What do you wish you had/hadn't done at your wedding?

[awkwardusername]

Right down to the tiny details!

This is Mumsnet though. Unless you crucify yourselves on the alter of guest martyrdom, or get married on £30 and have the best day ever, you’ve hosted a shit wedding if you try to do anything that not at the direct benefit of your guests.

I wish I hadn't
:bothered with a professional photographer, never looked at the enormous box of photos and it was stupidly expensive.
Bothered with professional hair and make-up... rural australia I looked like a drag queen...Why Ive not ever looked at the photos.
Things that worked really well
loads of champagne, canapes or tea and scones for the guests during the inevitable lull between ceremony and dinner when the professional photographer (also rural Australia) was channeling his inner David Bailey and making me pose artfully against gum trees.

You wait until it's just the two of you then.
You don't have to crucify yourself buying stuff you can't afford. You just don't treat your guests as second class citizens in my opinion?

I wish I'd had spent more time speaking with people. Also there were people I wish I'd got photos with but it completely slipped my mind on the day.

Should've ordered less food, we brought loads home with us.

@Ihopeyourcakeisshit weird but thanks for your opinion.

@Dunlin
🤣🤣

You're welcome.

I know this is not the kind of answer you are looking for but I had a quick gag in the loo when I was getting married (over 20 years ago) as I was so nervous and set the hotels fire alarm off definitely not my finest moment 😞

Gag meant gag

@NeonStones

I wish I’d thought to offer tea and coffee along with cold drinks for the post ceremony drinks & nibbles. My relatives spied a tea van (we were in a public place) and descended on it with glee. We could probably have saved a fortune on Prosecco if we’d just given everyone a cuppa.

We did that. We had shortbread in the shape of our initials too. The bloke’s from N Ireland and it’s tradition there. Our guests loved it.

Ffs fag

Wouldn’t have bothered with the evening buffet, everyone was full from the meal and a lot got wasted.

Another vote for wish I had never married him. He's by far the worst thing that ever happened to me.

@Ihopeyourcakeisshit I do hope you don’t have such a stick up your arse at any weddings you attend!

Perfectly fine in my opinion to furnish guests with free flowing wine and Prosecco and canapés while myself and my husband drank champagne special to us while having photos away from the guests. We spent a lot of our hard earned money to give everyone a great day and this was just for us. Personal touches for you and your groom at your wedding that doesn’t negatively affect any of the guests are perfectly acceptable, but as I said, many people can be sniffy judgmental martyrs over things like that.

Not had "Here comes the bride" as our music to walk down the aisle on a Bontempi organ, mind you an American Aunt is an inveterate music snob so it was good to see her be mildly miffed by this.

Cake toppers were a total waste of money £50 (16 years ago so about £120-150 in today's money) for some lumpen figures that could have been anybody.

My DPs had paid considerable corkage on the wine, it was the day after that we discovered the venue had been very stingy about topping up glasses so a lot of bottles were left over.

As some have said our buffet was pretty much wasted. It was a huge spread and hardly any of it got eaten. I wish the venue hadn't cut up the fruit cake as we ended up having DS 11 months later and it would have been good to have for christening ( not that we actually had one).

I wish I hadn't invited my cousins boyfriend of the time, in the knowledge that she planned to dump him afterwards. He refused to dance with me for a ceildh dance which was rude of him.

It was a wonderful day and the above didn't impinge too much on it.

The real things I wish I could have changed, I wouldn't have been able to. Mum and Dad were stressed about annoying aunt and I spent the morning of my wedding driving DM to a chemist to get some of her stomach medication. DF then spent our time walking to the aisle ( it was outside so quite a distance) saying how worried he was about DMs health ( it turned out to be nothing serious ).

I really wished we had invited my DHs stepmum. His mum and sister pretty much forced him not to invite her. His mum and dad had been divorced for 25 years but his mum and sister were still bitter over it. His step mum is a lovely woman and pretty much offered not to come when she heard about the issues. She should have been there though

@SmidgenofaPigeon I was at a wedding where there were two tiers of wine being served. I know this because the B2B was raving about a certain wine and then it didn't appear in the choices available.

It was a wonderful event and the meal and wines provided were excellent, but it just seemed a little odd not to treat everyone the same when you have the rest of your life to drink special wines by yourselves - indeed the honeymoon would seem like a good opportunity to do that.

We plan to have a couple of very expensive bottles of champagne for my husband and I. These are gifts from work etc
We are spending £200 plus per head on each guest so I'm sure they can cope with prosecco or less expensive champagne after all we're spending a lot on them.

I wish we’d had a videographer.

I wish I hadn’t obsessively lost weight beforehand - it really aged me in the face and I notice it in the pictures when I look back.

I actually now wish I’d gone for a slightly more low key, slightly more practical dress. I went for a bit of a princess gown with a massive train which I absolutely loved but it was hard to move around and ended up looking a bit tatty.

I wish we hadn’t spent so much on a cake. It was a bit bland and there was so much left over.

I WISH I’d worn flats not stilettos!

But most of all, I wish I hadn’t been bullied into having a child bridesmaid I didn’t want and barely knew - she ruined the bridesmaid photos - and I also wish I hadn’t bowed to tradition and let my dad do a speech. Very specific to my family situation but I didn’t want him to do a speech but I let him because ‘tradition’, and it was a nightmare.

But overall it was a lovely wedding and I’m glad we did it the way we did.

Not go through with it!

Wish I’d gone and got married abroad. Wanted to but MIL said her family wouldn’t all be able to travel. Wish I’d not felt pressured into inviting people that I didn’t want there.

not let MIL interfere with the cake cutting at all!
I guess there's no time to be more symbolically and putting your foot down - I had to ask her to step back!
I wish I didn't have to, it was quite awkward.

@rookiemere it was only two bottles. One probably would have ended up back in our room. And the wine being served was very good, not cheap in the slightest. Irrelevant now really but it was just supposed to be for when we went outside to have the photos done and didn’t have access to all the wine the guests were drinking. No one was supposed to know! But as it was, it went into general circulation anyway, and we only remembered it the next day.

@OSullivans good! Nothing wrong with it in the slightest!

No speeches at all. No posed photos that drag on for hours. Much less formal reception.