By host Tom Ashbrook:

Americans get married every day of the year, but right now we are headed into the heart of wedding season and the wedding business — and what a business it is.

White tents and tall cakes are months in the making and budgets head over the moon. Bride and groom dream of “One Perfect Day,” as New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead calls it, and everybody gets taken for a ride.

Mead has gone coast to coast and into the giant wedding dress factories of China. Now she’s staring the deluxe new megabucks American wedding in the face and asking “What are we doing here?”

This hour On Point: the great American wedding, and what it’s become.

“I believe that the way we marry tells us the way we are as a culture.” Rebecca Mead

“It seems to me that the more [couples] are invested into the wedding, the less they are into the marriage.” Listener

Guests:

Rebecca Mead, staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.”