To think weddings cost guests and bridal party too much?!

Yeah, it's mental.

A friend's younger sister recently invited me to her hen do (her sister and I are about ten years older than the bride, but I've known her for a very long time and I see her very much as a 'bonus sister').

I'm a high earner, no kids, have a higher than average annual leave allowance due to being senior / well-established in my role, but I wasn't going to spend £800-1k and five days' AL on what is essentially a party.

My friend is going because the bride is her sister and she obviously feels obliged, but I know she doesn't have the same income I do and has pre-teen kids, so she's a bit worried about it.

I do kind of want to take the bride by the scruff of the neck and give her a bit of a rattle (I've known her since she was eight!), but it's not really my place.

Some of it is just going to be inevitable with most of us not living near the people we are close to. I can count on one hand the number of weddings and hen dos I've attended where I've not stayed one or more nights at a hotel. I don't see how those costs can be avoided.

I think a lot of these holiday hen dos are asking a bit much and requesting guests to buy outfits in certain colours is a piss take.

Bring your own food sounds nice for a small wedding of less than 20 but not so much 200. How would you even organise that? How would you safely store that much food until it was time to eat?

We got civil partnered nearly two years ago now - wedding was registry office with our son and both Mums. Then we took everyone out for dinner and cocktails. The following day we had a piss up in a brewery, open bar and we paid for lots of pizza and cake. It was awesome and I think it will have been the cheapest night out anyone has had for a while!

No hen do for me - I don’t have female friends, DH had a stag weekend away where they went camping and got pissed.

Yes I ended up paying about £300 to attend a friends wedding then we are told what colours we should wear 🙄

I didn’t have the money to buy another outfit and many had ignored this request

Surely it depends on the kind of wedding.

I was a bridesmaid last year and the only cost was the hen do and drinks at the wedding. The bride paid for our dresses, hair and make-up.

Pressed post too soon.

I was due to be married in 2019, but cancelled 4 months before as i found he was cheating on me. BUT everything was booked and done, and my aim was to make it as cheap as possible for my guests to be there. We were paying for all alcohol, free taxi's etc. my bridesmaids didn't have to spend a penny on outfits, make up, shoes, hair. why should they? i had asked them to be part of the bridal party.
My hen do was just a day out at Go Ape with friends and then food, around £100 each with shared travel.

I was adamant i wanted everyone to join in with as little cost to themselves as possible.

I've always declined destination hen do's and weddings. I never used to earn what i do now and wasn't going to stretch myself for them. I'm glad, as all of them are now divorced 😂

I think a BYOB and bring a dish wedding is a great idea. Each to their own

Yanbu especially when 1/2 end in divorce. Just elope and be done with it! Nobody actually cares they just want the buffet and a piss up

Ridiculous basically means unreasonable, so from a guest POV if it costs them more than they think reasonable then they're well within their rights to think it ridiculous. Privately, of course, not to say it to people's faces!
I agree though. Everyone should respect everyone's right to do as they wish. Where the problem comes is people getting upset that nobody wants to put themselves out to give B&G their 'dream wedding'. Fair enough if they've done it for friends and not reciprocated, otherwise no.

I think people are entitled to celebrate their marriage anyway they choose. The day is theirs to do with as they wish, and its no one's place to describe their choices as 'ridiculous' anymore than its anyone's place to describe a more modest arrangement negatively.
People who can't afford or don't want to join in should feel free to decline, and the bride and groom should be understanding.
Personally I'd prioritise people being able to easily attend over luxury and location, but I respect other people's rights not to.

@MannekenP

Fair enough. I've said I've been to some lovely weddings and invariably they are the ones which haven't been an orgy of consumerism. Nothing wrong with spending a bit of money on it all but standard weddings are just breathtakingly naff and samey.

But I do think underlying all this there are a few quite toxic things about weddings which aren't really acknowledged:

a) the absolutely grotesque levels of consumption and cost and the status arms race
b) the fact (as I've alluded to) that they tend to obscure the important things about the actual marriage
c) the horrible way they push men and women into outdated gender play acting. Even the so-called progressive ones.

I realise most of my objections are my own particular foible and I don't expect other people to agree. And I would certainly never express any of this at someone's wedding or in the run-up to it.

It's not just abroad, I've also noticed a trend in people hiring 'venues' in the middle of nowhere.
A recent wedding invite ... impossible if you don't drive. One train an hour (and often delayed/cancelled based on their service statistics and the local FB page). 20 min drive from the station (who on earth wants to walk a big distance in their wedding finery' anyway)? Rural so not much taxi availability. Nowhere near to stay overnight.
We declined. Wasn't really a close friend anyway just someone my OH knew from school. They speak occasionally but that's all. I'm the only driver and as much as I love a wedding I'd not be able to enjoy much drinking as the designated driver!
His mum still lives in same place as my ILs and I heard whisperings that we were not the only ones to decline. Even at school the person didn't have many friends and as the bride's from abroad he'd invited anybody and everybody he marginally knew. Doesn't take a genius to work out that this was going to happen. They'd have been better off with a smaller wedding or more accessible venue but there you go.

I should add, I LOVE weddings but this was ridiculous

DP turned one down recently that we worked out for us both to go would have cost at least £600/700 (flights and a hotel involved). Bride posted something really passive aggressive about how their venue was going to look half empty.
Yes cause you’ve booked somewhere that needs a flight to get to and isn’t near anywhere with only two extortionate hotels anywhere nearby and necessitates car hire!

@Thepeopleversuswork I do think you're a joy sponge, I love weddings :) but having recently organised my own wedding I sort of agree.
I went to one wedding fair and almost exited straightaway... the sheer amount of useless rubbish and vendors trying to upsell was ridiculous. Plus, everyone kept speaking to me and not my future husband.
I get it, they're businesspeople trying to get business. But the level of stupid shit people bothered with from matching place cards, pew ends etc etc. I'm not one for obsessing over details and visuals so I just found it all an incredible bore.

I choose a 'common' theme, managed to get most of it from FB marketplace and Vinted, very happy with the results. Yes it's not all 'matchy matchy' but who cares? My guests won't be hungry, thirsty or out of pocket unnecessarily that's the main thing.

I think if people choose to get married overseas they must accept some family and friends will decline to attend. Also if a bridesmaid or groomsman the bride/groom should pick up the cost of dress/suit. I know when I got married 18 years ago now I come from Devon and DH from Yorkshire and we live midway between the two in the West Midlands. Both of our families had to travel and had the cost of staying 2 nights away in Premier travel inns. We felt it was fairest for both families to travel a shorter distance than 1 family to travel over 160 miles also our friends were mostly local to where we live so they didn't have to travel. My Mum felt it should have been held where I grew up but that would have meant a lot of travel for future in-laws and I didn't want to start off on the wrong foot. In-laws paid for a lovely Italian meal for everyone who travelled so mostly family plus a couple of my old school friends, the evening before our wedding. My Mum paid towards the wedding reception and DH and I paid for breakfast for all our guest who stayed at the Premier travel Inn the morning after the wedding and we had a family BBQ late afternoon at our house for both families to spend more time together before we left late evening for our honeymoon. It was very expensive then but now wedding costs have exploded since Covid.

I had a very cheap do, however I quite enjoy more exotic celebrations. I go if I can, don’t go if I can’t. There is less expectation to attend if more expensive, people understand the cost of living is high

I totally agree. The last wedding I attended I worked out I spent £600 on the hen (abroad), £250 to stay overnight in the venue because it was near nothing, £100 on a wedding gift. I wore a dress and shoes I already had. That's a grand! Was one of my best friends and I'd gone to similar for other friends so I felt obligated to do the same for her. 3x weddings in 3 years so a grand a year.

It's fair enough for her to decide she wants to go abroad- but she cannot take it personally when people say no and can't afford it. Tbh that's a really shitty attitude for her to take and it would put me off the friendship that she'd expect me to put myself into debt over it. There's no reason why things can't be cheaper and more local.

@sockarefootwear I totally agree with all of this but I think it's actually more sinister than that, it has really damaging ramifications for the way people organise their lives.

The expectations around weddings are such an obsession that they completely cloud people's perspective on the marriage itself. It's as if the wedding is the goal and the sole focus and noone is actually thinking about the fact that theoretically you have to spend the next 40 or 50 years of your life with this person and make it work or there will be major fallout.

So many young girls in particular think "wedding! Kerching!" and that's as far as their planning and consideration goes. They don't think about whether they are compatible with their partner and can live with them. They don't think about whether they are going to work or stay at home after the wedding or how the marriage will impact their financial security or not (and actually in a lot of cases getting married is not financially sensible). And how they are going to finance having children and raising them.

And then the parents get wrapped up in the whole st

Major, life-changing decisions about money and children get swept up in this froth about table settings and bridesmaid's dresses and whether Uncle Godfrey will sit next to Aunt Fenella and whether it will be in a barn or a Premier Inn or whatever. It's all ultimately completely irrelevant and none of it matters.

I'm not religious and I have no particular nostalgia for the days when marrying couples were expected to spend some time with the priest before tying the knot. But I do think there was some virtue in forcing people to actually confront this stuff before getting married. We as a society have this collective taboo about talking about what marriage actually means: not the "till death do us part" stuff and all the flowery words about fidelity but the hard, contractual element, the financial risk, the impact on your future children etc.

Part of this is down to changing social expectations around women and men's roles etc and there's no consensus on this. But I think the whole madness about driving women to want to get married as a goal above almost anything else in life is in large part to blame for this and the wedding industry is a major signifier of this.

I think part of the problem is that over the last 20 years or so what is seen as 'normal' for a wedding has become increasingly expensive and demanding. Perhaps partly due to social media. So now if someone has a night out for a stag/hen do and a church/registry office wedding followed by a party somewhere in their local town this is seen as a 'budget' option. The normal option now seems to be accepted to include several days away for the stag/hen parties and a 'location' wedding (even if it's in the UK this will be at an expensive hotel and usually requires travel for everyone). Since this is accepted as normal even people who are usually thoughtful and rational get upset if close friends and family say they can't come. I think Brides and Grooms also feel a lot of social pressure to have elaborate/expensive events even if they can't really afford it. Which makes matters worse as quite a few seem to be doing things like having mid-week weddings/child-free weddings/asking bridesmaids to buy their own dresses etc to try to reduce the cost rather than having a simpler wedding.

I have a close family member who has been engaged for years, has a disabled child and is saving for a deposit to buy a house. She and her partner would love to get married but she tells me that she would be embarrassed to have a budget wedding because all her friends have had expensive events.

Spot on

Totally agree OP, it has got out of control.

My wedding was similar a million years ago, it was great

Have a great day @malificent7