The finding is uncomfortable enough that most people who hear it for the first time assume there must be a mistake somewhere in the methodology. Common sense, plus about ninety years of concentrated wedding-industry marketing, has left almost every adult in the Western world with a background belief that spending significant money on the engagement ring and the wedding ceremony reflects the seriousness of the underlying commitment, and that the seriousness of the commitment predicts how long the marriage will last. The larger the ring, the deeper the love. The more elaborate the wedding, the more solid the future. The whole architecture of the modern wedding industry rests on this proposition, which has been so consistently promoted, since the De Beers “A diamond is forever” campaign was launched in 1938, that it has come to feel like the ordinary truth about how relationships work.
When two economists at Emory University tested that proposition against actual marriage-duration data from more than three thousand ever-married American adults, what they found was almost exactly the opposite. Couples who had spent more on the ring and the wedding were, on the data, meaningfully more likely to be divorced by the time the survey reached them. Couples who had spent less were, on the same data, meaningfully more likely to still be married. The larger the wedding budget had been at the start, the shorter the marriage that followed it had tended to be.
What the researchers actually measured
According to a peer-reviewed 2015 paper by Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M. Mialon of the Department of Economics at Emory University, published in Economic Inquiry under the title “‘A Diamond Is Forever’ and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship Between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration”, the researchers surveyed 3,151 ever-married American adults, meaning people who had been married at least once regardless of whether their marriage had ended in divorce. The survey asked about the amount they had spent on the engagement ring, the total cost of the wedding ceremony and reception, and a wide range of demographic and relational characteristics that might independently influence marriage outcomes.
Those additional variables mattered because a study of this kind lives or dies on its control variables. Couples with higher household incomes might reasonably be expected both to spend more on their weddings and to have different divorce rates for reasons that had nothing to do with the wedding itself. Couples who had cohabited before marriage, or who had attended religious services regularly, or who had children early, or who had married younger, all showed different baseline patterns of marriage duration in the underlying literature. What Francis-Tan and Mialon did was measure all of these variables in the same sample, and then statistically isolate the effect of wedding spending after each of the other factors had been accounted for.
The effect survived every control they added. Even after adjusting for income, age at marriage, race, religious attendance, prior cohabitation, presence of children, and every other candidate factor the underlying research had suggested might matter, the correlation between wedding spending and subsequent divorce risk remained clearly measurable, and it ran in the opposite direction from what the wedding industry has been implying for the better part of a century.
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What the numbers showed
The gradient of the relationship was steep enough to be worth stating in detail. Men who had spent between $2,000 and $4,000 on the engagement ring were, on the survey data, approximately 1.3 times more likely to be divorced by the time they were surveyed than men who had spent between $500 and $2,000 on the same purchase. The pattern extended upward at each higher spending bracket. Larger rings correlated with shorter marriages, in an approximately monotonic fashion.
The wedding ceremony itself showed an even steeper pattern. Women whose weddings had cost more than $20,000 were approximately 3.5 times more likely to be divorced than women whose weddings had cost between $5,000 and $10,000. Couples whose weddings had cost less than $1,000, meaning modest ceremonies with small guest lists and minimal external services, showed measurably lower divorce rates than any other spending bracket in the sample.
One additional finding, which sits slightly against the general pattern, is worth flagging carefully. Couples with more attendees at the wedding, meaning larger guest counts rather than larger budgets, showed lower divorce rates. The two variables are related in ordinary experience, because larger guest lists tend to produce larger budgets, but the survey controlled for cost separately from attendance. Which meant that, after the researchers had accounted for the effect of spending, having more of one’s social network physically present at the wedding correlated with a more durable subsequent marriage. Small wedding, many witnesses. Not large wedding, elaborately staged.
What might explain the pattern
The Francis-Tan and Mialon paper is a correlational study, not a causal one. What it demonstrates is that the relationship between wedding spending and divorce risk exists in the direction opposite to popular assumption. It does not, by itself, establish why.
The authors offer several candidate mechanisms in the paper’s discussion section, none of which has yet been experimentally confirmed. The most straightforward is financial stress. Wedding spending routinely puts young couples into debt at the exact point in the marriage when they most need financial stability, and the resulting economic strain has been well-documented in separate research as a significant predictor of subsequent marital difficulty. According to the earlier working paper version of the same study, uploaded by the authors to the Social Science Research Network in September 2014, the finding is consistent with a substantial body of prior research showing that couples who begin their marriage under financial pressure are more likely to experience the kinds of ongoing conflict that lead to divorce.
A second candidate mechanism is closer to social psychology than to economics. The wedding industry has, over the past century, become extremely effective at framing wedding expenditure as evidence of commitment. Couples who feel less secure about their underlying relationship may, on this reading, be more susceptible to the industry’s framing, spending more on external ceremonial markers of a bond they cannot verify from the inside. On this interpretation, elaborate weddings do not cause divorce. They reflect a pre-existing insecurity about the underlying relationship that would have predicted divorce regardless of what the couple spent.
A third possibility, which the authors mention but do not endorse, is closer to the popular self-help framing. Couples who spend modestly on their wedding may, on average, be more emotionally realistic, more focused on the marriage rather than on the ceremony, and more oriented toward the practical work of shared life rather than toward the theatrical performance of romance. Whether that characterisation applies to any given couple is impossible to determine from the survey data. What can be determined is the direction of the pattern.
The Francis-Tan and Mialon result has been widely cited since its publication and has produced a small industry of subsequent research, some of which has replicated the basic pattern and some of which has questioned specific aspects of the interpretation. What has not seriously been challenged is the underlying descriptive finding. The wedding-industry premise that spending more on the ring and the wedding predicts a stronger and more durable marriage does not, on the survey evidence, hold up. If anything, the relationship runs in the opposite direction.
Which leaves the whole story with a small and quietly uncomfortable observation. The industry that generated fifty billion dollars in United States revenue in 2014 alone, and considerably more in the decade since, has been selling a proposition about love and commitment that the peer-reviewed evidence does not support. The couples who followed that proposition most enthusiastically were, statistically, the ones whose marriages were most likely to end. The couples who ignored it, and got married cheaply in front of large numbers of the people they cared about, were the ones whose marriages tended to last.
Kiran Athar is a writer, not an economist or a marriage researcher. This piece draws on peer-reviewed economics research, the researchers’ working paper submitted through SSRN, and follow-on academic discussion of the findings.
