2212: Diamonds Aren't Forever: Expensive Rings and Weddings May Lead to Relationship Problems by Dr. Samantha Joel of Luvze

[00:00:00] Now, before we start, you might want to check out our other podcasts covering topics like personal development and minimalism, money, health, relationships, and more. So, to optimize your life in other areas, just search for Optimal Living Daily in your podcast app.

[00:00:15] Now, onto the show. This is Optimal Relationships Daily, episode 2212. Diamonds aren't forever. Expensive rings and weddings may lead to relationship problems. By Dr. Samantha Joel of Loves.com. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another edition of Optimal Relationships Daily.

[00:00:36] I'm Greg Audino, and I'm here with you every single day, hosting this show and reading from different articles about relationships. Some are narrative-based, some are made up of lists, some are opinion pieces, and some are more data-driven like this one.

[00:00:50] So, listen close for some enlightening research today as we optimize your life. Diamonds aren't forever. Expensive rings and weddings may lead to relationship problems. By Dr. Samantha Joel of Loves.com.

[00:01:10] My husband and I got hitched this past June, which I can honestly say was one of the happiest and most transcendent experiences of my life. However, we both agree that whereas the wedding was awesome, the wedding planning process was decidedly not awesome.

[00:01:27] Navigating the wedding industry can be quite frustrating, in part because of the relentless pressure to spend fantastic amounts of money on anything and everything wedding-related. As a relationships researcher, I was particularly interested in, and baffled by, the rhetoric that

[00:01:43] many vendors use in order to sell wedding services and products. Many of the sales pitches boil down to the idea that couples in love should want expensive weddings. Vendors will argue that if

[00:01:55] you truly love your partner, you should be willing to go to any length, at least monetarily, to properly celebrate that love on your special day. For example, maybe you want to show your love for

[00:02:07] your partner by getting a fancy gilded guestbook for your guest to sign, or personally monogrammed hand towels for the reception bathroom. Sometimes the rhetoric even goes so far as to suggest that an expensive wedding guarantees you true love. With a perfectly straight face, some vendors will

[00:02:26] tell you that your wedding day will set the tone for your marriage, and you should be willing to do anything it takes to start your marriage off on the right foot. For example, perhaps you should

[00:02:36] set the right tone by hiring a 20-piece orchestra for your ceremony, or limos to transport all your guests to the reception. Examples of this sort of advertising can be tracked back to the 1940s, when De Beers' Diamond Company launched their infamous Diamonds Are Forever campaign.

[00:02:54] Indeed, many of the social norms around marriage proposals, such as the arbitrary benchmark of two-month salary that men should spend on an engagement ring, come from De Beers' successful advertising efforts. Like the wedding industry more broadly, the diamond industry relies on

[00:03:10] the premise that spending a great deal of money shows love for your partner and predicts relationship success. This idea is widespread in our culture, likely because it is a marketer's dream. Who wouldn't pay any price to ensure marital bliss? What's less clear is how accurate these notions

[00:03:28] are. To what extent do high levels of spending actually predict marital bliss? For decades, the idea that spending a fortune on engagement rings and weddings is good for your relationship has gone untested and largely unchallenged. But recently, a pair of economists put De Beers,

[00:03:47] et al., to the test. The researchers recruited over 3,000 ever-married participants, i.e., people who were either currently married or had been married at some point, to complete an online survey. They asked participants a wide range of questions about their marriage, such as how long

[00:04:05] they dated before marriage, their age at marriage, their feelings and attitudes at the time of the wedding proposal, whether they had children, and, critically, the costs of their engagement ring and their wedding. Participants who were unable to remember how much their wedding cost were able

[00:04:22] to report that rather than provide an inaccurate figure. Participants were also asked about several demographic factors, such as education, income, religion, and race, so that the researchers could control for these factors in their analyses. Most importantly, participants were asked about

[00:04:42] their marital status and marriage duration, so that the researchers could see what factors are associated with marital outcomes. The results did not lend support to the wedding industry's mantra. In fact, any reliable associations that the researchers found were in the opposite direction

[00:04:59] from what marketing would suggest. For example, people who had spent between $2,000 and $4,000 on an engagement ring had significantly higher rates of divorce compared to people who spent between $500 and $2,000. Similarly, couples who spent less than $1,000 on their weddings

[00:05:18] had significantly lower rates of divorce even compared to the people who spent between $5,000 and $10,000. People who reported having spent more than $20,000 on their wedding tended to have higher divorce rates compared to those who spent less. Furthermore, any cases where spending more

[00:05:35] was associated with better relationship outcomes were explained by demographic factors like having a high income. In other words, it wasn't that spending more made things better. Other factors were responsible. It gets worse. The researchers found that high levels of wedding-related spending,

[00:05:54] for example, having a wedding that costs more than $20,000, was associated with stress over wedding-related debt. The researchers posit that this stress may help to account for some of the negative associations between high spending and marital outcomes. Couples spend money on their

[00:06:11] wedding that they don't have, which later puts a strain on their marriage when they have trouble paying off the resulting debt. These results suggest that, if anything, high levels of wedding-related spending have a negative effect on marriage, not a positive one. Of course, this study is

[00:06:28] cross-sectional, meaning that the researchers did not follow people over time. It would be great to see a longitudinal study where newlyweds first report on their engagement ring and wedding spending and are then followed over time to see who splits up. However, the researchers did make

[00:06:44] a commendable effort to rule out alternative explanations for their results. For example, a problem with cross-sectional studies is that people don't always have a good memory of events that took place years ago, what psychologists call a retrospective bias. To help account for this,

[00:07:02] the researchers also tested their effects among only the people who were married after 2008. If biased reporting produced the effects, this subsample of participants, who presumably had a better recollection of how much they actually spent, should produce weaker findings. But instead,

[00:07:19] the researchers obtained the same results. The very large and relatively representative sample also lend credibility to their findings. 3,000 participants is a lot of participants. I think the takeaway message here is that the wedding industry's primary objective

[00:07:35] is to make money. They are not in the business of doling out useful relationship advice. So for a couple trying to plan their wedding, it is probably wise to take the wedding industry's

[00:07:46] messages with a very large grain of salt. Your chances at marital bliss are not riding on whether or not you get personalized miniature champagne bottles for your guests to bring home

[00:07:56] with them, or whether the bride gets a deluxe skin treatment every month for a year leading up to the wedding. The amount of money you spend on your wedding is not an indication of how much you love

[00:08:06] your partner, nor is it a way to improve your marriage's future prospects, no matter what the bridal magazines have to say about it. You just listened to the post titled, Diamonds aren't forever. Expensive rings and weddings may lead to relationship problems.

[00:08:26] By Dr. Samantha Joel of Loves.com. And I'll be back in just a sec with my commentary. Alright, and thank you so much to Dr. Samantha, who has reported some findings and statistics

[00:08:38] here today that might make you sweat a little bit, as it seems the majority, at least here in America, spend upwards of $4,000 on a ring and $20,000 on a ceremony. However, if you are past this point and you're already married, having dealt with or currently dealing with wedding debts,

[00:08:57] it's still important to take this article into consideration. Why? Because financial strain is one thing, but the resentment that can come from it is another. You always have the opportunity to stop, to take ownership of past choices like these and move forward with grace. You can stop right

[00:09:16] now and remind yourself that the past is the past, and though you may feel that you made a mistake in spending as much as you did on your wedding and or engagement ring, you still have the option to

[00:09:26] forgive yourself and or your partner for making these choices. Somehow feeling as though they are to blame can be a common feeling if you're unable to forgive yourself for these decisions, but that only causes the initial problem to have unnecessary lasting effects. So use this article

[00:09:44] today to forgive yourself or your partner from any poor decisions made in the past so as to ensure that they don't overstay their welcome any longer. I wish you luck with that everybody. It's time to

[00:09:55] get going for now, but I thank you so much for joining, not just today but every day. Have a great rest of your day and be sure to join us again tomorrow for a parenting post. That's where your optimal life awaits.