Does spending more money give you less marriage?

We’ve all heard the jokes about guys with jacked-up trucks and oversized tires are making up for inadequacies in other areas. If you haven’t, never mind.

There may be a similar overcompensation at work when it comes time to walk down the aisle.

According to a study of 3,000 married people, the more you spend on a wedding, the less likely it is to last.

Economics professors Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M. Milan found the amount couples spent on an engagement ring and the ceremony is inversely proportional to the duration as the marriage.

For example, men who spent between $2,000 and $4,000 on an engagement ring were at 1.3 times greater risk of divorce as those who spent between $500 and $2,000.

When it comes to the ceremony itself, weddings costing less than $1,000 were significantly less likely to result in divorce than those costing 420,000 or more — 1.6 times among the women sampled.

The same goes for looks. Those who reported that one’s partner’s looks were important in the decision to marry were much more likely to have a marriage of short duration.

So what’s the takeaway? Perhaps couples do tend to spend more money to make up for doubts they may have about the upcoming nuptials.

At the very least, perhaps some of that money they plan to spend on the banquet should be diverted into pre-marriage counseling.

Read the original paper, “A Diamond is Forever and Other Fairy Tales,” here.