Weddit Survey Results! plus bonus questions
A few weeks ago, I posted a survey for the community to fill out, about them and their weddings. There were 1,714 responses. This survey was totally unscientific, a survey that is at best representative of this forum and not of all brides and grooms, and all those other disclaimers, but still fun to see! Here is a link to the results and here's a summary of them:
- The sub is very female: 96% are brides, 4% are grooms.
- The sub is pretty American: 75% are American, 12% Canadian, 5% are from the UK, 3% Australian, 2.3% Western Europe, and less that 2% for everywhere else combined. Of the Americans, the Northeast and the Midwest were the most represented regions at 17.7% and 17.3%.
- The sub is very heterosexual: 98.4% are one half of a bride and groom, 1.4% are one of two brides, and only 0.2% (4 people!) were one of two grooms.
- The sub is largely mid- to late-20s: about 1/3 apiece fall into the 24-26 (30.4%) and 27-29 (34.8%) age categories at marriage. 18.9% will be 30-32, 8.6% 21-23, 4.5% 33-35, and <3% for under-21 and over-35 brides and grooms combined.
- The sub is very white: 87.5% identified as white, 4.5% as Latino or Latina, 3.8% as East Asian, 3.6% as bi- or multiracial, 1.4% as black, 1.3% as South Asian, and less than 1% for other identifications. 17.3% considered their relationship interracial.
- The most common way to meet your future spouse was at college, followed closely by through a dating app or site. If you include all the responses in "other" that were Reddit, Twitter, online gaming, or other non-dating sites, meeting online would surpass college to be the most common (23%). My favorite one-off responses were "nudist resort," "through my ex," and "we don't actually remember" . . . ?
- A little under half of Wedditors (43.5%) had been together more than 4 years before getting engaged. 3-4 years and 2-3 years were tied at 17.8% apiece, 15% at 1-2 years (meaning about half were together 1-4 years), and just 5.4% were under a year.
- The most common engagement length was 1-2 years at 58%. About a quarter in addition had shorter engagements (6 months-1 year) and 11.3% were 2-3 years.
- 97% were planning their wedding for their first marriage.
- About 60% had diamond engagement rings. Moissanite (10.9%) and sapphire (8.8%) were the most popular non-diamond center stones, followed by emerald, morganite, and opal at about 2% each. 2.5% skipped the engagement ring.
- The plurality of weddings (31.3%) project having 100-150 guests. Slightly smaller weddings of 76-100 guests were the second most common at 22.5%.
- The most common wedding budget (32.1%) is $10,000-$20,000 USD. About 1/3 have budgets under $10,000. Interestingly, just 17.8% have budgets of $30,000 and above, despite The Knot's statistics that the average wedding costs $35,329. Could be instructive about medians vs. averages (or The Knot's demographics vs. Weddit's)!
- About half of wedding parties (47.3%) are 5-10 people. 14.3% are forgoing wedding parties.
- A little over 1/3 apiece are having autumn (36.8%) or summer (35.%) weddings.
- We have a quite secular crowd on Weddit, as about 3/4 are having non-religious weddings (though it should be noted that a lot of the "other" responses also said their weddings would be mostly secular).
- The most evenly split category was on the question of children at the wedding. Approximately 1/3 apiece were having kids there, not having kids there, and having just family or bridal party's kids, with the slight edge going to allowing them (38.7%).
- Outdoor wedding ceremonies were more common than indoor, 59% to 41%.
- Approximately the same percentage of brides would be wearing a long white or ivory dress as a diamond ring, 60%. When you include long white-adjacent dresses (blush, champagne, etc.) it climbs to 85.5%.
- 85% also planned on going on a honeymoon, and a little over half of those were leaving right for after the wedding.
I wanted to do all sorts of analysis looking at how various factors interacted with each other, but the raw data is kind of messy and I haven't really had the time. Plus I realized my statistics skills are kind of rusty. I did look at one thing, though: the relationship of # of guests and wedding budget. Of course, it makes sense that these would be correlated, but I think the ways and degree to which they are correlated is helpful to see.
For example, only 6.1% of Wedditors overall had weddings of under 25 guests, but 40.6% of those with budgets of $5,000 and under did (and 0 of those with budgets of $30k+). Expanding to 50 guests and under, that represented 16.8% of all Wedditors but 79.6% of weddings $10k and under - meaning only about 20% of weddings $10k and under have more than 50 guests. And similarly, only 13% of weddings of over 100 people are under $10k, and about 1/3 (34%) are under $20k.
On the flip side, only 5.4% of weddings overall had more than 200 guests, but 35.2% of weddings over $50k did. I did notice that guest count was highly correlated to cost on the low ends, but less correlated once you got to the average number of guests (101-150) and past the average cost ($10-20k) - so whether you were spending $20k or $50k, you were still most likely to fall in the 101-150 guest category (indicating that past $20k or so, the cost was less about the size of the wedding than it was for lower budgets). If you take just that most-popular size of wedding (101-150 guests), about half were under $20k and half were over $20k.
There were no weddings of 200 or more people with under $5k budgets, which I thought of because of that study that said the lowest divorce risk is if you have over 200 guests and spend under $1k! So as we all suspected, the divorce-proof wedding is impossible. But I guess the 4 people with under $5k weddings and 150-200 guests win on that count!
I'm sure someone with a better stats background than me could quantify that better, so if anyone wants to play with the raw data, you can access it by clicking on the green icon with a white cross on the top of the results page! And here are my separate charts with guest count by budget and budget by guest count.
I thought this was super interesting and informative! I fell into the most common categories in most, but learned that I'm in the minority for being 32, getting engaged quickly (under 6 months), and having an emerald engagement ring, an indoor wedding, and a 12-person wedding party.
Some mentioned a few questions they wished were included, and there were some I wanted to include too but cut in the interest of brevity. So if anyone's appetite for surveys is still whetted, here is a follow-up survey with 7 bonus questions - they deal with some of the topics that come up here that tend to be more split or contentious.
Thanks for participating, and for reading!
Posted Jun 19, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC
It's 100% this, as the median spending on Weddings across the US falls into that $10,000 - $20,000 range.
https://www.theweddingreport.com/index.cfm/action/blog/view/post/pid/670/title/2016_U_S__Median_Cost_of_a_Wedding_was__14_399
https://thebillfold.com/lies-damned-lies-and-wedding-cost-statistics-dcec7c48bc8a
i.e. Fuck the Knot and other reports for using a skewed Mean/Average and trying to convince us that the "normal" across the board is to sped $30k+.
I've seen that first link before and couldn't quite figure out the source of their numbers - most seems plausible but it is very surprising to me if the median wedding photography is really $883, for example.
But yes, regardless, the median is far under the average reported by The Knot. I read a statistic that 40% of weddings were under $10k, so by that measure, Weddit is a little spendier with only about a third! Though the 40% statistic was from 2014, so it could be fewer for weddings this year and next.
Yeah, that photography number is super low.