Who else loves the movie Father of the Bride? Too funny, and I’m sure relatable for many parents.

My daughter is only 2 years old… but I did just start saving for her wedding. Look, my wife was a wedding photographer for many years, and that gave me a front-row seat to the wedding industry. The big thing I learned: weddings are expensive. As a parent, I want to give my daughter a beautiful day without her having to stress about the bill.

And turns out the bride’s parents have been paying for the wedding for over 4,000 years... kind of.

Both my wife's parents and mine helped pay for our wedding and even part of our honeymoon, and we were so grateful. That got me thinking about an American tradition we rarely question: the bride's parents typically help pay for the wedding.

Doesn't that sound a little like a modern-day dowry?

So, what is a dowry?

A dowry is wealth that moves from the bride's family at the time of marriage. It might be money, land, goods, or jewelry. Sometimes it goes to the bride herself, and sometimes to the groom or his household.

It's easy to confuse a dowry with two other traditions. Bridewealth (or bride-price) runs the opposite direction, with the groom's side paying the bride's family… Like the groom’s family paying for the rehearsal dinner…

Where it came from

Dowry is an ancient tradition. It shows up in the Code of Hammurabi, from Babylon around 1750 BC, and even then it was treated as an established custom, not something new, and even then it was treated as an established custom, not something new.

For some reason, the word "dowry" has a negative connotation for me. While, like anything, it was used negatively and maybe still is in parts of the world. But after researching more about it, I now think the premise of it is a good thing. Throughout history women would leave the family to be with the husband's family. A dowry is a way for a father to bless his daughter, and to help this new relationship.

Rome had detailed legal rules for dowry, including who managed it and when it had to be returned if the marriage ended. The idea wasn't originally a payment to land a husband. It could be a contribution to the household, or an asset meant to protect the wife. But since husbands usually controlled the property, the line between protecting her and enriching his family was thin.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, dowries among elite families could be enormous, and they worked like diplomacy. Marriages sealed alliances, consolidated estates, and signaled rank. When Catherine of Aragon married Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1501, the negotiated dowry was 200,000 crowns. That's a geopolitical deal with a wedding attached.

India's story is fascinating... The practice of dowry grew dramatically in the twentieth century. Research summarized by the BBC found that dowry was part of roughly 35 to 40 percent of marriages in the 1930s, and nearly 90 percent by 1975. The average inflation-adjusted value tripled over that stretch. One estimate puts the total paid between 1950 and 1999 at nearly a quarter-trillion dollars.

A few forces drove it: families competing for desirable matches, caste and status pressure to marry "up," unequal inheritance, and a growing premium on grooms with education and steady salaried jobs. Cash, cars, appliances, and housing became expected. What may have started as support for the bride turned, for many families, into a price for access to a particular husband.

While the dowry nearly disappeared across Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One likely reason is that parents no longer had to tie their blessing to the wedding day. They could invest in their daughter's future in other ways. Think of paying for college. A degree can open doors to new social circles, and those circles can lead to meeting a partner. That's not the point of sending a daughter to college, but you can see how closely the two are connected.

So, is wedding-paying the modern dowry?

What we do in the US today looks like a faint echo of that idea, except it's a gift. You can thank Emily Post for the US tradition. In her 1922 book, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, she treated the bride's parents paying for the wedding as an "unalterable rule."

Though in her book she wrote the rule as something that is already being done, and we must still do. So we can trace the custom as growing from the dowry, but I think it's gotten off track. A dowry was meant as an investment in the new family, something to help them thrive. A wedding is amazing, but it doesn't give a couple financial stability afterward. A better modern-day dowry might be helping with a down payment on a house.

I learned a lot writing this, but nothing changed. Helping our kids start their married life is expected of us, and I plan to do it. My daughter comes first on the savings list, so her fund gets filled before anything else. If I can save more, my son is next. Whatever the custom looks like by the time they get married, I'd rather be ready than wish I had been.

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