VOA Learning English - Weddings Are a Billion Dollar Business in America | Текст песни

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• Weddings Are a Billion Dollar Business in America

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From VOA Learning English, welcome to This Is America. I’m Avi Arditti.

And I’m Kelly Jean Kelly. This week, we look at weddings in America—how much they cost and how different they can be.

(MUSIC: Bruno Mars “Marry You”)

More than 2.3 million couples get married in the United States every year. Sometimes a couple may simply go to a courthouse or city hall and be married by a judge or other official.

But more elaborate wedding ceremonies are big business, adding $70 billion to the American economy every year.

Weddings also often require couples to plan ahead. Bic Decaro was married in 2003, 13 months after her future husband asked her to marry him.

“You know, we thought we wanted at least a year to just plan and not feel rushed. And we thought that was just a choice we were going to make because that is what we wanted.

But it turns out when we started calling around, a lot of venues were already booked.”
The difficulty of finding a place, or venue, is not a surprise to Susan Smith, who is a professional wedding planner.

“In general most brides want to get married on a Saturday night. So that is a limited date. And again it goes back to if they want the venue then they will have to wait until it’s available or change their date. Also just the process takes much longer than what people think.”

Susan Smith says weddings often also cost more than people expect.

“It is very easy to get carried away. I mean with websites and television shows all about weddings, it’s easy to see things that you can’t afford and then you want them. And then it’s easy to start to run over budget.”

M.Z. Hemingway wrote in the Wall Street Journal newspaper in 2007 that she went to a wedding expo five months before her wedding.

An expo is an event where couples can look at every type of business selling anything connected to weddings. She discovered that businesses offering the best flowers, cakes and wedding photos were already scheduled for the day she wanted.

She wrote that the average cost of a wedding in the United States was almost $28,000—about the same as many cars. She called it a “new level of excess.” More than half the money is spent to rent a place to have the wedding and pay for dinner for all the guests.

Traditionally, the parents of the bride pay for the wedding. But today, the cost of the wedding is more often a shared expense. The bride and groom are often older and may pay some of the cost themselves, says wedding planner Susan Smith.

“If it is an older bride—and I don’t necessarily mean old but 27 or 30—then they are already established in their own careers and they have money of their own, so they are then able to pay for it and have more say.”

Bic Decaro says her wedding cost more than she expected, but she is not sorry for the money that was spent.

“We loved it. We loved the wedding. Everything went very well. And it was just that the day was so fast. It just went by just like that. And we thought, ‘Oh my gosh. It is over.’ And we really didn’t think about the money so much.”

(MUSIC: The Fray “Look After You”)

There is another trend in American weddings: more marriages are happening across racial and ethnic lines. Fifteen percent of marriages in 2010 were between spouses of different races or ethnic groups, compared to 7 percent in 1980.

Other Americans are also more likely to accept these intermarriages. Forty-three percent of Americans in a Pew survey said it is a good thing for society when more people of different races marry each other.

More than two-thirds of the people in the survey said it would be OK with them if a family member married someone of a different racial or ethnic group.

In contrast, only 10 percent said the trend toward intermarriage is a change for the worse.
But the story of marriages between people from different ethnic groups goes beyond numbers. What about ethnic traditions in the weddings themselves? The story i