When did attending a wedding begin to require taking out a small personal loan?
Danny Cipriani, 38, and his fiancée AnnaLynne McCord, 39, are the latest couple to discover that asking guests to fund your wedding is, unsurprisingly, not going down particularly well.
The former English rugby union player began dating American actress AnnaLynne, after splitting from his wife, Victoria Rose O’Callaghan, in November 2023.
Now, ahead of their big day, the pair have set up a Honeyfund asking loved ones to contribute towards everything from their marriage licence to photography, flowers and the wedding cake, with suggested donations ranging from £75 to £450.
The total — not including requested cash donations — comes to £10,660.
It’s hard to imagine a quicker way to suck the romance out of saying ‘Join us for our special day’ than following it with ‘your payment has been processed’.
And yet, while the internet has understandably piled on Danny for what many have called an entitled cash grab, I can’t help thinking he’s merely the logical conclusion of what weddings have become.
The wedding industry has spent years convincing couples that the most important day of their lives also needs to be the most expensive.
Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll be greeted by drone footage of Tuscan villas, champagne towers taller than the bride, personalised cocktails, fireworks, live painters, content creators whose sole job is documenting your vows for social media before your photographer has even downloaded the memory card, and enough white roses to make Kew Gardens blush.
Somewhere along the way, getting married stopped being enough, and it became a competition.
The average UK wedding now costs more than £20,000. In London, that figure climbs even higher. According to Bridebook’s latest wedding report, couples are spending an average of £278 per guest before anyone has even bought a new outfit or paid for a hotel.
And that’s before we get to what guests are expected to fork out.
One source, who decided she wanted to remain anonymous for fear of sounding ungrateful for all the invites, told Metro: ‘It’s getting to the point where I have to tell people I really care about that I just can’t afford it. Between traveling for Hen dos and destination weddings, this summer alone I’ve spent around £5000 attending weddings.’
Sam from Dorset said he’s had to turn down several wedding invitations in the last couple of years because of financial strain, and would certainly not attend a wedding where he was asked to help fund it.
‘It already costs so much to attend a wedding, between transport, outfits, wedding gifts, and, babysitters it’s already an expensive night out if the wedding is in our city. If it’s further away and requires paying for accommodation, that’s just not possible for us right now.’
That’s why Danny Cipriani’s Honeyfund feels so tone deaf, because there’s a difference between saying, ‘If you were thinking of buying us a gift, we’d love a contribution towards our honeymoon,’ and effectively itemising your wedding invoice for your guests to chip away at.
At what point does the wedding stop being hosted by the couple and start resembling a Kickstarter campaign? Perhaps the most frustrating thing about modern wedding culture is that it makes this behaviour feel oddly normal.
Couples are under enormous pressure to stage a day worthy of social media, while guests are expected to bankroll increasing chunks of it.
If Danny and AnnaLynne genuinely can’t afford the wedding they want, there’s an incredibly simple solution available to them: Have a cheaper wedding.
Scale it back until it fits your budget, just as most people have to do with every other major purchase in their lives.
Because while weddings are becoming increasingly unaffordable for couples, they’re becoming just as unaffordable for everyone else too.