Are weddings actually getting longer, or just more visible

There's a thing that happened in the 1950s with suburban home design—the ranch house became *standard*, and suddenly we had data on how Americans built houses. Before that, you had some big estates, some small cottages, a lot of regional variation. But most of it was invisible unless you were a surveyor or an architect. Then suburbs standardized everything and made it countable. I wonder if weddings are in that phase now, but in reverse. We're not standardizing weddings—we're just finally seeing them all at once. A wedding in 1975 could be elaborate and spend six months of planning and it would still be known only to the couple, their families, and maybe the local paper's society section. Now it's documented from save-the-date through honeymoon announcement. We're experiencing a visibility explosion, and I'm not sure we're actually seeing growth so much as we're seeing the parts that always existed suddenly made legible. That said, *some* things have probably changed. The wedding industry is now consolidated enough to market escalation as a norm in ways it wasn't before. A couple in a small town in 1980 didn't have Instagram showing them 47 elaborately styled alternatives. The comparison set was maybe your parents' wedding and your friends' weddings. Now it's global and curated and algorithmic. That probably does shift behavior at the margins. But I'd want to see actual data before I'm convinced weddings are materially longer. Divorce rates, remarriage rates, and the rise of destination weddings might be the bigger shifts—those things *are* different from mid-century patterns. The elaborateness question feels like it might just be that we're finally counting what was always there.