Connie Banks was planning a "bride's dream" at Tuscany of Garden Oaks, a Houston banquet hall with ceilings painted to resemble the Sistine Chapel. Then the hall's owner filed for bankruptcy.

Banks, whose family paid $22,000 for the space and catering, was suddenly left with no place to put the 250 people on her wedding list.

"I still feel guilty my parents lost all that money," said Banks, a 24-year-old teacher who found a new venue at the additional cost of having to change the date to a Friday from a Saturday this June. "I also feel guilty guests will have to take more time off from work to attend a Friday wedding."

The $60 billion-a-year U.S. wedding industry is contracting along with the rest of the economy, said Millie Martini Bratten, editor-in-chief of Conde Nast's Brides magazine in New York. Couples are scaling back on champagne and chocolate fountains, and business failures by florists and caterers are forcing changes in plans.

"People don't time when they fall in love with the economic cycles," Martini Bratten said. "But when times are tight, we do see a pull-back in spending."

The average cost of tying the knot in the U.S. fell 24 percent last year from 2007, to $21,814, and slipped in the first quarter to $19,196, according to Tucson, Ariz.-based Wedding Report, a research firm.

The number of vows exchanged will probably drop this year because every economic contraction since 1945 has been followed by a decline in weddings, said Shane McMurray, the firm's chief executive officer. He said there were 100,000 fewer in 2002 than 2001, when the U.S. was in a recession for eight months.

The economy has shed about 5.1 million jobs since December 2007, the most in a post-World War II slump, according to the Labor Department. The U.S. jobless rate is 8.5 percent, the highest since 1983.

Wedding industry unemployment can't be calculated because photographers, dress makers and others usually don't limit their work to one kind of event, McMurray said.

"Ninety percent of wedding vendors are small businesses, so these folks are obviously struggling," he said.