When my partner and I got married in April 2009, it was just a few months into the turmoil of the global financial crisis.
We were living in London, about to move to San Francisco, and while we were financially fine, we could see a lot of people weren't.
We knew we wanted to get married at home in Sydney in front of our friends and family but felt that a flashy wedding would not fit with the mood of the times.
So we spent less than we could afford, and apparently a lot less than the Australian average – though I have my doubts the difference was that extreme.
You see, whenever you read a story on the cost of weddings, it comes with an alarmingly large number. But the truth is the statistics are dodgy and real data is hard to come by.
First, most of the research comes from wedding planners and bridal magazines. At best they deal with a limited segment of the population so the view is skewed. At worst they have a vested interest in normalising spending a lot of money on your wedding.
The numbers bandied about can be wildly different.
For example, Bride to Be magazine's Cost of Love survey found the average wedding was $65,482 in 2015.
Meanwhile, the Easy Weddings annual wedding survey put the average spend at $36,000.
They can't both be right.
There is a dearth of official statistics. The Australian Bureau of Statistics told me it doesn't collect information on the cost of weddings.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission's MoneySmart website has an infographic suggesting the average cost of an Australian wedding is $36,200. It's based on 2012 data from business research firm IBISWorld, which no longer measures the wedding market.
Sometimes the total includes the cost of a honeymoon holiday, or an engagement ring, but this isn't always obvious from the headline figure.
What's more, average doesn't mean typical. If you have 99 couples who spend $10,000 each, and one ultra-wealthy couple spends $1 million, then the average wedding cost is close to $20,000.
It would be more useful to know the median – that is, the middle point where half the people spent more on their wedding and half spent less. In the example above, the median would be about $10,000.
I couldn't find any median figures on wedding costs for Australia. But online news site Slate found the figures for the United States. Are you ready for it?
The results from TheKnot.com's Real Weddings survey suggested an average wedding cost of $US27,427 in 2012 and this was widely reported – but when Slate inquired it turned out the median was only $US18,086.
The real figure is likely to be lower still since TheKnot.com was only polling its own members, who may not be representative of the average person.
I've been to lavish weddings. I also know friends who had a simple service and reception for close family only. I suspect the latter don't get counted in the wedding industry figures at all.
We're a multicultural society and cultural expectations can play a big role in the size of a wedding. So does family wealth. Plus Australians are getting married later in life, so most couples have more disposable income to spend on a wedding without relying on their parents.
You should spend whatever you want – if you want to blow $65,000 on your wedding or even more, be my guest (or perhaps I should ask to be your guest). Probably best if you don't block off an entire Sydney street without permission like Salim Mehajer, or is that just me?
My problem is with shonky figures that get uncritically accepted and breathlessly repeated by the media.
It could lead to wedding inflation, in much the same way that companies reporting executive pay has been a factor in the runaway growth in executive and CEO salaries in recent years. No one wants to be below average.
I don't buy into the idea that a wedding budget of $35,000 – let alone $65,000 – is typical. And given the limited sample, I question whether it's even average.
Of course, no one should base their wedding budget on what other people spend. Yet we know social pressure is real, plus it's a fact that many providers try to justify high costs based on what's average.
I estimate that our wedding cost less than $15,000. That's not including the hens' or stags' nights, my engagement ring, or our honeymoon.
It does include invitations, a church service, a designer bridal dress, hair and makeup, suit hire for the men, flowers, wedding rings, photography, and the reception at waterfront setting. We had 110 guests, food and alcohol, and a live band.
We were creative in our approach, but I don't feel we cut corners, and the wedding was as beautiful and memorable as I wanted. I'll do a follow-up piece on practical strategies for reducing the wedding bills.
It turned out that our sensitivities over the GFC were unwarranted. The rest of the world was in the grip of recession but in Australia everyone was still talking about the price of real estate and how they spent their $900 stimulus money.
But we have no regrets.
Two economists at Emory University in the US, Hugo Mialon and Andrew Francis, have researched the correlation between the cost of weddings and the rate of divorce.
It boiled down to this: "The types of weddings associated with lower likelihood of divorce are those that are relatively inexpensive but are high in attendance."
Perhaps we were on to something.
Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the editor of Money. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.
