Charitable Giving: A New Way To Bond

by Martha Baer

Elizabeth D., for instance, is using I Do’s gift registry. By signing up with participating stores—like Macy’s, Sur La Table, Cooking.com, or REI—she and her fiancé, Michael M., will direct up to 8 percent of the cost of their gifts to the Child Welfare League. There’s no added burden for the guests or for the couples—the stores take the hit—while, as Elizabeth puts it, “[we] harness the goodwill that comes out of weddings and put it toward a good cause.”

For Elizabeth, working with the I Do Foundation is also a way to remember her father, who died just a month before she and Michael were engaged. Giving to an organization devoted to kids will honor her father’s great love of children and his work as an elementary-school counselor. “This way we can take note of him—he can be there,” she explains. “Michael kept saying, ‘Why wouldn’t we do it?’”

Tracy H., who at 25 is two years younger than Elizabeth D., has deployed another I Do service for her wedding: charitable donations in lieu of favors. “I was looking through magazines for gifts,” she says, “and finding all these little tchotchkes that people would take home and throw away.” Instead, she decided to give simple cards with a statement on them: “In honor and appreciation of our guests, we have given a donation to the American Cancer Society.”

Of course, you don’t have to get married in order to give to charity. Nor do you have to be in absolute harmony.

Plenty of couples don’t even agree on whether or not to give away money to begin with. Margaret Shapiro, the founding director of the Couples Communication Program at the Council for Relationships, mimics a typically fraught dispute: