One does not need any especially sophisticated powers of deduction to figure out that females and males have been getting together, to effect reproduction and to look after their offspring, across the millenia of human history. The arrangement between the participating male and female will always have been special, but its identification as a longterm arrangement, union beginning with a selected ceremony, the wedding option, is only a comparatively recent event.

The old adage that “today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s necessities” applies to weddings just as it applies to washing machines and hot water. Formalisation of marriage, underpinned with rights and needs, and marked by the public rite of the wedding, was at first limited to rich land-owners
- that is, the people with major assets requiring focused scrutiny to their inter-generational transfer. For poorer folks the wedding option could get moving when circumstances so needed without the excessive luxury of a wedding.

As weddings have become the norm, the rituals surrounding them became more complicated, and subject also to the whims of fashion. There have been periods when it isn’t been satisfactory to have a marital relationship without first having a wedding - that is, “getting married”. This view of marriage, giving it ’sanctity ‘, in turn gave greater significance to the wedding rite. And as this happened, the wedding got to be a larger handle more of everything
- more ceremony, more people, grander receptions and banquets, dearer gifts, more bridal wear and other formal wear dressing up, and inevitably more cost.

Nowadays , the wedding option is often an enormous vision needing careful online research and selection, requiring all kinds of specialists, for the two major elements: the formal rite, perhaps at a church, but any costly locale will do; and the reception, which again can be anywhere suitably dimensioned, with the price suitably adjusted so it isn't seen as inexpensive.
Caterers concentrate on wedding banquets;
the wedding cake is vital enough to need another specialization. Wedding floral arrangements have particular significance;
table flower arrangements, wedding bouquets, floral buttonholes for the men. Wedding limousines (since autos aren't up to the job); wedding photographers and videographers to assemble the wedding album; and special, harmonized dress-up arrangements for not just the bride and groom, but a large listing of others with some role to perform on the day.

It’s now got to the point at which the wedding is so massive - it regularly overwhelms the ‘marriage ‘ itself, which these days doubtless started quietly a little time before the wedding - that another ceremony has now developed to mark the countdown to the wedding. This is the engagement party and can be the sole wedding option some now take.

Picking the wedding option in the Brisbane CBD and regional areas using the web online directory dLook.