ACHING for a giant rock of an engagement ring?
Maybe you should think again. A recent study carried out in the U.S. has found a positive correlation between the amount of money couples spend on engagement rings and lavish, over-the-top weddings and the odds of immanent divorce. Put simply… people who spend more are less likely to last.
The study was done at Emory University, and looked at 3,000 people who were married to someone of the opposite sex. The specific numbers found that men who spent $2,000 to $4,000 on an engagement ring were 1.3 times more likely to get a divorce than men who spent $500-$2,000. Women were 3.5 times more likely to get divorced when they spent over $20,000 on a wedding than those who spent between $5,000 and $10,000. But don’t think you can get away with a freebie here: couples who spent $500 or less on an engagement ring were more likely to divorce as well.
So… what does this all mean? Trends show that the average cost of a wedding these days is, at the very least, around $30,000 any way you slice it, so that automatically puts a lot of people into the “danger zone.” The researchers suggested that the correlation might be due to the stress involved in the wedding planning. Or, perhaps it’s because the average person can only afford to plan a wedding in that price bracket and the average person is more likely to get divorced than the outliers? Either way, maybe it’ll make us think twice when we watch Kim Kardashian’s fairy-tale wedding part deux and sigh dreamily,” Oh yeah, Kim and Kanye will be together forever, FOR SURE.”
No matter how much money you end up spending on your big day, there are a couple things that the study determined that you can do to up your odds of sticking it out over the long run. That would be dating for three years before you decide to tie the knot, invite as many people as possible to your wedding celebration, and to absolutely take a honeymoon. Perhaps these things make the commitment seem a little more official and invested? But then again, they also raise that old wedding cost quite a bit, too. You can’t win. Mayeb just have a civil commitment at the courthouse and call it day.
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