Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photos: Getty Images

You’ve heard it before: Weddings are a racket. So much money! So much effort! Just elope instead! And yet … here you are, planning one anyway, trying your best not to get fleeced or go broke or piss anyone off in the process. It’s a lot of pressure. A friend of mine who got married last summer told me that she can’t even look at her wedding photos because they remind her of how stressful the day was.

There are plenty of ways to save money on your wedding. Lost somewhere in this conversation, though, is what wedding costs are worth it — the splurges couples were thrilled with, that they’d pay double for if they had to do it all over again, or wish they’d spent more on in retrospect. I asked hundreds of people about the wedding expenses they thought were worth the money and then some. Here’s what they said.

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.