding cost $1,350. “We could have afforded a beautiful wedding,” he said, but “we dreaded the wedding registry and the seating charts.”
Not everyone is as financially fortunate. “People are saying, ‘I lost my job, and I don’t have the funds for a big wedding,’ ” said Mary Beaty, a New York chaplain of the Humanist Society, who said she is performing twice as many elopement ceremonies as before. Chris Andrews, the owner of California Wedding Packages in Napa, Calif., concurred, saying, “The elopement business is booming.”
Ms. Beaty said she has seen the trend “for the past six months if not a year.”
“Many young people,” she added, “are conscious about not wasting money and concerned about the expense for friends and family.”
Yet large traditional weddings are not about to disappear.
Ms. Mead, the author, said that Brides magazine was founded during the Great Depression. It was inspired by an article in Fortune, she said, “Which noted that even at times of economic depression people could be relied upon to spend money on weddings.”
