Buckle up, it’s a long one.
My partner and I have been engaged for more than a decade but haven’t got round to getting married, largely due to the logistics of organising a wedding. My family is extremely large and rather complex (more on this later) and his is on the other side of the world.
A couple of years ago his mum announced she was visiting us for the first time ever and we seized on the opportunity to book a v simple registry office number, with a mum each, a sister each and our then-baby daughter. Various siblings of mine were put out not to be invited but could understand because it matched my partner’s family presence. Perfect. Or would have been, but covid meant it was cancelled.
Last weekend we decided we would book a v small registry office ceremony in the spring and have a larger, informal party with friends to celebrate later in the summer to tie in with my partner’s big birthday - a party, but not particularly wedding-y. And when we next saw my family we would tell them and have a couple of bottles of champagne but no need to make a big deal. Lovely, and we could get on with being married, which to me is the important bit.
However my partner’s family has now decided they’d all like to come from Australia for one or other of the events. This is amazing for my partner but massively changes the scale of plans since if his whole family is there I will need to invite my whole family and everything very quickly spirals into an unmanageably large and expensive affair.
For context, our main plan next year is to renovate our house, which desperately needs doing and will be a huge drain on our finances.
For further context, my family are all lovely people but there are a lot of them. My parents are each on their third marriage and I am close to their previous partners. By the time I’ve got through parents, steps and new partners I’m at 7 people. Siblings, partners, and niblings is another 17. Just inviting some risks really hurting the feelings of others, which I don’t want to do. And that’s before we get to aunts, uncles and cousins, or friends.
So if his family comes for the ceremony and we invite my immediate family to that, I’m stuck with a 40-person wedding that I never really wanted, which will inevitably expand to include flowers, photography, catering, and a bunch of expense that’s probably better spent on the house. We’re in london so affordable options are pretty limited.
If they come for the party, it’s going to end up being a fancier affair than we’d envisaged, since people are travelling from the other side of the world for it, and again it all ends up being more of a “wedding” than I wanted or can probably afford next year.
I love them all and I know in the bigger picture this is a positive problem but AIBU to just want to scream? All I want to do is get married to my partner, but doing it in a manageable way just feels impossible.