For not wanting to attend a friend's destination wedding?

[emilydispleased]

My close friend is having a destination wedding, and while I'm happy for them, I really don't want to attend due to cost and time commitment. AIBU for not wanting to go?

You put it much better than me, succinctly spot on.

This.

Actually, the tradition (and wedding is tradition) is that you marry out of a bride's location, out of a bride's church, where she was christened. This rootless new mode of destination weddings is naff, tbh. It is like one has no home, no ties, no heritage - really like pirates getting hitched with no fixed abode.

I got married from my home town. It meant that most people did have to travel, because our families are scattered.

That is exactly what me and my husband were like. Our parents had passed, we both living in several countries growing up and did not live in close to any relatives. So why not.

it was on the beach too - to give it that extra pirate twist 😀

No, people have to expect a lot of guests won’t come if they choose to get married abroad.

It's a really simple one.

How much do you want to celebrate your friends wedding?

Versus

How much will it cost to attend?

If the later is greater than the former then don't go

Yawn!! Not all of us are practicing Christians and why should we have to stick with the same old stuff?

Preachy posts are naff

When we got married we got married in DH church (because its nicer) but had my priest as DH priest was judgmental that we had two kids out of wedlock. He didnt object to my priest because he "didnt want to marry us anyway"

I really like the sound of wedding destination olympics.

Prickly pear!!

No defo not U

A friend of mine invited me to her wedding in Thailand. It's not somewhere I want to go, and the cost when I looked into it was mad. I know its terrible but it got cancelled due to Covid and I was secretly quite happy. They had a lovely wedding last year which was fairly local!

Quoting myself from last night like a dick but this morning I am still enamoured by the idea of the Destination Wedding Olympics.

Perhaps a reality tv competition programme? The contestants - in couples, natch, although a polyamorous wedding would be fun - have a set budget with which they have to choose and plan a destination wedding, that to be fair and equal has to be approx X flying hours away from the UK.

The contestants have a certain number of guests to invite, and while not paying for their guests, they have to cater to all the problems the guests may have. The couple with the most guests to turn up win.

You've put a lot of thought into that @WriterOfWrongs 😆🤣

I wouldn't need someone to pay for a wedding in Cambridge - I can drive. Cuba?

That doesn't work these days though.

I have always pretty much where I do now near the SE coast.. My brother is the most local and he lives in the next county over. My parents moved to Scotland. My DH parents live 4 hours away on the east coast. His siblings live near Bristol. We have friends all over the place.
The second reason for destination wedding ( France) after non negotiable time of year, was because no one was more than 2 hours from an airport and pretty much everyone would have needed accommodation regardless. Much cheaper there than here. We paid for some.

The destination meant something to us both. Many of our guests have returned to the location since our wedding, for a holiday too.

I agree with @OlivePoet , @Changingplace , and..... well, virtually every other poster since.

I was going to say, No, of course YANBU to decline the invitation, but your incredibly rude and snippy replies to posters empathising with you have totally lost you any sympathy or desire to carry on with answering the question.

We got married abroad in 2008, small intimate wedding in Italy. I gave family and friends the details and said they are very welcome to attend and join us on holiday.

The guests treated like any other holiday and I think would have been embarrassed if we had paid for their flights, accommodation and the rest. No one was forced to come.

I loved the wedding and I’d do the same again.

i never wanted a big, formal stuffy wedding like I see over and over again in the UK with themes for everything, such a waste.

That’s a shame that her Grandma wanted to go, I’m sure your niece considered all factors. I don’t agree with having a wedding you’re not happy with to please others, it’s about the couple and the marriage

The son of an old friend once did a BBC internship where he and some other guy were basically put in a room and told to come up with ideas for ‘shiny floor’ programmes (light entertainment, typically broadcast from the floor of a studio, often with a live audience, like Strictly, or The Weakest Link) — he would say yours had promise but was too easy.

And prob suggest the wedding had to be equivalently remote (up a mountain, on an uninhabited island), or that the guests had to get there on a tight budget, or within a short time window, or only using donkeys, or without being caught by an Evil Wedding Preventor (wedding Guest Hunt?) or the rival wedding guests aimed with pant guns?

She didn't.
You can have the wedding you want, I've said that before. It's just a bit selfish if you exclude loved ones for the sake of an instagrammable backdrop.
However, I may well be in the minority about that, so be it.

It’s unfair to assume that. There were many reasons I preferred an abroad wedding, having ‘instagrammable pictures’ didn’t even feature in my list. And we had a party at home to celebrate with everyone

I'm not "assuming", it was the reason, in this instance. Like I say - each to their own.

You seem like it’s a massive sore point, perhaps approach your niece rather than calling strangers selfish

Rude.

I never called strangers selfish. I've said many times folks can please themselves. Go for it.
I do think that organising a wedding which will deliberately exclude loved ones because of the venue, is acting in a selfish way. But hey, folks can do whatever they want. Only my opinion.