Like many unAmericans I get most of my information about American culture from American TV, where it’s a staple that the characters go to lots of really big weddings, and often the people getting married aren’t even people they know well. Of course I get that everything is exaggerated on TV, but there must be some recognizable root for it to work.
I’ve been to maybe a dozen weddings in my life and they were all close friends or family. The idea of going to a wedding and not really knowing who the couple are, as I’ve seen on TV shows, is very strange to me. And these guys can easily rattle off a dozen weddings in a year, or even a summer.
So is this real? Do you guys go to all these weddings for people you barely know?
It depends, and I’m not sure it’s just an “American” thing. The largest weddings I’ve been to have been of various ethnic diasporas. In my experience as a wedding vendor who has attended over 300+ weddings, the average American wedding is about 150 people. My Polish family will have weddings more in the 200-300 range. The South Asian weddings I shoot average probably at around 300-400 and go up to 1000 (though I have heard of them as large as 2000 here in the Chicago area. And, yes, when I talk to my South Asian friends who are in this circle, they go to about a half dozen weddings or more a year.)
I’ve been to only one wedding that semi-qualifies.
When I was working at The Academic Institution That Will Not Be Named, I was invited to the wedding of an Indian medical resident I knew casually (the bride, not at all). They had a ton of people in attendance, virtually none of whom I knew, in a huge ballroom. What I remember most is that for entertainment there was a young girl doing a traditional dance while the elders looked on in what appeared to be lascivious approval.
I heard that the happy couple later had a separate formal ceremony in India, which involved riding on elephants.
It might be a reflection of seating the bride’s and groom’s friends and family on separate sides of the aisle. One side often needs to be padded with college friends and work acquaintances to balance the room. For most Americans, there seems to be a decade straddling their 20s and 30s where (non-family) wedding attendance seems like an annual or semiannual occurrence.
I guess I’ve been to two weddings that sort of qualify. One was the wedding of my fiance’s college roommate. It was an enormous Chinese wedding, and i knew the groom slightly and the other guests not at all. We were the only non-Chinese there, seated with the other college friends, and they teased us about not knowing what to expect. The food was fabulous, and served in excess. There may have been 2000 guests.
It was a slightly weird wedding because the couple had eloped a year earlier, but the families pressured them to have a large formal wedding.
The other was a very small wedding, on a week day. I knew the bride better than the groom, who was an introvert, but my husband had shared some classes with the groom, and I was surprised to discover that we’d been invited to pad out the groom’s side, which was a handful of relatives and us.
The smallest wedding celebration I’ve attended was my brother’s. He and his wife eloped, but threw a brunch immediately afterwards when they told the rest of the immediate family.
Most of the weddings I’ve been to were 100-200 people, and i know the bride and groom, and at least one set of their friends.
Not really IME. Setting aside the ethnicities already addressed where huge weddings are de rigeur …
Some people have small social circles with almost no penumbra while other folks have large social circles with lots of good friends who have slight friends who have acquaintances. Where one may well end up invited to a bunch of the acquaintance weddings.
I’s also bet it has a lot to do with whether you still live near where you grew up and how large the average family size is. I come from a small family with few cousins, and have moved from major city to major city roughly every 10 years since I finished college. Not a lot of opportunity to be included in weddings of folks I sorta kinda remember knowing from the Olde Dayes. Folks in the opposite situation have a lot more opportunity.
I think that’s pretty common. My post-college circle of friends was mainly made up of couples at that point. Naturally, most of us got married, and since we were all about the same age and at about the same point in our lives, we all got married within a few years of each other. Of course, that also means that we both knew the bride and groom very well and in all those cases, we were on a friendly basis with the immediate (and often extended) family of at least one of them.
The only time I can think of going to weddings we’re neither I nor my (at the time) wife knew either person very well was when one of us was obligated to attend because of a family connection and the other was a +1.
Yeah, I’m wondering where the OP is from if he things American weddings are big. American weddings are tiny. I had about 400 people at my (Israeli) wedding, and it was considered modest.
And sure, there were lots of people there I didn’t know, but the more the merrier, right? They made our parents and siblings happy, and most of them brought money, so why on earth would we complain?
What’s a “wedding vendor”? I’m guessing it’s something that a really small and/or informal wedding wouldn’t have, which could skew your perception. (Does two people getting married by a justice of the peace count as a wedding?)
My guess is, a business which specifically works on weddings (caterer, DJ, etc.) – IIRC, @pulykamell is a photographer. So, yeah, if a couple is getting married at the courthouse, with just their families or a few close friends in attendance, and isn’t having a formal reception, they may not be hiring a photographer, a caterer, etc.
I don’t think that I’ve ever been to a wedding where I didn’t know the bride and/or the groom, but I’ve certainly been to a few where I knew very few other people.
And agreeing with others that there was a period, when I was in my mid 20s to early 30s, where I was attending several weddings each summer. But, at this point, in my 50s, I’ve only been to three weddings in the past five years.
Most of the weddings I’ve attended have been in the range of 75 to 150 guests; I’ve never been to a really big one.
Yes, as @kenobi_65 mentions, I’m a photographer in the industry (in fact, have a wedding coming up in a few hours after having shot a medium-sized one yesterday.)
Taking myself out of the vendor equation, if I just look at my family, me and my wife had the smallest wedding with only 85 guests. My brother’s wedding was around 200. The median family and friend weddings I have attended have been around 200 people, so slightly larger than what I consider average in my industry. I come from a family and friends of recent immigrants, and that may skew the average, as the ethnic weddings, in my experience, tend to be larger, sometimes much. The high-end weddings are the ones that tend to be in the 50-100 guest range.
The weddings in American movies and television shows aren’t typical. They are just the only ones interesting enough to be shown in a movie or television show. As was previously noted, it’s only in one’s 20s and 30s that one can expect to be invited to one or two weddings per year. Certainly no more than half of weddings are remotely large, with people there who don’t know each other. Many weddings are done with very little planning and have few guests. Some have no guests. The couple just goes to the country courthouse to get a marriage license and gets married by a clerk there. And remember that there are significant numbers of American couples who don’t bother to get married. They have kids and live together for a long time. Occasionally they refer to each other as husband and wife even though they aren’t married. American television shows and movies are about what the producers, directors, and writers consider interesting, not about what’s typical.
Incidentally, I think that American funerals are a bigger event than American weddings.
When we got married, there were guests who knew me a bit, but were partially invited because they were good friends of my parents. My mother-in-law then had a party for us approximately a month after the wedding, for their (her and the father-in-law) friends who couldn’t attend the wedding due to the distance. Some of them could not have picked my husband out of a line up, as they hadn’t seen him in years.
For the wedding there were 120 people, for the part, approximately 60, but not all at the same time, since it was an open house. Many of those people we never saw again.
Another point: first weddings (particularly a first wedding for the bride) are more likely to be bigger events, with more guests, than any subsequent weddings. While it’s not unheard of for people who have gotten divorced, and then are getting married again, to have a big fancy wedding, in my experience, those weddings are more likely to be smaller, without a formal wedding reception, and with attendance limited to family and a few friends.
I’ve been to one wedding with about 1000 guests. I only knew the groom and some members of his family. It was one of those ethnic weddings as mentioned above.
There was a three year or so stretch when I went to tons of weddings, including my own. These were all childhood friends, siblings, college friends and work colleagues of mine or of my girlfriend/spouse. All of them were for people around my age. I knew all of them well except for a few where I was the +1 and my spouse knew them well. Even outside of that window the same applies.
My own wedding had around 100 people and I knew all of them except for a few +1s of my guests and maybe two to four of my parent’s friends. My parents invited several other people apiece but I knew all of them since I was a kid.
Now that I am old I can see being invited to the wedding of the kids of my childhood friends in the not so distant futures. I have met all of them but I can’t say that I know them very well.
wedding planning is big business, and in America they offer a university degree in it!
I wonder if this field of study exists at , say, Oxford or Cambridge, or the Sorbonne
The last wedding i attended was my son’s. There were a ton of people there that i didn’t know, all relatives of the bride. I made a point of meeting all those people, as one of the functions of a wedding is to merge families.
