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Friday October 26, 2007

You say lilies, I say tulips

Planning a wedding is becoming a family affair

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

When Monica Wulff and Vlad Baranovsky started to plan their wedding, they did not begin by calling the bride’s mother.

Instead, they sat down and estimated their budget for their July 1 wedding — $15,000 — and tried to figure out how much of that they could cover themselves. Then they called their parents.

“We tried to split it three ways as evenly as we could,” said Monica Baranovsky, now using her husband’s surname.

The couple, 23 and 29 respectively, married in Marin, and while they ended up spending “much more” than they initially predicted, they stuck to their plan of splitting wedding costs between themselves and their families.

“We had enough set aside that we could easily finance a portion of the wedding, which we felt was the most fair thing to do,” Baranovsky said. “We didn’t want to put the sole burden on either set of parents, nor did we want them to split the whole costs.”

The Baranovskys are a part of the critical mass of couples no longer relying on the traditional formula of who pays for and plans a wedding.

“There has been a metamorphosis,” said Wendy Kleckner, manager of Too Caterers (the kosher division of Continental Catering) in Menlo Park.

“Ten years ago I’d get this classic call from the bride, followed by, usually later the same day, a call from the mother of the bride, and this would be the team I’d work with. I rarely saw the groom, and I never saw the groom’s father.

“Now, it’s a whole new day. So often it’s the couple coming in and, secondarily, the parents. Oftentimes I have meetings with whole groups because they’re all paying.”

According to a 2006 study by the Condé Nast Bridal Group, only about a third of all brides’ parents pay for the entire wedding. Instead, one-third of brides and grooms pay for their wedding themselves, and about one-fifth of couples will foot the bill with the help of both sets of parents.

Why the shift? Brides and grooms are standing under the chuppah later in their lives and are thus more established and financially independent. The average bride is now 27 years old, the groom is 29 and they have an estimated household income of $74,000, according to the Condé Nast study.

The other major change? The price tag. It’s not as easy for one family to foot the bill, considering that the average cost of today’s weddings is $27,000, compared to $15,000 in 1990.

Joannie Liss, a San Francisco-based event planner, said she frequently finds that if the groom’s family isn’t paying for half, they do pay for specific elements of the wedding, such as the bar, band, photographer, centerpieces or food.

“I’ve done many weddings where the groom’s family is way more affluent than the bride’s, and the groom’s family wants a fabulous wedding, and when that’s been the case, both the mothers are involved,” Liss said.

While it’s increasingly common for the families of the bride and groom to split the cost, many brides and grooms still go the traditional route. Like Elana Rubenstein and her fiancé, Daniel Weinberg, both of San Francisco, who will be married Jan. 19, 2008.

“From a financial standpoint, we never considered doing it any other way than the traditional way,” Rubenstein said.

She’s the youngest of four girls, and this is the fourth time her parents have opted for that conventional route (bride’s family pays for wedding, groom’s family pays for rehearsal dinner and the rabbi).

Nonetheless, Weinberg, like a growing number of grooms today, has taken an active role in planning the wedding.

“My dad has told this story countless times: He didn’t know anything about his wedding until he shown up, and he would not have showed up unless my mom’s brother came to get him,” Weinberg said, chuckling.

Rubenstein said she tries to include her fiancé in all the big (and some small) wedding decisions. They worked on the language of their ketubah together. They chose invitations together. They’re both involved in creating the ceremony and choosing Jewish rituals. Weinberg even helped Rubenstein choose the outfits for the ring bearers and flower girls.

“It’s our wedding. I want us to make the big decisions together,” Rubenstein said.

“I think more guys want to be involved in the process because they want their own imprint on the wedding,” Weinberg added. “Gender roles don’t play as large of a role today as they did in the past. And I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting the burden of planning the wedding entirely on Elana and her family.”

Yet sharing the wedding is not always simple.

“It definitely creates conflict — I now have more Indian chiefs,” Kleckner said.

Baranovsky said there was a “fair amount of friction” while planning her July wedding, since both families were paying, both felt entitled to have things their way.

Everyone tried to be rational and reasonable.

“We considered how badly our parents wanted something and how much that conflicted with what we wanted. If they cared very deeply about something, we deferred to them,” Baranovsky said. “Sometimes we had to say, ‘We’re paying for a third, and this is just not going to work.’”

Kleckner said whenever disagreements cause problems or put unnecessary pressure on the bride and groom, she speaks up.

“I often remind people that the food is unimportant compared to what’s happening under the chuppah,” she said. “I say, ‘Please remember how blessed you are to be sitting at this table making these kind of decisions.’ And that’s not falling on deaf ears.”

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