Cousin-in-law’s Wedding Restrictions on spouses.

I’d go, keep your head down and use spa/visit local tourist attractions etc. Order breakfast in your room and have a lie in. Enjoy your weekend unobtrusively!

You did say that you hoped to be invited in for a dance.

From your op it did sound like you wanted to be wedding adjacent enough to tag along.

I hope you find something else to do that weekend. Drinks out with your friends? Visit your side of the family?

Are you one of those people who is surgically attached to their husband at all times? Sometimes couples need to attend events separately. It isn’t the end of the world. I am embarrassed for you. Your mother in law’s nephew? Christ alive.

Op I would bail out of this thread now. The savaging is inevitable,

Its poor form they couldn’t even manage an evening invite, and poor form splitting up a couple. We wouldn’t go to this kind of wedding, half the fun is enjoying it with your other half!! A massive waste of money really unless you are both going to enjoy it.

I hope whatever you decide you enjoy a fun evening. It’s their loss, you sound like great fun and just the kind to get everyone up and dancing! Nothing worse than an empty dance floor all night - really sours the evening. Anyway not your problem 🙏🏼

I remember that, but I think it was a different poster?

Their wedding their rules. I don't think it is that unreasonable of them. I think if looks a bit needy to lurk around the venue when you are not invited.

If you do this you are going to make a right tit of yourself. Just happened to be at a wedding you werent invited to and hoping that you will have a dance.

Why this hotel, on this day, and this time? You are just happening to be there hanging around....

It’s not your fucking wedding and not up to you to decide what is the best decision or budget for someone else’s wedding.

Or to choose a venue where you could afford to accommodate everyone.

As I said, I know it's an old fashioned view, but if you're going to do it and have 11 couples paying for hotel rooms, you can't be too surprised when someone of them choose to share them with their spouse. Attending a wedding is an expensive business, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to want to take advantage of a hotel room you've paid for and have a nice weekend of your own while DH is occupied at a wedding.

The hoping for a dance is odd though.

oh come on ' that they might invite me in for a dance ' meant you were going to be hanging around / hoping to be ' seen '

so ' I did not intend to gatecrash the wedding ' is not actually true is it...

I can just see it now you and the other 10 spouses / partners just hoping to be invited in for a dance...

still think this is a wind up...

Take the hint. They don’t want you there. Just don’t go.

They haven’t chosen that at all. They’ve invited their relatives. If their relatives can’t bear to be separated from their spouses for 48 hours they can decline. Nobody has chosen the spouses behaving weirdly (and very rudely).

It would have been smarter to budget properly for the wedding, or chosen an exclusive venue.

It really doesn’t. Your ideas of ‘classy’ are quite strange. It ‘screams’ ‘someone sanely enough prioritising actual family members over spouses they may barely have met’.

Half the time the reason people’s spouses are invited, or a guest is given a +1 is because they may not know anyone else at the wedding. If numbers are limited, and there’s a group where the bride/groom don’t really know the spouses, and the group all know one another and can be seated together and will have a whale of a time, there’s no need to invite spouses, if inviting them means you’d have to leave out actual family or friends.

I once went to a cousin's wedding which DH (admittedly then still my boyfriend) wasn't invited. My cousin at that stage didn't know DH at all and vice versa.

It was fine. DH (then boyfriend) and I just had a day each doing our own thing.

You aren't invited. Don't just try to sneak in via the back door. Do you and MIL's nephew even know each other? If you do then I can see why you are a bit miffed (though I wouldn't be bothered), but if you don't, or barely, then you shouldn't/can't expect an invitation. Either way, you shouldn't turn up at all.

Just organise yourself something nice to do for the day, perhaps with some friends.

Why? This is what the couple have chosen! It is not gracious at all.

If there's 11 spouses on his side, and potentially more in the brides side, he's just making it very clear that folks hoping to be invited in for a dance won't be getting that invitation.

He's obviously got wind that a few spouses were going to stay in the hotel and he's making sure, early doors, that it's clear that they won't be included on any of the wedding bits.

When you think of the number of potential extra people, and then the offence if Mary leaves Fred at home but then discovers that Alice brought Steve and now he's been invited in for a dance... he's just being very clear, and it's no wonder.

So you have none of your cousins? Because they can afford the 11 cousins, it’s the 11 spouses they can’t. The only solution according to your rules is to have none of the cousins, who they want and can afford, celebrate their wedding at all.

Then it would be the army of spouses who would lack etiquette and embarrassing themselves.

Presumably with a rival get together in the bar on Friday night and sat at a nearby table for breakfast so the invited spouses are caught in the crossfire of having to choose between the two groups.

What an embarrassment.

I think the groom has been smart in his communication to avoid any chancers. Anyone remember the lady and her daughter trying to chance the breakfast the day after the wedding, the wedding she wasn't invited to?
You do sound desperate, hoping to sneak an invite for a dance?
By all means stay at the hotel but don't get involved with any wedding related events unless you are invited.

You are perfectly entitled to do that op. Can you organise a fun night out with the spouses?

I am amazed your dh wants to go at all, a huge expense for a wedding. Maybe the money is better spent elsewhere.

Good update Op I'm glad you have come to the decision not to go.