Stu and Sarah Jones celebrated their wedding at Piha with their son Ethan. Photo / Supplied
In the week of the royal wedding, Simon Collins looks at how times and traditions have changed in New Zealand since the marriage of Charles and Diana in 1981.
Sarah Wheeler walked up the "aisle" to her wedding on Piha Beach this month in bare feet.
The "aisle" was a wide strip of raked sand fringed by driftwood. The guests on both sides were invited to "dress for comfort - Jandals okay".
Bridegroom Stu Jones and his four groomsmen
wore black Jandals and black pants. The four bridesmaids were in Jandals with diamantes.
The bride was meant to wear them too, but kicked hers off because her long white wedding gown kept catching on them.
The bride's mother, marriage celebrant Carole Wheeler, conducted the wedding, stopping at one point to wipe the nose of the bridal couple's 20-month-old son Ethan, who spent most of the ceremony in his mother's arms.
The scene could hardly have been more different from the formal pageantry that will unfold in Westminster Abbey on Friday.
While weddings in much of the world are still confined mostly to churches and temples, in New Zealand they can now legally take place anywhere.
Carole Wheeler says 95 per cent of the ones she conducts are outdoors, with about 55 per cent on beaches.
Keith King of the Celebrants Association says gardens, parks and restaurants are common.
"One of our members has done an underwater wedding. There have been weddings in balloons. There's even been a wedding done in a bungy jump," he says.
"When I do weddings, people from Britain are quite blown away with the informality of ceremonies here. I think in Britain it's still a far more formal affair."
In some ways it's surprising that we still bother with ceremonies at all when - again more universally in New Zealand than in most places - hardly any bride is still a virgin.
"I don't think I've taken a wedding in the last 10 years of a couple who haven't been living together for a serious period of time, at least two or three years," Mr King says.
"More than 50 per cent would have children in the relationship already."
In the 25 years after Prince William's parents married in 1981, the proportion of New Zealanders aged 25 to 34 who were legally married almost halved, from 72 per cent to 38 per cent.
Those living together "de facto" jumped from 6 per cent to 27 per cent. Those who were single or separated increased, too, from 22 per cent to 35 per cent. The overall marriage rate plummeted from a peak of 45 a year for every 1000 non-married person aged 16-plus in 1971 to 29 in 1981 and just 13 in 2006.
Today, the median age of first marriage has risen from 22 in 1981 to 28 for women, and from 24 to 30 for men.
Yet even now, most people do still tie the knot eventually. By age 35 to 44, 59 per cent are legally married; by age 55 to 64 it is 66 per cent.
"I always ask why they want to get married," Mr King says.
"For most people, it's a sense of stability. They still see marriage with a sense of permanence attached to it in a relationship."
Sarah Wheeler and Stu Jones, both 31, lived together for six years, bought a house and had their son Ethan before marrying. But marriage was important to both of them and was "always on the cards".
"I wanted us to be a 'family' and all share the same name, which feels more important when you have a little one," says Sarah.
Mr King says 80 per cent of the brides he marries still take their husbands' surnames.
Sarah said she was also sick of saying "my partner".
"There's something very rewarding about saying 'my husband'. Plus 'my partner' or 'my boyfriend' sound like we're 16 and having a fling!"
She walked up the "aisle" with her father, Chris Wheeler, a one-time editor of the anarchist magazine Cock who is "basically anti-marriage".
"It was a bit of a hoot getting him to do it, but we did it more for fun," she says.
But Carole Wheeler asked not just the bride's father but the parents of both bride and groom: "Do you, the parents of Sarah and Stu, give them to be married?"
"I would say 80 per cent of the brides are still walked in by either the father or the mother or a brother," she says.
"That is a symbol of giving away, but the actual words faded away.
"Now they are coming back in a different form - instead of just asking the father, I always feel the mother has been almost denied a role in the wedding ceremony, so it's very good to actually bring in the parents."
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