If you're getting married you're an as-hole! Yes you heard me!

Yes, I get it. You're madly in love, want to crank out some future Ivy League graduates and see us to fly to Bermuda for your Gladiator themed wedding. Eat me!

You have a 50% chance of getting divorced and your future wife is a bitch. BTW...not only am I skipped your lame celebration but I'm not visiting your Amazon registry.

Wedding Guests Are Broke, Tired and Begging for Mercy

This year could approach a record for the number of marriages being celebrated; ‘Everyone and their mom in my life is getting married’

By Jacob Passy, WSJ

June 16, 2022 10:08 am ET

For Mackenzie Crocker, chats with friends and colleagues often turn to weddings. But Ms. Crocker has an unusually full bouquet of tidbits to add to the conversation. She expects to attend 18 wedding celebrations this year.

“Everyone and their mom in my life is getting married,” says Ms. Crocker, a 25-year-old from Conway, Ark. “It’s become a part of my personality at this point.”

The summer wedding season is upon us, and this time it’s coming down with the force of two tons of rice. Between nuptials delayed by the pandemic and those for recently engaged couples, this year could approach a record set in the 1980s for the number of marriages being celebrated. Ms. Crocker estimates more than half of her weekends over the past year featured a wedding, bridal shower or bachelorette party.

With so many weddings being held in 2022, the year has grown beyond busy and pricey for wedding guests. They face an array of conga lines, open bars, murky dress codes—“beach formal” anyone?—and going broke paying for travel and the best stand mixer in the department-store registry. (Fatigue also sets in; there’s only so many times you can do the “Cupid Shuffle,” notes Ms. Crocker.)

Almost 2.5 million weddings are expected to occur in the U.S. this year, according to data from the Wedding Report, a research firm. That figure doesn’t include instances where couples are hosting larger celebrations after eloping or having smaller weddings earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic.

A survey of more than 2,500 wedding guests conducted by wedding-planning website Zola found that people on the site are attending four weddings and seven wedding-related events on average this year. However, the percentage of guests RSVPing yes for weddings is down slightly compared with prepandemic levels, a sign of how booked up many people are this year, says Katie Brownstein, of the wedding platform Joy.

Having a social calendar filled with multiple weddings may be an enviable problem, but attending all of them comes at a price. Those with an above-average number of nuptials to attend this year must go to extreme lengths to make it possible. Shivali Mathur Shenoy is set to attend eight weddings this year. All but one of these are Indian weddings and multiday affairs. And multiple days means multiple outfits.

With so many events to attend, Mrs. Shenoy says she and her husband barely unpack anymore. Instead, they leave their luggage in the guest room of their apartment in San Francisco filled with much of what they would need for a wedding, such as jewelry, makeup and shoes. “I’ve just been switching out the clothes,” Mrs. Shenoy says.

The Zola study found on average people spend $593 to go to a wedding by car and $1,314 by plane. Those costs add up, particularly for people in the wedding parties.

Coleman Horsley, a 28-year-old engineer and part-time M.B.A. student who lives in Cambridge, Mass., is attending seven weddings this year; he is a member of the wedding party in five of them. All but one of the weddings involves travel, to places as far as Puerto Rico and Phoenix. Plus, he was asked to attend multiple destination parties in locations such as Nashville, Tenn., and Austin, Texas.

Factoring the cost of traveling to these events, clothing for the weddings and gifts, Mr. Horsley estimates he may end up spending more than $10,000. That isn’t the only cost. Having so many celebrations to take part in has put some strain on Mr. Horsley’s social life and has made dating difficult, he says.

In one case, he had to send a screenshot of his calendar to someone he was trying to schedule a date with to prove how busy he was. “It’ll be several months where just every weekend is full,” he says.

At a recent wedding, he attempted to finish some homework before the ceremony and ended up missing the bride walking down the aisle.

For Mrs. Shenoy, sourcing all of the lehengas and saris she needed for the weddings was a challenge, especially since she wanted to avoid re-wearing outfits too often.

She normally buys the outfits she needs for events like weddings when she visits family in India—but the pandemic has prevented those trips. While she purchased some outfits online, she has also relied on borrowing clothes from others, including her mother who lives in Texas, and having them altered.

“It’s a mad rush to make sure everything is done on time,” Mrs. Shenoy says.

For those getting married this year, getting invited to so many other weddings can be a double whammy. Meagan McCarthy, a 29-year-old lawyer from West Palm Beach, Fla., got married in April. She and her husband are skipping the honeymoon this year—because they are going to several celebrations as guests.

Ms. McCarthy was invited to over half a dozen weddings for 2022, and has either already attended or plans to go to all but one. She was a bridesmaid in a wedding earlier this year and will be one in another celebration in October.

Even a decision as simple as what gift to give gets complicated with multiple weddings on the docket. Stephanie Higashi and her husband are going to five weddings this year, in addition to their own reception to celebrate their marriage in 2020 belatedly, and they just bought a house. Choosing what to spend on gifts is a challenge.

For a close friend’s wedding, Mrs. Higashi’s husband suggested giving the couple $300, which she initially balked at. “In my opinion, that’s family money,” says Mrs. Higashi, who works at a real-estate firm and lives in Tustin, Calif. The pair ultimately settled on a $200 gift.