Weddings are a joyous occasion, and I’ve heard of at least three in my social circles in the upcoming months. But two of these weddings are diverting from the norm of a weekend celebratory affair, choosing instead to hold their nuptials on a weekday.

“A weekday?!” one might well say. “How inconsiderate! I can’t take a whole day off from work just to attend a wedding!”

But perhaps that’s the whole point – not to be inconsiderate, of course, but to trim costs. After all, setting a wedding for a weekday reduces the costs of venues, caterers, florists, and other services, while also automatically lowering the wedding guestlist – not through invites from the couple, but through each guest’s own decision on how far they are willing to go to be available on the big day.

This trend isn’t just in my social circles, however. As a recent article in Elle explained, the younger generation is riding the pendulum away from the millennial trend of bombastic, Instagram-worthy weddings, opting instead for small, quiet, budget-friendly ceremonies that rely on dresses from grandma’s attic and a friend with a film camera.

“In many ways, this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” author Rowan Beaird writes. “Gen Z has lived most of their lives amid periods of profound economic precarity, and the idea of spending thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars on a single day seems absurd.”

Beaird believes these young couples are onto something, asking, “What would it mean for us to think of these celebrations not as a performance, but as simply what they are at their core: traditions, rituals, ceremonies marking the start of a marriage?”

Wait, weddings that are traditions, rituals, and ceremonies to mark the start of a marriage? What a novel idea!

Except … that’s exactly what a wedding was always supposed to be: a solemn pledge which marks two lives coming together symbolically and physically, promising to love and to cherish one another in sickness and in health, not a big party that celebrates a physical relationship that’s already started – and may even be on the rocks soon given the debt required to make the party bigger and better than the one the Joneses had last year.

In 1786, George Washington dropped a profound little line while writing to Charles Armand-Tuffin:

For in my estimation more permanent & genuine happiness is to be found in the sequestered walks of connubial life, than in the giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure, or the more tumultuous and imposing scenes of successful ambition.

Washington was writing more about the daily aspects of married life more than he was speaking of wedding ceremonies, but I believe his advice speaks to the trend away from over-the-top weddings. Essentially, Washington saw that a happy marriage isn’t necessarily one which has all the bells and whistles, the sights and sounds, the smells and the tastes that make a wedding Instagram perfection. Those things all appeal to the senses – the “giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure” and the “imposing scenes of successful ambition.”

Instead, it is the quiet solemnity – those “sequestered walks” – of a simple marriage ceremony surrounded by family, old traditions, and even homemade cake, that tend to create true happiness. For such events are not spectacles of eye candy that fool guests into thinking the couple has it all together; rather, they are humble attempts to focus on the people and realities of life – the stuff that all marriages are really made of in the end.

And when we recognize that true marital success is found in how we handle the simple, foundational things of life – God, family, friends, and resources – then perhaps we’ll have more couples who make it further than a few years after they walk down the aisle.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Negative Space, CCO