So it turns out that fewer people are getting married, and Las Vegas is feeling the pinch. Now, 92,000 weddings a year in Las Vegas sounds like a lot but that is down. And bear in mind that historically, this is about one-twentieth of the marriages in the country. If that is the case, then that means that there were about 1.8 million marriages last year — a number that seems low for a nation of over 300 million people.
Six and a half years ago, my wife and I were married in Las Vegas. I had, and still have, almost nothing bad to say about the experience. We got a lot of value for our money compared to what we could have got back at home in California, and it was easier and exceedingly popular with our families.
Most amusingly, the only thing of any real bother we had to do before the wedding was getting the actual marriage license. This involved a trip to a state government building, in downtown Las Vegas. There we found that the marriage license office was open 24 hours a day. I have long thought that an excellent reality show or HBO documentary could be made there, finding out who exactly needs a marriage license at three in the morning on a Wednesday.
But I digress. Las Vegas offers a good product, something that people presumably want. This is indicative that demand for marriage overall is declining. Why is that?
Is it the fact that gays can get married now too in Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, the District of Columbia, and Iowa? This strikes me as rather unlikely.
Are people deciding that they just don’t need to be married? If you believe as I do that human nature is fundamentally unchanging, then the desire people have to couple up and make lives together certainly hasn’t gone anywhere. And marriage offers the Cadillac package of joint life-planning, at a bargain-basement price.
Is it the fact that people just aren’t going to Las Vegas as much anymore, due to tough economic times? Perhaps, but it’s probably more a function of tough economic times to begin with. A colleague who does family law has related to me on several occasions that his business is down because his clients cannot afford to get divorced. Most of the money to pay for divorces has historically come from liquidating the house out of the marital estate, and when the typical house fell underwater there ceased to be any money to pay for the divorce. With no money, no divorces, and thus no new marriages.
One situation he related to me had the husband and wife living together in the house they jointly owned, with the husband and his new girlfriend in one part of the house and the wife and her new boyfriend in another, with everyone working to keep the house from falling in to foreclosure. That scenario sounded like a ticking time bomb to me. Or the premise to a sitcom, but I foresaw a greater potential for violence than for belly laughs.
It may be, then, that for a lot of people marriage is something of a luxury — an aid to life planning but not a necessity. Until property values rise to the point that those people who want to divorce and remarry can afford to do so, many of them are electing to simply stay married and live their lives as they see fit — dating, cohabitating, opting out of their marital estate with a ten-dollar separation filing, and just not finishing the paperwork because they just can’t afford to.
Las Vegas’ wedding industry will turn around — after its divorce industry turns around, too. That won’t happen until people can liquidate their houses with enough capital gain to pay their lawyers. Until then, Las Vegas wedding chapels are just going to have to double as venues for Quinceañeras, bar mitzvahs, and proms. Which kind of sucks, but one thing it will do is get a lot of people thinking about why they want to get married in the first place.
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