Are weddings actually seriously uncool? Naff as anything?

For me you can tell when the couple have prioritised the look of the day over their guests enjoyment of it, and those weddings are tedious. You can’t help thinking- I wish they’d gone without fussy themed favours and chair covers and flowers on every surface, and someone playing a harp for 10 minutes before the ceremony starts, and just spent a bit of that money on some food while we all stood round waiting for photos.

Have you ever been to one with bad speeches though? Awful! I went to one with 5!! speeches (the bride and maid of honour spoke, as well as the usual groom, best man and FoB). It went on for almost two hours, everyone was well past ready for their dinner and most of the guests were completely fed up. The poor best man actually had a good speech but because he went last you could tell he knew everyone was over it.

@Heronwatcher I agree with every word you said

I’ve been married 27 years and have daughters aged 23 and 25. I genuinely don’t care if they get married or not. In a time when saving for a house deposit is impossible for many, the thought of wasting all that money on a day appals me.

It’s all utterly ridiculous.

People getting married in a church who have literally never been to a service other than Christmas in their life, people getting married in white and having a wedding list even though they’ve been living together for 10 years and own a chic townhouse and 2 cars, people expecting friends and family to trek halfway across the world to see them get married even though they actually got married in a registry office in Maidenhead because who wants to get a Spanish/ Italian divorce! And don’t get me started on women taking men’s names, bridesmaids, all the menfolk doing speeches whilst the women sit and clap, kids being excluded and all of the bridezilla rubbish about dresses, 3k hen weekends, hair colour, weight, pregnancy etc

To me it’s all a horribly outdated money spinner and I would genuinely be happy to never go to another wedding again apart from an Indian one because it’s worth biting my tongue for the food.

We did similar. Two witnesses, no guests, rings, flowers, poems, songs, kisses. Just us giggling that we were actually doing this after being together nearly 40 years. Afterwards we went out for a pizza with our witnesses and then went home. It was lovely. Cheap too. The day, including taxis cost £300.

Weddings have gone mad, and madder by the day. Huge shows, for show- and the meaning totally lost in the middle. In my experience the flashier and most showbizz wedding = the most disastrous marriage. Totally bonkers, and saddling couples with huge debt so often, putting pressure on relationship and making it impossible to save for flat or house.

B O N K E R S

I can’t think of a bad wedding I’ve been to. Apart from an evening do invite to someone I didn’t really know very well from work and it turned out the people I liked from work hadn’t gone….and it was his side of the family on chairs one side of the dance floor facing her family. No mixing. I made a French Exit.

@fruitbrewhaha My partner HATES being the centre of attention and public speaking is just a massive no, I'd hate for him to not enjoy his day because he was so woried about doing a speech!

If My dad wanted to do one then fine, not banning them - but nothing would be essential. Whatever makes everyone happy!

I just can't believe people are prepared to fork out the best part of their annual salary on a party. I am far too cheap for that.
My aunt got remarried last year and they had a ceremony in the registry office and then a buffet in a local cafe for 25 people. It was a lovely family event, very low key and hardly cost anything at all.

NO SPEECHES! No way, the speeches are the highlight for me. It’s a comic interlude and at 99% of the weddings I’ve been to, very funny and a kind of ice breaker that leads to lots of further interaction between guests. When you find out a funny university story about the groom and his mates it gives you something to go and chat to them about.

I can only think of one wedding where the BM stood up and thanked everyone for coming and that was it. Rubbish.

I often think with these threads on MN where posters slate weddings, that you’re just going to shit weddings, because I’ve always immensely enjoyed myself at them.

I don’t like or enjoy them. We have passed up 3 weddings from acquaintances this year because they are wasteful, long and expensive to attend.

And yes, they’re mostly tacky and overdone. Santorini is not romantic - it’s a European Disneyland for the fur coat no knickers brigade.

their primary wedding portrait

Tee hee!😁.

Meh. They're clearly creative types, with a similar circle. I can't access the NYT article but I found a similar article on Conde Nast. They're literally in the business of being content creators for travel brands, so it's not surprising the aesthetic was important to them. It was a destination wedding and they had 30 guests. If guests didn't want to go and weren't happy to go along with the dress code, they didn't have to go. Good for Lauren and Jackson pleasing themselves, I say. Some of the MNers who love an informal wedding should be big fans.

"... tragically co-opted by the romance-industrial complex".

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4050aacd-b8c7-4a65-9990-9818d491bea7

I'd have been wishing for the wanky twosome to have been eaten by hippos.

I read somewhere that celebs are doing it quietly these days.

But yes, I think the whole thing is naff and I say that having wasted a huge amount of money on the big wedding for my 1st.

My second being a registry office do with 4 of our closest friends, a slap up meal, drinks in the garden at ours and then a fish supper at the local was by far and away the better wedding and most fun.

I think they are sooo over.

I think as well as some the things already mentioned it's partly social media to blame for what I call, Pretty Staged Event Fatigue

There's just way too many curated images and videos of celebrity and joe blog weddings, and people putting their pictures up on Facebook, Instagram etc. Everything looks the same now. Everything. Nothing is original. It's homogeneity through and through.

You've seen the same dress a thousand times. And it's all the same dress now, whether it's pared back country peasant pastoral or big over blown Disneyfied balloon gown. It somehow is still all the same.

You've seen the non-matching ditsy floral, gingham bunting, the tied ribbon streamers.

You've seen the glass jars and tea lights

How many more oh-so-deliberately-not-matching wooden chairs or covered satin ribbon chairs can you see without yawning?

Happy brides in white. The matching or matchy/not matchy satin bridesmaids dresses.

I'm tired.

I saw some images of a couple who did a whole goth wedding. That got my interest.

And it is also bad taste in a cost of living crisis to issue a wedding list with demands for stuff when you're both working people who have been living together for ages!

I think someone was saying the new thing that will take off in the celebrity world will be no images allowed to be posted on social media or taken at big events including weddings. Phone taken at entry. Once this takes off at the normie end, weddings may be exciting - and unique - again. I actually used to enjoy going through the wedding book with the couple afterwards.

Weddings are a bit like Christmas, in that they are completely uncool but still fantastic and attempts to make them cooler just make them worse.

I love weddings, especially the ceremony and the speeches and having a knees up. Couldn’t care less about any of the fripperies.

I think this is a stretch. Wearing exactly what you want to wear is more of a feminist statement than feeling like you have to have something plain, classic, boring because you see wearing a white princess style dress as childish? The fact that you can’t see any witty or smart women in a white dress shows that you are failing to realise how multifaceted women can be. Women are completely able to be smart, witty, have fun with fashion, to want to wear white as part of a tradition in whatever way they choose, wear a veil….

I hate the idea that for women to be taken seriously we should have to tone down our femininity and conform to male standards. If I have a daughter I would like for her to grow up in a world where she can be respected for being herself.

*TLDR:
"When Lauren and Jackson England tied the knot with a safari wedding in Ranthambore, India, in January, they wanted the dress code to reflect the surroundings. The mood they communicated to their guests was “classic heritage Ralph Lauren.”

“I am an aesthetic person, and we had a clear vision for the hero image we wanted to create on the safari Jeep,” Mr. England, 37, said, referring to their primary wedding portrait. (He and Ms. England are founders of a content and production company in Sydney, Australia.) “It was important to me that guests followed our color palette.”

In the end, “our creative friends had fun with it, but our mothers were a bit overwhelmed.”*

I hate Lauren and Jackson.

I hate them 😀 Been married twice, never in a church, no white dress, no cake, wedding favours, bridesmaids or hen do.
I avoid them .

I agree. I think there's a fussiness and rigidity to the 'traditional' wedding, even the most tasteful ones, that people are starting to push back against (or see as unfashionable). Most of my friends have got married in the last few years and the ones everyone enjoyed best were very small, informal, at unusual times or otherwise non-traditional. We've had registry office then a catered dinner party at someone's house, a 9am town hall wedding then brunch in a beautiful coffee shop for 12 of us, a brewery wedding with everyone instructed to wear their normal clothes (inc both brides), etc. This is probably somewhat to do with the type of people I'm friends with, but I've definitely seen a reduction in the number of traditional weddings and a shift in what people think is fashionable in weddings.

I love a wedding and don't care if it's naff or not but I do think there are a few things that are going out of fashion. Mainly the matching bridesmaids dresses and hair, the first dance, the big wedding cake and the insistence on everyone being suited and booted. Some of the "cooler" weddings I've been to recently have left that stuff out.

When my DSis got married she tried to dictate colours. She asked that people didn’t wear pastel. Of course most of her family and friends told her not to be ridiculous. She asked my DSis not to dress her two DD in crochet ponchos ( the trend at the time), that was red rag to a bull and of course they wore ponchos to the ceremony.
She laughs about it now and admits that it was ridiculous to expect us all to conform. She had become the classic bridezilla. More concerned about what everyone else thought rather what she really wanted.