To think it might be true that most people dislike weddings?

[TheRealAmandaClarke]

Or have become a grumpy old woman?

(I know the truth btw, I'm not offended)

I think its a fairly recent thing and probably related to the "modern" high expectations from B&G about their day, spiralling costs which the B&G usually pay for themselves, and large guest lists/ geographical spread of families and friends which make overnight stays a neccessity.

I don't think there was so much angst about wedding in the past (apart from the ever present family politics issues iyswim).

Have we lost all sense of reason with our weddings? So many threads raise issues about children at weddings (almost always a cost factor to not invite them and often a problem for guests), overseas weddings dictating the family holiday for that year, expensive overnight stays in remote hotels (oops ), requests for money.......

I honestly think that it didn't used to be that bad. And more people were content with a modest celebration with family and friends, that suited their budget, rather than giant disney princess, magazine cover, tattler style events that we all seem to need. And the cost affects the couple and all their guests with much grumbling for some time.

Am i unreasonable to suggest this?
Am i alone?

I think most people still are content 'with a modest celebration with family and friends, that suited their budget'.

Just the few you hear about are the OTT ones.

I like weddings on the whole.

YABU.

I love weddings.

I hate all the crap that goes with them - hen weekends, daft requests about who does what and goes where to orchestrate the Hello magazine-esque "perfect day". I blame the Beckhams personally - I'm sure it never used to be like this before their throne shite

Oh and dear cousin who with a year to go decided to ask nan to pay towards "dream wedding" as groom was facing redundancy - you've got your priorities all wrong! Would any normal person ask a pensioner to dip into their savings to fund a glitzy day rather than a scale back with a year to to?

Weddings are just too over the top now I think. Everything costs far too much, for both B&G and guests. Long gone are the days when you got married in the local church or registry office and went back for a meal at the community centre/pub/restaurant etc with a cheesy disco to round off the evening. Now it all seems to be hotels, bands, 'experiences' and £££.

Apart from my own the best wedding I have been to recently was a Registry office followed by Chinese Restaurant and back to B&Gs house for drinks. That was a stand out day and much better even than the extravaganza we went to later on that year that cost the B&G over £300 a head (and they had 80 odd guests ).

I avoid weddings as much as possible. They grate on me.

Oh brave they'd done that too! Apparently the table plans had been done 'the navy way' - which was interesting as none of them had any connection to the navy They thought it would be nice for the guests to meet and chat to new people - FFS people go to weddings to catch up with old friends and family you don't see often! DH and I were fed up by this time and just picked up the name cards and swapped them about.

I find weddings quite boring to be honest. Well...your bog standard formal wedding anyway.

I love weddings.

And I have never seen the hysteria I've read around here, either. Tbh, I've been to some fantastic weddings that were a ton of fun due to what was probably some intense Bridezilla level planning. The more casual weddings had a lot more standing around.

I am getting married in two weeks and my wedding is low budget, all invited, in a cheap place not too far from where everyone lives (no overnight stay required) and I can honestly say that I have thought more about all my guests enjoying the day than I have thought "its my day." Its not my day.

Anyway, I do feel that when we read threads about weddings on here we are only getting a view of the extremes. No one can make an AIBU about a normal down to earth inexpensive wedding, so those ones don't get mentioned. Its easy to think that ALL weddings involve crazy requests and cash poem, but I don't think they all do.

As for weddings, I love them and wish I had been to more and hope I will be to more in future!

I love weddings, I wish I was invited to more! I absolutely hate only being invited to the evening do though. You feel a bit like a second class citizen, spend a whole load of money for a couple of hours, everyone is already drunk when you get there, and you miss the whole point of the day - the marriage.

If you are lucky you might get a dried up bacon sandwich for your troubles.

Can't stand them , so boring waiting around for hours.

And speeches...oooh Goddd.
I remember one wedding where the father of the bride went on and on and on....

We didn't have speeches at our wedding, just quick toasts, and on with the party.

I don't like weddings. We got married in a registry office with two witnesses and a child. We went home for tea.

I have been to 1 wedding in the last 20 years.

I like weddings - well, the weddings of my friends whom I love. I'm not so keen on the ones that are all for show - one of my favourites was a second wedding, back garden affair - it was great!

I have been to a wide range of weddings and there was really only one I got bored at - and that was one where everyone was invited to everything, but half the guests were friends of the bride's father (and possibly the groom's parents too, I'm not sure) so they fucked off after the meal, leaving a heavily diminished group. I've never wanted to leave a do so early in my life before! I wasn't allowed to, DH thought it would "look bad", so I stayed a while longer but still left before the end.

Possibly the oddest wedding though, was one where the wedding breakfast was a fork buffet, but there was next to no seating available, so eating it was, um, interesting! The speech by the bride's father seemed to mostly focus on her sister and there was no "party" bit at all. A touch too restrained, we thought!

I don't even mind evening-only invitations because quite often there are a lot of aged rellies that have to be invited to the day, who disappear before the evening party bit - and it's nice to turn up and see everyone after they've started to relax (and miss the speeches, probably my least favourite part of any wedding)

In real life, I've never heard people bitch about weddings like they do on here, if they get invited to a wedding that's too much hassle and expense to get to, they decline, if they don't like the people involved, they decline, at most, people have 2-3 siblings/siblings-IL so there's only a few occasions in your life when it would really be 'bad form' not to go.

Problems are the geographical spread more in this generation (large numbers going ot university, making friends from all over the country, and a generation more likely to move for work) plus marrying later (so have had time to move about making friends all over the place!).

Plus it's only since 1994 that you could get married anywhere other than a Church or the Town Hall. Churches would make you have a connection with them, so either the one you went to as a child or the one you go to every week for 6 months - that would mean you couldn't just go to the other end of the country to get married - and town halls were prickly about marrying couples who didn't live in that Borough.

The wedding venue changes so you could get married in a hotel has opened up the ranges of places you could go anywhere, meaning that it's made it more acceptable to not just get married in the same town you live in, having the same identikt wedding as all your cousins/friends as there's only the one church and choice of 2 hotels (the 'posh one' and the 'cheap one') to pick from....

I think they're dull for guests. There's too much hanging around feeling hungry.

Am I the only one who thinks the baby boomers got a great deal here too? They didn't pay for their own weddings, but they are the first generation who get to sit back and let their DCs pay for their own!

Honestly, my mum complained about my wedding being a lot of 'fuss', I pointed out if I priced up her wedding now, it would cost in the region of £10k at least, and she and Dad weren't expected to pay for it, the two sets of grandparents did, and they arranged it all for her, she just had to buy her dress and send her mother the addresses of her uni friends to send the invites to - I was trying to arrange our wedding while working fulltime, getting no help and spending all our own money on it.

The geographical spread for us meant that we felt we had to put on a bigger 'do' than we would have done otherwise, I felt if people were coming from a long way away (and some of DH's uni friends were flying in from Zurich, some from Luxembourg, some from Ireland, as well as my friends coming from all over the UK), we felt we had to "look after" them properly.

I could never say YABU about anything very much, amanda you are one of our good common sense, reasonable MN posters, including this post!

I agree very much about heightened expectations, all the celeb culture from OK and Hello just magnifies the problem.

Things I enjoy
Sincere exchange of vows
Beautiful bride (they all are!)
Getting dressed up in best gear including heals I never normally totter around on wear )
Everyone getting together, enjoying a bop to great Eighties dance music

Things I cant stand
Asking for money
Families "never forgiving" someone who cant attend (oh please?!?)
Expecting everyone to spend excessive ££££ (OTT outfits, hotels, travel)
Wedding poems naff
Getting so caught up in the MeMeMe, forgetting other people do exist!

Aw I love them. Went to a (naice) pub last night and there was a wedding reception on. It's so nice everyone being together, kids playing, getting dressed up, eating nice food, everyone being happy! What's not to like?!

NCFTTB - I must have friends who can throw a great event, I've never had to hang around a long time feeling hungry! Always got fed at normal meal times (or earlier), a bit of time having photos etc, but not really excessive.

I like weddings in the main, as long as i know a decent amount of people there. Although saying that i have had great fun at a wedding before when dh and i were stuck on a table with people we didn't know.

i consider myself something of a wedding connoisseur now, having been to over 30 (including my own) in the past 6 years and the one thing i can say without any doubt is that if a wedding has been planned with the guests enjoyment in mind then its much better than one that's been planned to try and WOW, or to produce nice pictures, or to be 'different' etc.

I also think if you like weddings or not might depend on if you are an introvert or an extrovert - I quite like meeting new people and making small talk, DH hates it, so I don't mind being at a wedding where I know few people, as I'll make friends by half way through the starters, I take the view that everyone there will have been invited for a reason, so if my friend is their friend, then this person must be a good laugh/kind/interesting, best to find out how.

DH tends to look like a rabbit caught in the headlights, until I've got a conversastion going and then relaxes, if you had 2 people in a couple like my DH, then I can see being on a table with people you don't know would be painful...

Weddings bring out the grumpy old woman in me, they never used to. Have just declined an invite as really CBA.
I think it's since hotels and other venues have been able to do the ceremony, they offer standard packages so it's all a bit samey. Hate seating plans and having to sit and make small talk with strangers, standing around for hours while official photos done and queuing in the receiving line as if the b & g are royalty.
Also asking for cash not presents, because "we've got everything we need". Well good for you, so you don't need cash either. Much less grabby to suggest charity donations.

Def hate evening dos. They're a bloody cheek

Thirty weddings? In six years?

I really don't enjoy them at all. They are so expensive, from hen nights to new outfits and gifts and then they drag on. Lots of waiting around and awful speeches. Really, really not my cup of tea.

I don't think for me it's an age thing. I've never liked them. Although they pale into insignificance when compared to the awfulness that is hen weekends.

Yanbu. I am guilty of one of those things, the getting married abroad ( well it's abroad for half our guests but it's where my dp comes from and where we live, so even if we had a wedding in the UK it would be "abroad"for half the guests) we made it very clear on the invites to people in the UK that we realise it's a long way and we completely understand if it's too far/expensive to travel. We asked for no presents.

I'm feeling a little worried that I'm too calm about the entire thing, we have bought a boot load of alcohol, 2 boot loads of soft drinks, we have lots of tasty food, dp's cousin is making the main course and a friend is making cakes, we have made a spotify play list and a quiz about our respective countries to help the guests get to know each other at the meal. We have goodie bags for the kids and sweets as favours. I'm wearing a pale sundress ( I'm very pregnant and was happy just to find a dress that was comfortable!) the bridesmaids willjjust wear a normal dress that they own and will have flowers in their hair, dp will just wear a suit that he already owns. We are going to have orchids ( very cheap!) and candles in the middle of the tables and some tissue pom-poms an American friend bought hanging from the ceiling, it's in an old barn but we aren't having anything extra in terms of decorations, no chair covers or drapes. There will be summer games on the grass outside and I'll bring ds's toys and make a little fenced off area cage for the toddlers.

It just feels like I'm missing something, we have just treated it like a normal party, do you think the guests will be disappointed by the lack of a big white dress or matching napkins/best man's tie/bridesmaid dresses? I just want to marry my lovely dp and for our friends and family to have a fun time.