Till Debt Do Us Part: Evaluating the Social, Economic & Psychological Pressures of Modern-Day Weddings - By Mohammad Abdul Razzaq Siddique

Written By: Mohammad Abdul Razzaq Siddique

Category: Essay

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Mohammad Abdul Razzaq Siddique presents an insightful essay titled "Till Debt Do Us Part: Evaluating the Social, Economic & Psychological Pressures of Modern-Day Weddings." Featured within the esteemed Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, this essay delves into the complexities facing couples as they navigate the multifaceted demands of wedding planning. With a focus on the socio-economic and psychological strains, Siddique's work sheds light on the enduring impact of societal expectations and the commercialization of weddings.

About the Work

This essay meticulously examines the escalating pressures associated with contemporary weddings, exploring the influence of social status, family expectations, and social media. Siddique articulates the financial burdens young couples face, transforming a once joyous occasion into a source of stress and debt. His exploration of societal norms and their implications offers a profound commentary on the modern-day marriage celebration.

Till Debt Do Us Part: Evaluating the Social, Economic & Psychological Pressures of Modern-Day Weddings

Original Submission by Mohammad Abdul Razzaq Siddique

Till Debt Do Us Part: Evaluating the Social, Economic & Psychological Pressures of Modern-Day Weddings

Mohammad Abdul Razzaq Siddique

The guest list was originally meant to stay under a hundred. But like everyone at dinner that day, it put on some weight, swelling to roughly six hundred because every aunty with a distant cousin insisted that their absence would cause more than the required amount of drama. One night of celebration became several. A loan with a brutal interest rate became practically unavoidable, but at least the wedding photographs looked flawless. This is one story amongst millions. The global wedding services market, valued at roughly USD 700 billion in 2025, is projected to more than double by 2034 (Fortune Business Insights, 2026). Yet that growth is far from free, especially for the couples at the center of it. The steady commercialization of weddings in today’s world, driven by socio-economic pressures and social media hyper-idealization, has transformed marriage from a joyful celebration into an elusive financial milestone and relationship hurdles for many young adults.

Weddings have for a greater part of history served as status signaling, and that tradition now utilizes customs and religion to further inflate modest obligations into excessive pre-marital commitments. One of the few occasions where an entire community comes together to watch a family’s resources on display, a wedding’s scale of celebration establishes a statement of standing, from the guest count to the caterer, every minute detail is reported as evidence to family reputation and financial worth. A formalization of this behaviour by economists: Bloch et al. (2004) model wedding size and spending as a signal of a family’s quality, a way of converting money into public prestige. And undoubtedly, the signal only works when it’s visible, thereby setting a baseline. Once a certain standard is expected, anything smaller counts as failure, making the standard unsustainable even before the long list of family demands come into the picture. This fits with Asia Pacific, a region where extended families and community reputation carry great weight, accounting for 44.14% of the global wedding services market in 2025 (Fortune Business Insights, 2026). The Gulf offers a well-documented example which is replicated similarly in other parts of the world: multi-day celebrations with henna parties, luxury limousines, and hotel ballrooms can exceed one million dirhams (Bristol-Rhys, J, 2007). Status competition as the remote cause, and family demands as the proximate cause, serve as the perfect ingredients for a recipe with only one outcome: a bill the couple cannot afford. Religious practices can inadvertently add upon the bill, such as the Islamic practice of mahr (bride wealth obligation), generally capped at 20,000 AED, yet actual demands surpass 150,000 AED routinely, some unofficial agreements even touching an unfathomable 800,000 AED (The National, 2010). The gap can’t simply be explained by what the couple wants – the additional reputational cost of the wedding adds up quickly.

Amidst the couple barely surviving the family-status competition, they’re awaited by the grand stage of social media platforms: the precipitating cause which amplifies financial pressure by setting luxury wedding benchmarks that few budgets can match. Sharabi and Hopkins (2021) analyzed 3,270 Instagram posts from 178 couples and found that public displays of relationships create what they refer to as “normative relationship traces”, a cookie-cutter template of what a couple is supposed to look like. Though the study uses relationships in general, in today’s day and age, it comfortably extends into modern-day weddings too. As the most photographed event in the duration of a relationship, every polished Instagram post raises the benchmark for the next wedding. If family and relatives were the judges of comparison before, the jury is now global and permanent, ridding the privacy of a sacred moment as every platform carries images across borders and remains on one’s feed. Essentially, status signaling has upgraded from a long private guest list to the comfort of everyone’s screen, developing practically unreachable standards for a budget that the common man (and woman) aren’t designed to meet.

The first and most immediate economic outcome of hyper-commercialized weddings is widespread household debt, generating severe financial strain upon early marriage life. A LendingTree survey of 1,050 newlyweds found that 67% took on personal debt to fund their weddings (LendingTree, 2025) and for 23% of couples, money was the most stressful part of the planning process. In actual fact, 16% admitted that budget disagreements made them consider splitting up before the wedding even took place. The chain of causality quickly becomes distinct: when a perilous combination of family expectations and social media set a price that’s hard to reach, borrowing closes the gap. The earliest months of marriage, which require a strong sense of stability become tainted with constant lingering debt. Though the LendingTree survey follows American couples, the study showcases a mechanism, not a geographical variation. Any couple pressured to spend way beyond their means must borrow, and borrowing creates strain, and not just in one aspect.

On a broader societal scale, many young adults now indefinitely postpone or forgo marriage due to financial accumulation taking precedence over emotional maturity or true connection. The chairwoman of the UAE’s Marriage Fund told lawmakers that the fund’s studies showed up to 79 per cent of those polled saw a strong relation between late marriage and excessive marriage costs (Gulf News, 2018). The state’s response, having sponsored over 40 mass weddings since 1999 and offers grants of 70,000 dirhams to help young adults bypass runaway individual costs, reveals a much deeper issue. The reasoning is straightforward. If the average modern-day wedding costs more than a young person can plausibly save, waiting becomes rational, and for some the wait never ends. While wedding costs are not the single most important reason since rising education levels, career ambitions, and urbanization can explain why people marry later, it doesn’t explain why some don’t marry at all. Cost is what turns delays to deterrents. However, the fact that governmental organizations are paying people to marry more cheaply suggests that cost is a significant contributing factor, not just a footnote.

Beyond financial distress, a subtle yet daunting predicament presents itself. Exorbitant wedding debt and commitments may foster toxic power imbalances in households that significantly elevate possible domestic abuse and conflict. Though there isn’t conclusive evidence that points towards belligerent abuse, a causal chain following bride price paves justifiable reasoning. In Timor-Leste, Khan and Hyati (2012) compared clans that practiced bride price with clans that did not and found that 60% of women in bride-price clans experienced domestic violence, compared with 26% in the others. While this leans towards correlation, and not unequivocal causation as the clans could differ in several parameters – the tenable mechanism paints a picture worth deciphering: when a marriage has been secured at great financial cost, a power dynamic develops with one partner coming to feel a sense of ownership while the other feeling a lack of autonomy and loss of negotiation capacity. Following the causal chain, debt could augment the same imbalance, not simply in a physical sense, but a deeper physiological abuse that’s much harder to account for. This pathway is plausibly a contributing factor to an issue that vehemently lacks attention, and it merits investigation precisely because the stakes for those affected are so high.

Somewhere, an aunty insists on calling just one more distant cousin, as though the couple isn’t under enough pressure already. That pressure has a very coherent chain of events:

family status competition sets a sky-high price, social media manages to raise it even further, the couple is indebted as an “auspicious” start to the marriage, and the damage reaches the marriage itself, through delay and possibly through harm. None of this is fixed. Unless societal norms shift towards healthier financial sustainability, the future generations shall continue to reap the effects of commercialization through crippling debt, delayed marriages and heightened conflict.

References

Bloch, F., Rao, V., & Desai, S. (2004) Wedding celebrations as conspicuous consumption: signaling social status in rural India. https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/39/3/675.abstract

Bristol-Rhys, J. (2007). Weddings, marriage and money in the United Arab Emirates. Anthropology of the Middle East, 2(1), 20–36. https://doi.org/10.3167/ame.2007.020103

Fortune Wedding Insights (2026) Wedding Planner Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By Service Type (Full Service and Partial Service), By Budget Range (Standard, Premium, and Luxury), and Regional Forecast, 2026-2034 https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/wedding-planner-market-112905

Gulf News. (2018). Member voices concern over late marriage among Emirati women. https://gulfnews.com/uae/government/member-voices-concern-over-late-marriage-among-emirati-women-1.1026662

Khan & Hyati (2012) Bride-Price and Domestic Violence in Timor-Leste (United Nations Populations Fund) https://timor-leste.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/Bride-PriceandDomesticViolenceinTimor-Leste.pdf

LendingTree (2025) 67% of Newlyweds Went Into Debt for Wedding https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/newlywed-wedding-debt-survey/

Sharabi & Hopkins (2021) Picture perfect? Examining associations between relationship quality, attention to alternatives, and couples’ activities on Instagram (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349082970_Picture_perfect_Examining_associations_between_relationship_quality_attention_to_alternatives_and_couples'_activities_on_Instagram

The National (2010) Keep dowries and wedding costs down, couples urged. https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/keep-dowries-and-wedding-costs-down-couples-urged-1.531253

The National (2010) More Emiratis are marrying foreigners to ‘save money’. https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/more-emiratis-are-marrying-foreigners-to-save-money-1.483691

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a celebrated event that brings together writers from around the world to showcase their creativity and insight. It serves as a platform for diverse voices to explore and express the nuances of human experience through poetry and creative writing, fostering a global community of literary excellence.

We extend our gratitude to Mohammad Abdul Razzaq Siddique for his compelling contribution to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. "Till Debt Do Us Part" provides a thought-provoking perspective on the intricate pressures of modern weddings. Thank you for sharing your voice and insights with us.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.