Who was unreasonable at this wedding

[Dottie39]

Couple getting married. Family and long distance friends invited for whole thing, fairly small ceremony with around 40 guests and sit down meal.
Local friends invited to party afterwards.

After the ceremony, but before the meal, local friend arrives. His invite clearly said to come for evening only. He asks if he can join for meal but is told by staff all good is prepared however he can go to bar and order something himself. Bride and groom are oblivious to all this. (I'm sure if they had known they would have been more accommodating)

Local friend orders meal and stays for party.

The next morning when bride and groom check out they discover local friend has charged his meal and drinks to their room. They refuse to pay assuming mistake. Local friend, who had stayed at venue also is asked to pay. He argues couple should pay as they invited him to wedding and is now not talking to couple for embarrassing him and making him unwelcome.

Who should pay for the meal?
Who was unreasonable in this situation?
Local friend say they thought they were invited to whole thing, but was late and therefore missed ceremony.

Wow, Purple how ruuuude of the B&G! I'm impressed you still hosted the other guests - very decent of you

Mumsnet is the only place where I’ve EVER come across this weirdness about evening invitations. It’s standard. I’ve been to weddings all over the country and there are always evening guests.

^^this! Mumsnet is very strange sometimes.

YellowMakesMeSmile
The vows are the most important part of the wedding, everything else is an optional extra. By not inviviting people to the ceremony you are saying that they aren't important enough to witness your vows but are needed for their gift/cash contribution later.

See, this is the sort of attitude I actually find quite gross. You've had numerous people here telling you this is NOT what hosts are "saying". Nothing to do with 'importance'. I expect if you asked 99% of hosts their reasons for inviting X people to the wedding and Y people to a celebration of the wedding they would say the same. In most situations if you understood the full context - no, not necessarily that they're cutting "A-tier" guests to have a horse-drawn cart, but making decisions about venues, accessibility etc to take into account sensitivities, family history, MYRIAD factors - most reasonable people would likely be sympathetic, or at least less entitled.

Yet you are still rude enough to project your own decisions onto them (that hosts expect gifts, that witnessing vows is a judgement on someone's importance) and maintain that you know their own reasons better than they do.

I basically operate an open house policy and I like the guests a lot. Groom is known for being flaky and shit but DP doesn't have many friends nearby so I tolerate it with minimal bitching.

DP doesn't really see groom anymore. Last time they came over to ours they expected me to pick them up and bring them here as well as take them home at the end of the night! I told them to get a taxi.

Wish there was an applause emoji Purple !

'The vows are the most important part of the wedding,'

Oh, c'mon! Maybe to the B&G and their nearest and dearest, but to a lot of people, the food and drink and dancing, the feast, is the most important part.

Yeah, I’m not really there for the cows. This reminds me of when we were discussing what drinks we wanted for after the ceremony and SMIL said “Nobody cares about cocktails. All I remember from every wedding is how the couple looked at each other”.

Fuck off. I remember the canapés...

It's telling all your friends and family what tier of importance they are on, in your opinion. Rude.

What? Are you telling me you only have a set number of friends and relatives that are A listers?

My side would be 40 close relatives
Then there 2 of my mums friends who always call me to everything plus partners, that 44 plus DH side 13 so 57 family ..... now GM would want a plus one, as would a few cousins who aren't yet married, nephews and nieces who are just dating so maybe another 10 (67)

We haven't even got to friends yet! Let alone work friends ....

So my side .... lets see 3 closest friends plus partners and kids is 12,
So we're up to 80 - DH friends same again say 15, so 95.

Then DH works friends and my work friends, plus friends who I see from previous jobs and same for DH - at least 40 people.

There's no way 135 people all day is do able - that would be ridiculous!!

@GreenTulips
Some of The PPs would tell you to have crap food and location just so you accommodate everyone for every part of your day!

I would have good food, less people and not worry about the "tier" system!

I think maybe some people come from the sort of six-fingered backwater where you all know the same people, you live two streets from your parents and so does your intended spouse, and all your friends/relatives (often an indistiguishable category) expect to be invited to everything... (Bit like a soap opera only when a new person walks into town they don't inevitably turn out to be a murderer or someone's long lost half-step-brother they once had an affair with...)

For a lot of people, these days, at least one partner probably has family a good two-hour drive away, if not both, so it's first a matter of picking where to have the wedding that's least inconvenient for most people. Then you've got to factor in whether or not you're going to have the aunts and uncles and cousins there and their DC even though you haven't actually seen the adults since you were 10 and have no contact with their DC apart from swapping Christmas cards/token gifts for the little ones. And maybe one partner has a huge family and the other is an only child with no surviving grandparents, so is likely to want more friends there...

It's not surprising that it's a minefield for invites, and that a lot of people are inclined to have a smallish ceremony/meal and a big, more casual party later on.

BTW I have been to more than one wedding where people were invited to bring food/drink to share, as bridal couple were on a budget and wanted to have a lot of guests enjoy the day with them - these things are usually lovely but MNers would be shitting the bed with rage in many cases and insisting that the underpaid should have nothing more than crisps in the nearest cafe if they couldn't pay for a meal themselves...

“Nobody cares about cocktails. All I remember from every wedding is how the couple looked at each other”.

Oh, fuck that. I care about the cocktails.

I love weddings where the reception is a potluck/byob etc. They usually have a much nicer atmosphere, I feel I've contributed something really nice and there isn't all the "our speshul daaaaaaaay" matching chair-covers and expecting people to behave like lego pieces vibe.

That's completely different from being invited to fuck off and amuse yourself in a strange town all afternoon while the inner sanctum sit down to lunch. I maintain that only self-absorbed asshats would do this to their friends.

So, I was also thinking that this might be about how spread out your family and friends are (though I wouldn't chuck in the offensive 'six-fingered backwater' stuff), but came to the opposite conclusion. I think one of the reasons I've not been to that many weddings with evening-only guests, and perhaps why I think it's so rude, is that I've also never been to a wedding that was truly convenient to get to for the vast majority of the guests. Almost all my friends live in London, but I've only been to one central London wedding. People tend to get married in their home town (we got married near mine), but apart from my parents - who weren't obvious evening invite candidates! - that was at least an hour's journey for everyone, as the school friends I invited all, like me, no longer live there. I went to six weddings last year and all but one required an overnight stay, and that one we ended up wishing we had because it ended up being so inconvenient to get home. In these circumstances, an evening invitation is really quite shit. If almost all your guests live in the same small area I can see how asking people to rock up for a few hours is much more reasonable. I do still think it's a bit weird, though, and maintain that it wouldn't be considered socially acceptable for any other kind of party!

ReanimatedSGB

I love potluck/BYOB weddings, too. Have been to a number of them that were 'cake and tea/coffee' and that's it. No problem. In and out and free to do something else with the rest of the day.

And I think a potluck wedding is great, as was a wedding I went to where we all had afternoon tea rather than a formal meal. I also think a buffet for everyone is a much nice solution than giving half your guests dinner. I do recognise, though, that sometimes it's about capacity not cost, so a cheaper dinner option doesn't solve the problem.

' I went to where we all had afternoon tea rather than a formal meal.'

A poster started a thread about her afternoon tea wedding. Sounded lovely. But there were dozens of posts about how she needed to add in some salads and hot dishes, it wasn't substantial, Aunt Winifred wouldn't like it, there needed to be plenty of fizz on hand, too, blah blah blah.

Fuck no. Absolutely no way bride and groom should pay. No no. If local friend has the audacity to invite himself and show up where he wasn't invited - he can bloody well pay for himself!! CF indeed

Well, I will say that it was a very drunken wedding, and a fairly light meal probably contributed to that...! But also the B&G were 23 and so were most of the rest of us, and so it was probably always going to get a bit raucous whatever we ate! They were the very first of my friends to get married, it was done on an absolute shoe string, and it was absolutely lovely.

I’m sure I read somewhere that Megan Markle was an evening only invite at Pippa Middleton’s wedding.

I went to a wedding of a very religious couple once. It was at a massive church, and there were about 500 people invited. The breakfast afterwards was only 40 people. The B&G left at 5. They hadn’t consummated the relationship before their wedding.

The ceremony was the most important part of the day to them. And possibly the sex 😂

I went to a lovely one where the aunt had done the buffet. I think sometimes the personal touch goes a long way.

We had to travel and pay for a hotel for a sandwich wedding

Was so embarrassing as we hadn't realised we weren't invited for the wedding breakfast. Only realised when we couldn't find our names on the table plan. Ended up going to McDonald's

We had the opposite at our wedding. Everyone was invited all day.

Some people only appeared at 19:30 - for a 3pm ceremony - then complained there was no buffet. No shit, we just had to throw your hot meal in the bin

Friend pays! What a cheeky arse he is. Id be fuming if i were the bride

Day and evening dos have always been the norm for me too.
Having a later ceremony where everything blends into one is a more recent trend I think.
It's not rude.
Most people have close friends and family and then acquaintances and more distant family.
This is why a lot for people just go away and get married either telling nobody or only a very small number of people.

I think one of the reasons I've not been to that many weddings with evening-only guests, and perhaps why I think it's so rude, is that I've also never been to a wedding that was truly convenient to get to for the vast majority of the guests.

That is rude. I wouldn’t expect people to travel, stay over night etc for just an evening do.

However I have been an evening guest at three weddings in the last few years all of which have been walking distance from my house. They were all work colleagues or friends that I wasn’t all that close with. That is fine in my book.