Your wedding is an IPO where everyone’s lying
On weddings, capital markets, and the fictions that make both of them real
When I get married, no one will ever know about it. I’m so serious, I’ve planned this all out. The way I imagine this will happen is that if I do marry, I’ll do the legal paperwork stuff, not announce it, and then maybe a year into the thing, I’ll send out invites for a nice dinner party and insist that the people I really, really want there show up. Then I’ll just announce it in the middle of the thing.
My future first husband has no idea about this plan simply because I haven’t run it past him and that’s because I am not sure where he is at the moment. More pressingly than what my future first husband thinks, I have a flight to Canada in a few hours, so we’ll deal with this when it comes.
Besides, I already met the love of my life (myself, tbh) and I’m not sure it’s socially acceptable to throw a wedding for my love for myself, though to be fair, the entire global financial system, just like a wedding, is also a fiction.
1. Once in a lifetime: why markets and weddings are the same kind of lie
Money is not real. It does however have real consequences. The twenty dollar bill in your wallet is a piece of cotton-linen blend that the United States government has declared holds value because everyone agrees it does. The moment everyone stops agreeing, it’s just a piece of paper (sounds like something you know said by a person in a long-term relationship who refuses to get married, right).
Monetary policy and the entire global financial system runs on consensus and collusion maintained through institutional trust, regulatory frameworks, and the collective decision of billions to keep pretending the numbers on screens correspond to something tangible. It’s the same exact thing happening when your friend is walking down the aisle marrying a person who they’ve decided is their best option to marry even though you were there when you saw what happens when they fight and no amount of Dr. Phil or Dr. Drew or actual doctors could fix this mess.
A stock price is the same thing in that it’s a belief turned into a measurement. When Apple trades at $X a share, that’s not Apple’s “real value” revealed. That’s millions of people agreeing on a number based on projections about future earnings that haven’t happened yet, discounted by interest rates set by people who are also guessing, all of this filtered through sentiment shaped by whether a CEO wore a turtleneck or showed us their tai chi saber skills.
The entire apparatus of Wall Street exists to facilitate and formalize a collective fiction so convincingly that it produces real outcomes. Fiction and performance makes our world go round. Companies get funded, employees get paid, economies grow. All of it built on the collective agreement to believe in an idea to then make it a concrete tangible reality through our participation in it.
A wedding does the same thing.
When two people stand in front of other people and say “I do,” they are not describing a pre-existing reality. They are performing one into existence. Before the words, you’re two people in expensive clothes. After the words, you’re legally, socially, and emotionally bound in a way that will require lawyers to undo.
This is, wait for it, also exactly what an IPO does. Before the offering, you’re a private company. Some people believe in you, most don’t know you exist, and your valuation is whatever number your last investor insisted they thought it should be. After the IPO, you’re public, which means you have a price, the market has spoken, and when I say the market has spoken, what I mean is that the market and all of us in it have agreed to pretend to speak about your worth through various signals, sentiments, and how we deal with those shares.
The pretending is what makes it real, until something like WeWork happens or your marriage crumbles because you married someone because it made sense after so much time to do so, not because you wanted to.
The point of this essay is that a wedding is a relationship’s IPO. You take your partnership public, you let everyone evaluate your market value based on centerpiece choices and whether the bar is open or cash (if it’s cash, I’m judging you, and I will remember this when evaluating our friendship going forward, you cheap bastard.) Just for one day, we can be heroes even as we create a public price for your love. And then, ideally, you go private again before anyone notices the foundational cracks. Or, if they did notice, it’s because they found you crying behind a closed door and helped fix your makeup, and they’ll never speak of it.
Weddings as a process cost more than a Tesla, last less than a Netflix binge, and somehow over the decades managed to convince people that photobooths with fake mustache props constituted entertainment that humans voluntarily enjoyed partaking in. One wonders whatever happened to all those fake mustache props, and in what limp cardboard boxes they now rest in damp corners of dark warehouses or garages, and whether the fake mustache graveyard carries the same energy as the stock certificates of companies that went to zero, which is to say: evidence that people once believed in something that turned out to be worthless, but in the moment, they believed so hard.
So let me map this to capital markets for you, because if we’re going to pretend that spending thousands to millions of dollars on one day is rational, we might as well use the language of people who once thought WeWork was worth $47 billion. I’ll do this by explaining the components of an IPO to then talk about the listing day itself and why at the end of the day none of this matters as much as the fact that I am a top-tier wedding guest you can rely on.
2. Life during wartime: the prospectus, the roadshow, and the hype machine
Every IPO starts with a story, and every wedding does too. The question is where you file it.
A Knot website is an S-1 filing since both of them contain fictions and versions of image management we want to clean up into palatable realities.
An S-1 is the document companies file with the SEC when going public: who we are, what we’re worth, everything that could go wrong. The Knot website is the same thing with prettier fonts. It has the couple’s story, the FAQ section that answers nothing important (”just Venmo or contribute to our honeymoon fund,” which is investor relations language for “give us cash, not a Le Creuset”). It’s the formal prospectus for an event that’s already sold out and did you see the fact that there is no registry, just experiences to fund? What if I don’t like your future partner, can I give half?
Assembling it forces the same reckoning as writing an S-1’s risk factors section. I am endlessly fascinated by the narratives on wedding websites. The tone is always the same: meet-cute framed as destiny, proposal framed as surprise (it was never a surprise, there are photos of it happening, c’mon now). I am particularly fond of a wedding website I recently discovered for an ex because I had a feeling the writing was AI generated and it absolutely was and I am losing my mind about it. The original draft of this essay went into this in detail but then I decided, you know what, your love story is a prospectus and you let ChatGPT write it, that is a separate essay of its own for another day.
After the prospectus, the deluge - or what’s known as the roadshow. In an IPO, once the S-1 is filed, the company’s executives tour around presenting to potential investors. They tell their story over and over with slick slide decks and rehearsed talking points. It’s the same origin myth delivered with manufactured spontaneity to room after room until it calcifies into mythology.
Weddings have this too, though it’s decentralized. It goes something like engagement party, save-the-dates, Instagram post of the ring (hand carefully positioned, iced coffee artfully in frame, manicure fresh). By the time the wedding arrives, the core audience has heard the highlights on repeat, just like investors who’ve sat through nine roadshow presentations and can recite the company’s TAM in their sleep. Guest list curation? Babe, it’s investor targeting. You might schmooze that wealthy uncle harder in the months before hoping he’ll “invest” generously in your wishing well later.
You’re bookbuilding your RSVP list the same way underwriters build an order book. If everyone RSVPs yes, you might upgrade the venue. If half your list ghosts, you cut the open bar to beer and wine only, which is the wedding equivalent of pricing your IPO lower because institutional demand was lukewarm. But I’m Armenian, and our IPOs are different (I will not be taking questions, sorry.)
3. Psycho killer: deposits, planners, and the mechanics of the spectacle
Do you know what it costs to keep a wedding and an IPO running? What is the price of your sanity? Wedding planners and investment banks have learned how to game this need. After all, both are the backbones of each event, so investment banks who manage IPOs relabel what wedding planners do into the term underwriters. Underwriters in their role as dollar doulas orchestrate the entire process from building the book to managing the syndicate (the group of banks sharing the deal) to setting the price and stabilizing things when they go sideways.
If you thought your wedding planner was expensive, wait until you see what Goldman Sachs charges for theirs. What really is the difference between an underwriter preventing a stock tanking on day one versus the wedding planner preventing your father-in-law giving an unauthorized speech about how he didn’t really like you originally after his fourth glass of Sancerre? It’s all just risk management at the end of the day.
Now, the day-of coordinator specifically is your stabilization agent. After an IPO, underwriters can legally buy shares to prevent the stock price from crashing on day one (SEC Rule 104, which you don’t want to look up, but I did, because I have a law degree I refuse to let go to waste entirely). Your coordinator does the same thing for example when your cake is sliding and they prop it up. They become the human circuit breaker preventing visible failure so your wedding doesn’t become the one people remember for the wrong reasons.
As for the deposits that everyone’s forced to pony up in wedding planning to secure their right to get married on a large green lawn with rows of white chairs, did you know they’re options? Think about it. Every vendor deposit is literally buying an option.
You’re paying a non-refundable premium today for the right, but not the obligation, to use that vendor on that date. The $15,000 venue deposit is your premium for a call option on a Saturday in June. If you exercise the option (have the wedding), the premium goes toward the final bill. If you don’t (call it off), you lose the premium. The vendor keeps it because they held that date for you and couldn’t sell it to another couple. “Non-refundable” is not a suggestion. It’s a legal term and vendors will enforce it with the same enthusiasm Goldman Sachs brings to a derivatives contract.
The seating chart is an allocation schedule and it is harder than anything any investment bank has ever done because shares don’t refuse to sit next to other shares because of something that happened at Thanksgiving in 2009. Shares don’t bring an uninvited plus-one who turns out to be the ex-wife of the share two tables over. Share allocation, like a seating chart, can also make or break the feelings some people have about you, but that’s not an issue if you elope (I’m just saying).
4. Heaven: listing day is not the business
So you’ve got your S-1 filed, your roadshow completed, your underwriters in place, your options paid for, your allocation schedule surviving by a thread. The IPO happens. The rice is thrown, the die is cast. Everyone cheers. Now what?
Capital markets are full of beautiful IPOs that went to zero because the fundamentals weren’t there just like social media is littered with beautiful weddings that led to divorces for the same reason.
Perfect centerpieces can’t manufacture compatibility though they look lovely. The tedious and unglamorous daily grind of creating value at a company is like that of a partnership. At your wedding, no one sees the slow and unsexy work of building a life together when your partner snores, someone loses their job, an ex pops up wanting something, whatever.
Weddings, like IPOs, are just one time things that create publicity, hype, and inject capital, and we call this a liquidity event. Everything else afterwards is boring as hell. Quarterly earnings, analyst calls, shareholder meetings? There is no glitz and glam to resolve a fight with a partner, morning breath, or differences on how to properly load the dishwasher (hint: if this is happening, it is not about the dishwasher, the dishwasher is just the symbol of bigger issues).
The wedding industrial complex, like investment banks, profits from the transaction and event itself, not the outcome. Your planner gets paid whether you divorce or not. The venue doesn’t care if you’re happy. The photographer isn’t tracking your five-year survival rate. No one cares about your annual rate of emotional return except for yourself. Even then, some people lie to themselves constantly until they cannot.
And yet, we’re all in on the joke.
Objectively speaking, spending so much time and planning on a one time event is a risk, but the ceremony of it all is the point. The ceremony is theater, everyone knows it and participates anyway, and that’s what lends this entire liquidity event legitimacy. Vows in front of witnesses are words speaking truth to power in giving weight to this union of two people because outside of that, really, no one cares except for the state you get your marriage license in and governmental authorities for tax purposes. That’s why you invite people to this event. Not just because they watch, but so they can believe, and that belief multiplied across them transforms a ritual into a reality known as matrimony.
Weddings, like graduation ceremonies, are not actually for the people involved in them. They are events for everyone else to participate and enjoy. You are telling a room full of people: I believe in this choice enough to be irrational about it, and I’m asking you to be irrational with me for one night or one day because getting a venue in the afternoon was cheaper than on the weekend. A wedding, like an IPO, messages loudly and publicly that you’re generating a shared mythology by going public with this commitment.
So where does that leave me? Understanding the fiction doesn’t break the spell. That a wedding is theater doesn’t make the moment less moving. Sometimes it does the opposite. The understanding that everyone in the room is choosing to believe, actively, deliberately, together, makes the belief more powerful, not less. I love that for you, sweetie, because there is something epic about moments of collective delusion that involve an open bar and good feelings. Plus, I want to be proven wrong.
What I am sure of, however, is that I’m an incredible wedding guest. This is not a fiction, it is a fact. I want this on record. I cry at ceremonies. I eat everything. I lead the conga line just like I know when to follow it. Most photos of me at events involve food and that’s not an accident, it’s a lifestyle. I am an equal opportunity eater. Weddings are my natural habitat. There are wedding attendees and then there are top-tier wedding attendees and if you don’t invite me you are making a mistake that will haunt your ancestors for generations. That is also not a fiction, so don’t make it a reality, and let me know at least 6 months in advance especially if it’s a destination wedding thing.
Reader note: for comments/inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com.
Like and subscribe for updates. Merci