To not be the least bit interested in other people's weddings?

[PiperChapstick]

A colleague is getting married next month, and it just seems to be the only topic of conversation in the office at the moment. I've heard endless conversations about what the favours are, the first dance, cake, colour themes, "disasters" with the MIL dress (it's the same colour as her mums ). She's a bit of a queen bee and other people in the office are making a terrible fuss - there's gonna be a hen do, a meal after work for colleagues who make the hen do, a day where we've booked a meeting room to present her with champagne and on the last day before she gets married the chief exec is presenting her with flowers. For that day people have various tasks such as filming, photos, making sure everyone in building has signed the card etc.

AIBU to find this all horrendously boring? I get it's important to her and she's excited but why does everyone else need to care? Maybe I'm just miserable re weddings - I couldn't even be arsed having a "proper" one, DH and I buggered off to America to elope. I did make a feeble attempt, we were gonna get married in our home town but I just never found myself caring about any of it, I just wanted to be DHs wife and be done with it.

I haven't said anything to colleague but I also haven't been insanely enthusiastic either I actually love weddings of families and good friends, I've always had a good time, but that's because of the people who are there, not the stuff on the table

I got married in a hole in the ground and our guests queued up to take a dump on us after our vows. I was actually still working on my Blackberry during the ceremony and DH didn't even realise we had gotten married until several weeks later. We only spent 26p but everyone said it was the best wedding they'd ever been to.

you know how Muriel is obsessed with weddings in Muriel's wedding and has clippings from magazines on her wall and tries on dresses? Do you think The MN equivalent of Muriel (aka MNuriel) goes to B&M to try on bin bags, has clippings of registry offices with no one in and buys Iceland buffet food telling the check out girl "it's for my frugal wedding day, aren't I ever do NORMAL and HUMBLE!"

'Sorry, but the fact it is basically marketed as 'the best day of a women's life' like the pinnacle of our lives are bagging a man, just gets my goat. And don't even get me started on how the woman at a 'traditional' wedding basically does nothing but sit there and look pretty - groom gets a speech, bride's dad gets a speech, best man gets a speech i.e. men get to talk, women get to to sit there and look pretty. It's so passive.'

Just so you know marmite, this bothers the living shit out of me too You are not alone! I find it downright depressing that so many women go along with it too, although tradition is a hard thing to fight.

Love the hole-in-the-ground wedding. Now those preps I'd love to hear- we found the perfect boar pit!

But do brace yourself, OP, if Queenbee bride has a baby it will be the second coming. You will hear more about her perineum than you can imagine.

Piper " I like going to wedding where everything is a surprise,"

please could I have an example of this?

Where I've had no prior knowledge of the small minute detail. Like favours and colour themes. It's better to go "oh that's nice" than "oh yeah that's that thing I heard about 50 times". I love a wedding where it's relaxed and no birdezilla or silly rules and exclusions or politics. Just two people wanting to get pissed have a nice day with the people they love. I find the most "razamattaz" weddings are usually the ones where people are most uptight and more concerned for perfection rather than having a nice day.

I'd just like the record to show that I've known a few groomzillas in my time.

It isn't always the woman who is the fusspot.

Organising a party for yourself, buying a dress, signing a piece of paper, is not real because it doesn't change anything real in the world. If a wedding did or didn't take place, no one would be able to tell, because nothing real in the world actually changes

Signing the piece of paper most definitely does change things in the real world.

I get his pension

It often is the bride who looses perspective though. Years ago I had a younger colleague who got married a couple of months before my DH and I did and kept going on and on about their wedding details (peach or pink?! Ties not quite matching bridesmaids dresses ) -fair enough, maybe she felt it was something we had in common at the time, though it was dead dull after the 162nd update. One day she said to me 'it's been like a little project for me the last year or so, I don't know what I'll do when it's over'. 'Get a life' was the obvious response, but it obviously would have been mean. Smile and nod and avoid the tearoom.... they were divorced 3 years later. I just thought about all that angst over the trivia.

Piper - I was hoping for something really fun, like a free bottle of Veuve handed out to each guest, lol.

I have been bored silly with wedding detail but I can't say I feel better or worse at a wedding knowing about the chair dresses or flowers in advance.

Cactus I think discussing the ideologies/patriarchy/etc is valid and interesting. What I am railing against is the general idea here (and you can't pretend you haven't seen it) that weddings are shit/nobody wants to go/it's a massive imposition/you're an idiot for bothering.

They're only an imposition if you allow them to be.

It's okay to turn down an invite.

I do love on these threads how so many responses go soemthing like:

"Oh yes, other people's weddings, dreadfully boring, at my wedding..."

I do hope the irony isn't lost on them.

Nope, no irony to be had, NotSaying news of our marriage came after our wedding. No chairs were forced to wear dresses and no colleagues made miserable by banging on about ribbons

Yup, what Cactus said. You may choose to think a wedding with two witnesses on your lunch break is self-righteously frugal, but I'm absolutely certain you will not have been bored rigid by two years' monologue about the guest list, the special unique jeans that were going to be worn, and the fabulous ribbon used to tie the unique bouquet.

Cactus, you and I appear to have had the same wedding.

The irony is because with one breath you insist weddings are boring and with the next you tell us all about yours. Can you really not see that?

chairs being forced to wear dresses

Writing a sentence about one's wedding on a thread about other people's wedding is not quite as bad as banging on for weeks to colleagues who cannot escape unless they resign though?

Why has no-one complained about the waste of working time? Admittedly, in my last few jobs, I've had intra-day deadlines, but surely everyone has some sort of list of tasks to accomplish that day, stuff that can't get done if everyone's wedding-skiving!

Go on, I dare you to complain on work grounds!

I think wedding-time-wasting is factored into the staff number calculations. It is time usually taken up by MN, which would otherwise have half the number of daytime posters

But MNing (or FBing) doesn't disrupt people who want to work (apart from the keyboard-spitting, which must annoy IT!)