We Have Put It Off Twice

There are two dates on two calendars that were circled and then uncircled.

The first one was for last autumn. You got as far as telling a few people, and then you did the arithmetic properly one evening and it did not work, and you told everybody you were going to wait a bit, and everybody said that was sensible.

The second was for this coming spring. You did not tell anybody about that one. You circled it privately and uncircled it privately and nobody ever knew it existed.

And you are still engaged, and you have been for a while now, and the ring has started to feel less like an announcement and more like a fact about your situation.

I want to be direct about what this article will and will not do, because you have every reason to be wary.

I am not going to tell you that God will provide for your wedding.

I want to say that as plainly as I can, because it is the sentence you may have half expected from a site like this one, and it is the single most damaging thing anybody could say to you today.

If somebody tells you to book the date in faith, they have handed you a bill and told you that God will pay it. And if the money does not come, you will not conclude that the advice was foolish. You will conclude that something was wrong with your faith, and that is a wound that outlasts any wedding.

So nothing here promises you money. Not indirectly, not by implication, not in the closing paragraph.

What I am going to do instead is much more useful, which is to look at the actual arithmetic, because I think there is an error in it, and it is not on the side you have been staring at.

You have been treating the cost as fixed and the date as the variable.

Turn that around and almost everything changes.

All the substance of his house

There is a line at the end of the Song of Solomon that is startlingly relevant and almost never read this way.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned. (Song of Solomon 8:7, King James Version)

If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

Contemned means despised, held in scorn, treated as worthless.

Now read what that is actually saying, because it is stronger than people expect from a love poem.

If a man emptied his entire house, everything he owned, and offered it in exchange for love, the offer would be laughed at. Not accepted at a discount. Not appreciated for the effort. Held in contempt, because it is a category error to offer money for something money does not touch.

That is a verse about the relationship between wealth and love, and it comes down considerably harder than anything I would have dared to say to you.

And notice which direction it runs. It is not saying that poor people can love too, in a consoling sort of way. It is saying that all the substance of a house is not even in the currency. It does not buy a small amount of love. It buys none, and the attempt is despised.

So the thing you cannot afford is not a component of what you are about to do. It is not that you are getting a reduced version. The money and the covenant are not on the same axis at all, and the verse says so with a sharpness that ought to be a relief.

You are joining something that money has never once been able to buy any part of, and the substance of a house has never once been in that currency. Song of Solomon 8:7 calls the whole exchange contemptible rather than merely insufficient, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an arithmetic off a couple who have been staring at it for two years.

The cost is the variable

Here is the practical part, and it is the reason this is not just consolation.

There is a number in your head, and you did not choose it.

It arrived from the two or three weddings you have been to most recently, plus whatever you have seen, plus a general sense of what is normal now. And it has been sitting in your planning as though it were a fixed cost of getting married, like a fee.

It is not a fee. There is no fee. The legal requirements cost a very small amount of money in most places, and everything above that is a party, and a party can be almost any size.

So when you say you cannot afford to get married, what is true is that you cannot currently afford the particular wedding that is in your head, which you have never chosen deliberately and have never once examined.

And here is the thing you may not have noticed. Most of the cost of that wedding is other people.

Not the marriage. Not the day for the two of you. The catering, the venue size, the invitations, the transport: nearly all of it scales with the number of people who are watching. The parts that are actually about the two of you being married cost almost nothing.

Which means the reason you have delayed twice is not that marriage is expensive. It is that hosting is expensive, and the two have been fused in your head, and nobody has ever pulled them apart for you.

You are able to separate the marrying from the hosting, and the cost has never once been attached to the part that makes you married. The written word puts love entirely outside the reach of the substance of a house, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a couple which half of the number is actually theirs.

What you would want if nobody were watching

So here is the assignment, and it is a piece of paper, not a decision.

Write down what the two of you would actually want if nobody else were watching.

Sit down together. One page. And answer this question honestly: if there were no relatives with expectations, nobody to disappoint, nobody who would notice or comment or be hurt, what would the two of you want that day to be?

Write it as a description, not a budget. Where, roughly. How many people. What time of day. What you would eat. What you would be wearing. Whether there is music.

And be honest, because the temptation is to write the noble version. Some couples genuinely want twelve people and a meal, and that is real. Some genuinely want a big loud day with everybody there, and that is equally real and is not worldliness.

Do not write the version you think you should want.

Then look at what you have written, and notice two things.

First, notice how much of it you can actually afford. For most couples doing this exercise, the honest version costs a fraction of the number in their heads, because most of that number was never about them.

Second, notice which parts of the expensive wedding are not on your page at all. Those are the parts you have been delaying two years for, and you did not want them.

You are able to find out what the two of you actually want, and it has never once been the same as the wedding in your head. Song of Solomon 8:7 sets love entirely apart from what a house is worth, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with two people at a table with one honest page.