If you’ve reached the point in planning your wedding where you’re starting to fantasize about scrapping the whole thing and eloping, one of the questions on your mind might be "Why wedding favors?"

How do they fit in to the wedding and why should you bother? There are many powerful reasons for investing the necessary time and energy into it, but the three most important reasons for having wedding favors are honoring tradition, creating memories, and expressing your gratitude.

It’s been a tradition for centuries for the bride and groom to offer party-like favors to the guests at the wedding. As a new couple embarking on a life together, tradition and ceremony can be an incredibly powerful way to bind a new family together. Honoring and respecting existing traditions helps to include the extended family in feeling like they’re a full part of the experience, and the party favors you give your guests can be a way for you as a couple to begin to build your own new traditions.

One of the opportunities that you have in picking just the right party favor is that you can make it a tradition in celebrating your anniversary. To use an example, one popular wedding favor to give is a bottle opener shaped like a high-heeled shoe, reminiscent of Cinderella’s glass slipper. You could use that metaphor to establish your traditions as a couple by somehow incorporating the symbol of that shoe into your anniversary celebrations, and continuing to find some sort of wedding style favor to give your anniversary party guests in the same style throughout the coming years.

You’ll be slowly building a collection of unique objects that not only represent your journey through life as a couple, but is significant of the milestone of celebrating each and every year of your togetherness.

Honoring and creating these types of traditions are an incredibly powerful way to create memories worth revisiting and sharing, and to build lasting ties and a strong sense of connection. To help build the experience as a truly memorable one, ideally the wedding favor selected has meaning for both the bride and groom, and it’s a meaning that can be shared with the guests.

Finally, the wedding began as a way for the bridge and groom to say "thank you" to the guests for simply being a part of such an important day. In all of the hustle and bustle and all of the details that need to be taken of it’s easy to forget that ultimately a wedding day is all about friendship, love, and building relationships that last.

Giving wedding favors to the guests at the wedding is a way for the bridge and groom to begin a tradition of expressing their gratitude and appreciation in their marriage. It’s a stereotype in unhappy marriages that one or both of the partners in it don’t feel appreciated. So don’t underestimate the power of this tradition; respect it – and appreciate it – and honor it – and plan on honoring it – throughout your marriage. If you’re willing, your choice of wedding favors will never be a mere trinket that your guests leave the wedding with, but will become the foundation for a strong and happy marriage between two people that never forget to find ways to say "I appreciate you."