To think that wedding s never used to be such a ‘thing’?

I got married in the early 90s when everyone was having an 'evening do'. I always felt second best to be invited just to an evening do so didn't have one

Neither did we. We had a party that started in the early afternoon with the wedding ceremony and ended in the early hours of the next day. Guests could come and go all day as they pleased. We even gained some extras along the way.

I got married in the early 90s when everyone was having an 'evening do'. I always felt second best to be invited just to an evening do so didn't have one plus we didn't have that many friends. We got married at 12 noon, sit down meal and reception at posh hotel then were on the way to our honeymoon by 7pm. H always said he would have like to stay and get drunk with his friends for another few hours - I was just glad to be out of it all! Cost £5k in total - only tried on 3 dresses, bought one of them for £400 plus a cathedral length veil for £95. Marriage lasted 20 years.

The best weddings are the low key ones where it’s about people and having fun, not over the top social media circuses - in my experience those are the marriages that don’t last.

Extremely valid point, thanks for differentiating!

See that describes the type who I expect would of always had larger weddings from quite well off families or old money families.

When you have someone a good someone that is who can just say I know what you require I’ve found them, here are three please select. That’s where you’ve managed to outsource all the work.

But when you’ve got Sarah who works in a nursery part time and Tom who installs kitchen having a 35k plus wedding doing all their own planning and searching (or rather Sarah is) when they have two children. It’s debt or mummy and daddy pockets.

This could be true anecdotally...but people with higher education also tend to have higher income/come from affluent families. For my wedding, it was pretty easy to hire a wedding planner; we gave him a high level overview of what we wanted for the reception and he did all the research, planning, etc. He'd present what he considered the top three options for vendors, tabletop/linens/centerpieces, flowers, etc and we'd just choose the one we liked best of the three. It definitely didn't take over our lives and I didn't have any post wedding blues, but we still had what Mumsnet would likely consider an over the top wedding.

The rule was standing I'm the 90s, it might have been around a while. That's just the era I was involved! I only remember because we had a wedding scheduled where both of the couple had the same last name, which was commented on as a coincidence, but was actually because they had been married before to each other! Someone asked how come they could have a church wedding and the vicar explained that the first wedding hadn't been a church one.

I got married in 2004 and it cost around 15k - it was a fairly fancy wedding and we had 80 guests so we could go to a lovely top end hotel in London for the reception. I’m an only child and my parents have good money so they let me choose whatever dress I wanted (ended up with the first one I tried and it actually was about 1k), and basically gave me free reign for the wedding. I felt like we had everything we wanted but it was based off about 5 wedding magazines because that was what was available!
My dad did baulk at what I wanted to spend on flowers and said no, and in the end the lady who did the church flowers did the hotel ones and they were so beautiful, and half the price.
We had a hen do in London with lots of friends and I felt a bit OTT as I also had a spa weekend with my three best friends.
Didn’t do favours as I knew no one would be bothered by them. Did have an amazing cake. We splurged more on food and wine but we had an afternoon wedding so only needed one meal.

It was the most amazing day and I wouldn’t change a thing.

But the truth was, we were just exposed to way fewer options back then. There wasn’t Pinterest or insta so you basically looked at a few magazines to get ideas and went to a wedding fair and that was about it!

We don't accept invitations to evening dos or most receptions any more. Too boring. We get dressed up, attend the ceremony and then ta ta! Take ourselves out to dine if we feel like it but don't give up 12 hours of a precious weekend.

Especially since most of them have lived together or even had kids for yonks. What's the big deal at that point?

My elderly neighbour, now deceased, got married in the 1950s after a wartime-ish courtship. She didn't have a dress; instead they each purchased similar grey flannel suits which they wore for years.

They were married after the regular Sunday service with whoever felt like sticking around in attendance. Her own mum did not attend as she was home roasting the chicken for lunch. After lunch with a few family and friends they drove off on honeymoon for two weeks, to the Lakes and other areas.

They were hard workers though - both professional musicians - and bought a house for cash a couple of years later, at around age 30. Never had a mortgage. She lived to age 90 in the same house! 2 BR, one bath. Raised two boys who both shared the same small second bedroom until they graduated from uni. Both of the sons are very prosperous now.

I miss her and her interesting stories about being a jazz player in the 1940s.

I used to be a waitress for a wedding catering company back in the late 80s. This was quite a fancy company as having caterers was quite unusual then. Most of the time it was in a function room of a hotel or the town hall. I do remember one that was in a marquee in the grounds of the brides home.
Most of my family weddings were at the church (as it was then or the registrars office and, wrongly, that was seen as cheap or that one of you was divorced) and then a social club or village hall.
I think the best example of an old fashioned family wedding is a in the last episode of Cradle to the Grave. Family doing the catering, drunk aunties dancing and the bride and groom leaving in a car all decorated and with tin cans tied on the back.

As for money and house buying, we bought our first house in 2002 with a 5% deposit and two of us working full time but on minimum wage. When we came to remortgage 5 years later we really struggled as they had tightened up the affordability checks!

Things have definitely changed

Opening up “venues” for weddings = huge upselling/up-levelling

Lots of extras are relatively cheap so people add them. More marketing, bridal magazines, blogs, websites and then social media have given people more ideas and they are getting married and excited and extra.

Far more people live away from their home town, and have friends/family that moved away. I don’t care who you are, you can’t invite people to travel more than 40 miles if you are only doing sandwiches in a village hall.

Every event is more than it used to be. It’s not specific to weddings.

That is beyond the pale. If I was told what I was to wear at someone's wedding I would be declining the invitation (with pleasure, not regret).

The world's gone mad!

We got married just before Christmas. Pub hotel wedding as not Christians so didn't want to make false promises in a church. 17 guests. Best day ever.

Fewer people get married and they’re older so it is. ‘Bigger deal’. but it’s not always better. Your wedding sounds perfect.

Wow, I'm in NZ and divorcees could get married in an anglican church in the 1970s.

Yep we had an endowment nightmare and are still paying the mortgage taken in the late 80s no hope of taking it easy in our retirement as we can't retire.

I got an archbishops special licence to marry in a church that was outside either parish ....it's a beautiful document I think it was about £20.

Haha yeah I attended one where I was given a pick of three dresses as a normal quest. Then I had to wear it in front of the bridal family to be preaproved. Then it was decided to be too boobie and given a vest top to wear with the dress they picked 🤣 read I did not wear the vest top.

I am all for a couple having the wedding they want, but please do not dictate to me what to wear. I am an adult and have dressed my self suitably for dozens of weddings in the past, I don't need your help now, thank you.

Not least because there was a boom in products and 'financial advisers' tied to estate agents and financial institutions were incentivised to sell those products. Hands up who had an endowment mortgage missold to them that would never have never had enough in it when it matured to pay off the mortgage? Hands up who ended up in negative equity when the housing market bottomed out?

At that time there was still some respect for institutions such as banks and building societies so we didn't have cause to be suspicious. Since then we've had so many financial scandals we are a lot more circumspect.

I remember in 1992 when the interest rates soared thinking I would just need to hand in my keys and walk away from my house. It being easier to get a mortgage was not necessarily a good thing and its the reason we have such stringent affordability checks (arguably a bit to stringent) these days.

I got married for the first time in 1999 and the style trend then was much less flounce and pomp than the 80s frights I'd seen as a kid. I definitely agree that the "wedding as a Thing" has grown massively for lots of people in recent years when it seemed to have been previously only for the wealthy/high society types. It can be one hell of a circus if people can afford/want that, and more people seem to feel they should be able to have anything they can think of.

There was an explosion in where you could get married, but I think the explosion of things like Cricut machines along with social media made a massive difference too. These contributed greatly to the huge deal around, for example, personalising and/or having signs for everything.

I got married last winter for the 2nd time and was astonished at just how much Stuff was available - some incredibly affordable and lots of it lovely, if not remotely eco friendly. I didn't go down the route of things like Bridesmaid proposal boxes etc. Did find it interesting though that I regularly had to give myself a talking to about not giving in to Wedding Envy when looking for ideas for a budget-but-lovely wedding!

@Serendipity12 I think it is fine to have an opinion but the righteous "I spent two nickles and a dime on my wedding, and hand made my dress from silk I got off my pet silk worm" tone of this thread is a little patronising! In one group of friends I'm in alone, there have been 5 weddings, each very different to the last with varying amounts of money spent. Doesn't any couple better than the other! Each couple thoroughly enjoyed their day!