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Citing Oscar Wilde, in their call for papers the editors of this volume ask the question "Who, being loved, is poor?" On a meta-theoretical level, this article seeks to contextualize this question and its citation socially. On an empirical level, it contrasts the socially highly determined question and its implicit presuppositions with the findings of a local case study from the canton of Bern in the 18th and 19th centuries. When we examine precarious marriages through petitions for dispensation from the preacher's threefold reading of the banns from the pulpit, the collective audio-visual dimension of marriages in an agrarian society with scarce resources becomes apparent. With the petitions, the couples tried to avoid attention and thus escape the communal tribunal of a charivari and the like. In Bern, the material and media dimension of weddings were largely governed by local standards. Charivaris were audio-visual means for society to communicate shared values regarding marriage. An expression of the locally accentuated moral economy, they did not reflect romantic ideals of love. The performance of weddings as large and public rituals was a communal compulsion rather than the expression of an individualistic and therefore creative event. The performative wedding as the epitome of individualism is a very young historical development and strongly linked to a late-modern bourgeois culture of singularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]