When you attend a wedding…

[crabsaremisunderstood]

… is it expected for guests to stay until the very end?

I’m attending a few weddings this year. I’m playing a “role” (not wedding party) in each of them which requires me to get up very early and be at the venue much earlier than other guests.

On the invitations they all state “carriages at midnight”. Call me boring but I rarely make it past 10pm even on a weekend, and with the extra early starts I’d rather not have to stay until the bride and groom depart. Obviously, I’d say a proper goodbye and thank them for a wonderful day, etc. before making my excuses!

My question, then:

YABU - It is expected that guests stay to the very end of the wedding evening
YANBU - It’s perfectly acceptable to leave a bit earlier

Thank you all!

We left our own wedding earlier than was probably considered polite by some (10.30pm)

We were both just absolutely spent…. 🤷🏼‍♀️

My favorite bit of a wedding is sloping off to our room at about 10.00 to watch TV and drink wine in bed....

Carriages at X is basically "the bar will be shut and we'll be kicked out"

Leave when you want to

I always make a real effort to stay to the end - last wedding I was at I was 11 weeks pregnant stone cold sober and pretty tired having left at 8am to travel to the venue so would happily have gone home early… but I am Scottish and as others have said a wedding doesn’t feel like a wedding until 500 miles by the Proclaimers and the Loch Lomond song have been played at the end so maybe non-Scottish weddings are different!

I was a bit surprised when DH’s best man and his wife came to say goodbye at 9pm but outside of the main wedding party I didn’t blink. (And frankly, if DH hasn’t been surprised and a bit hurt then I would have just assumed he’d mentioned it to DH beforehand and not thought any more of it!(.

Interested in the 'leave when you want but don't say bye as it distracts the B&G from the party'

I've always just liked to slope off as I find those partings cringe but I thought it was terribly rude to leave without a goodbye and that id be singled out for being uncouth so have forced myself.

So: rude to not say bye or better to slope off quietly so as not to distract hosts from the party??

If it's the latter I'm delighted! I never thought about the fact that if everyone bid farewell at a wedding that potentially the hosts are being interrupted at their own party 40 or even 50 times before the end of the night.

Very interested in this too!

Not for weddings but for family parties. My husband always says we have to say bye to everyone. I hate this, because it adds another thirty minutes somehow. But I think it's unfair on the hosts too, because when we leave early and circuit round, people definitely see it as permission to leave too.

(OK, sidebar, I think that's actually fine, because these things last too damn long, but I can see why it would be annoying.)

But then he's also got this batty idea that if we're late (exclusively because of him, BTW), we also have to be the last to leave - when the hosts are practically shoving us out of the door.