Maria entirely failed to decorate her cakes. They were just ordinary cakes with nothing but plain frosting on them. Come on! It’s not that hard to do a tiny bit of basic decorative piping, or sugar a few edible flowers and place them on the cake. Heck, even a few colorful sprinkles or pretty plates would have made them look more festive! It’s not always necessary to go the extra mile, but an extra foot or two is usually a great idea.

I honestly do not have a clue why people allow themselves to be manipulated into going into thousands of dollars of debt for their child’s wedding. Yes, you want to make it as nice as you can, but there are so many ways of cutting costs. And frankly, I would worry about marrying a twenty-eight year old who couldn’t understand that $X does not equal ‘$whatever the hell I want to buy and have someone else pay for.’

It never occured to me to ask for wedding money. I guess I figured if I was old enough to be getting married, I was old enough to handle the responsibility of paying for it. Of course, I was thirty when I married. Had I married at twenty, my father might well have offered…or more likely my mother would have insisted he offer something.

Even if my father had given me money for my wedding, though, there’s no way I would have expected him to give me more purely because I wanted more expensive things. I would have expected to either stay within the budget offered or to pay the difference myself.

Tell the bride she’s running the show, tell her the bills are in her name, and give her a fixed dollar amount (if anything — honestly — at 28, you should be paying for your own wedding).