No, I am not bitter.
I wonder if the groom in the OP gives money to homeless people, or to beggers?
Does he hold the door open for a woman, or an older person? Does he say thank you when someone helps him?
What about the bride? All of this money has been forked out, but she does not feel responsible?
Is that your standard when confronting someone about the purchase of any luxury good?
Fundamentally, we need very little money to survive. You can get a little shack in the middle of nowhere, have an 20 year old car you fix yourself, and live off of potatoes, carrots, and a multivitamin. You can do this for under a poverty-level income. By this definition, everything above that level is a luxury.
So if you buy a new car, have a house with electricity and more than one room, watch TV, have internet access, eat meat, or have children, you are wasting huge loads of money every year that would be better off spent helping others (I actually know someone who lives pretty close to this mantra).
Material goods are certainly not the most important things in life, but they do make it more comfortable to do the things you do enjoy. Everyone has their own cutoff between "needs" and "excess", defined both by the amount of money they have and the amount of enjoyment they get from those material comforts.
For this couple, however, the wedding was (meant) to be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Perhaps it was to mean they would buy a smaller house, or a Honda instead of a Lexus. It has little relevance as to whether they're good people or not.
FWIW, I'll be getting married in a month. We're doing it at about a third of that cost, but we have comparatively simple tastes. Weddings are
expensive, especially when big (200+ in our case).
(As a tangential side note, this is why both very flat and very stratified societies fail. The extremely stratified ones allow for the pursuit of incredible luxury at the sacrifice of social mobility and innovative capacity, while perfectly flat societies remove the incentive to work for those comforts.)
