Do American weddings keep getting longer or just feel that way

This is thoughtful, but I think you're doing something sneaky with the class control. When you say "if you controlled for class and region," you're kind of hand-waving away the actual mechanism that matters. The visibility thing isn't separate from what's happening to middle-class weddings—it *is* the mechanism. I taught in a fairly affluent suburban district, and I watched kids stress about prom in ways that felt genuinely different from what their parents described. Not because the event itself was objectively longer or more elaborate, but because the comparison set expanded. A bride in Des Moines in 1975 saw maybe six weddings a year in person. Now she sees 500 on Pinterest before she buys her dress. That's not just documentation bias; that's a real shift in the reference point people use to answer "what does normal look like?" And when normal shifts upward, vendors have every incentive to push you toward it. The paralysis-of-choice thing you mention at the end might actually be the real tell. That friction—the decision tax—is itself a cost (time, mental energy, money spent on consultation). Whether the ceremony is 35 minutes or 45 minutes might not matter much, but the *planning* has definitely inflated. That's a genuine change, even if the wedding itself hasn't.

Do you have a sense of whether the *expectation* that guests attend satellite events has actually increased, though? I'm less interested in ceremony length than in the total time commitment. A 1950s society wedding might've been three days, sure, but those were rich people with flexible schedules and staff. The rehearsal dinner, the brunch—you went if you were close family or in the wedding party. Now I'm seeing people expect out-of-town guests to block off a weekend, sometimes more, for bach parties that happen months earlier, then the shower, then the wedding itself. The *total ask* feels different even if the ceremony's still forty minutes. Is that just selection bias on my part (knowing more coupled people, paying attention to weddings more), or do you think the actual logistical burden on regular attendees has shifted?

I'd be careful with the documentation bias argument here—it does some real work in your post, but I think it's doing more work than the evidence supports. Yes, we have better records of fancy weddings now. But we also have *worse* records of ordinary ones, which cuts the other way. A 1950s couple in a small town left almost nothing behind; same couple today generates a wedding website, a vendor invoice trail, maybe a venue booking confirmation. That's not invisible to analysis—it's just invisible to us scrolling through *Society* magazine archives. The duration question is testable though, and I'd want to see actual numbers before accepting that nothing's changed. Venue contracts, catering minimums, photographer hour packages—these do leave traces. The wedding industry didn't just become better at marketing pre-existing events; they have strong financial incentives to *extend* them. Longer receptions mean higher bar tabs. More hours booked mean more vendor fees. That's real leverage. A rehearsal dinner in 1955 might have been two hours at someone's house. Now it's a catered event at a separate venue because that's what the industry sells you. Your point about collapse of normality is sharper and probably more true. That *is* new, and it does drive a kind of decision paralysis that generates cost independently of whether weddings are objectively longer. But I'd resist collapsing the duration question into "we just notice it more now." We might, but they might also actually be longer for structural reasons beyond visibility.

I think you're onto something real here, but I'd separate two different things that keep getting tangled up. The documentation bias point is solid—we see curated peaks, not distributions. But the "collapse of normality" bit is doing a lot of work, and I'm not sure it's quite right. The template in 1975 existed *because* fewer people had real choice. You followed the template if you had the money and social position to follow it, or you did something much smaller and less visible. That wasn't stability—that was constraint. Now a couple in Des Moines can actually look at their own values and budget and pick something that fits, instead of defaulting to "this is what people like us do." That feels like paralysis if you frame it from above, but from inside it might just feel like autonomy. The stress is real either way, sure. But I'd be cautious about romanticizing the old template as some kind of lost clarity. Where I think you're genuinely right: the *industry's ability to monetize the comparison itself* is new. It's not just that weddings got longer or more expensive. It's that the industry now profits from making people feel like their natural instinct—whatever it is—is inadequate. That's different from documenting what was always there.