Then that’s not typical for the people I know.
That might be the average for someone hiring professional wedding people. The last wedding that I attended was maybe 18 people and they just ordered food from the local bbq place. It wouldn’t have even made the list for them.
I was a groomsmen/groom in 11 of them. Having another 30 people/family doesn’t seem like a particularly large number. I guess if you came from a really small family or were a hard core introvert but I can name at least 10 people I only knew through work who invited me to their weddings that weren’t even really friends.
Yes, obviously.
I’ve been to maybe 50 weddings in my adult life (say 1990 onward) and most of those were in 1992-2003. I am absolutely certain that fewer than 10 had over 200 people. Most had well under 100.
None of them were courthouse or registry office weddings. Some were performed by non-clergy officiants, many were not in churches. But all had flowers, decorations, some level of music, a bridal party, etc. A couple were indeed backyard weddings but not in the backyard of the couple or their parents. Maybe the photographer didn’t meet some definition of “professional” but I’m fairly certain they were all getting paid.
Many of the smaller weddings were not first weddings for one or both.
And I’m South Asian. I’m guessing weddings in our community tend to be larger than average.
I’m guessing The Knot is simply not including a whole bunch of weddings in their definition of “wedding”.
Also obviously there’s an element of SES here. @Oredigger77 who attended a lot of weddings was earning serious 1%-er money throughout the relevant years. As were all his co-workers.
My wife and I were 29 & 32 when we got hitched. Both well into serious careers. Fully catered shindig at a fancy resort for IIRC 200 folks. Attended a bunch of similar scale weddings for our social and work peers.
When two struggling small-town 19 yos get married and their Dads both work down at the plant, the wedding is gonna be pretty commercially modest. It might be large in headcount, but the party will be at somebody’s house and “catered” by the extended family potluck style. Been to a few of those myself & they’re great.
Doesn’t make the folks any less married or the guests any less happy for them. But it does affect what gets into the promotional magazines and websites. And, ref the OP, what Hollywood chooses to show.
I can believe that. An Indian guy I knew at work had to put off retirement because he had two daughters to marry, which involved paying to fly relatives from India and putting them up at ritzy hotels.
My younger daughter had 50, which is the biggest wedding in three generations of our family.
I retired early, by the way. 
I’m not sure how much the income piece mattered. I got dragged to two of my wife’s cousins weddings and three more of her family friends as well as her sister, though I was a groomsman in that one and two more of her bridesmaids have gotten married. We also started dating at a mutual friends wedding. So 8 wedding just with her family in the first 5 years we were married. There is a fairly large income gap between our social circles.
I’d guess that introvert/extrovert and family size has more to do with it. My wife is very connected to her family and family friends both of her parents were in 7+ kid housholds so there are a ton of cousins and like cousins out there. I’m pretty much an extrovert and everyone is my friend so it was normal when the secretary invited me to her wedding or other work “friends”.
No doubt. Personally I’m an only child with two step-siblings. Only two of my five aunts and uncles by blood had any children and all of my them literally live on the other side of the country. I’m fond of my few first cousins who I had contact with in childhood and I’ve sent some gifts. But most were married when I was a teenager and I’ve never flown out to attend any weddings or funerals. Meanwhile I have/had a slew of 2nd cousins and great-aunts/uncles, but I’ve met only a few a handful of times and again they’re mostly on the opposite coast. We’re just not a tight-knit family and I’ve never worked anywhere where mere co-workers were habitually invited to weddings ( excepting genuine off-work friendships).
Pretty much. All the people I grew up with were working or middle class. My uncle was a steelworker and I’m not sure if my aunt even worked. When my 19-year-old cousin got married, they threw a 200-250 person bash at the local Polish banquet hall. Horse and carriage, Polish Highlander musicians, and all that shit. It was just kind of expected in the neighborhood and that’s what we grew up with. It was big, close-knit ethnic families and they regularly threw large parties. Christenings were another big occasion.
My only contention is that large weddings are not unusual and, in some urban settings like mine, completely the norm, and not dependent too much on income level. If anything, like I said above, the more fancy schmancy weddings are lower on the headcount than the “invite all the bride’s Irish relatives and the groom’s Greek family and friends over to the banquet hall” weddings that are reasonably common around here. And much of the cost is deferred by guests. My brother made a bit of a profit on his large wedding. We just about broke even on our smaller wedding.
Just for fun, today I asked the Romanian videographer at the wedding I was shooting (African-American, 150 guests) how big her wedding was back in Romania. Four hundred guests. So it’s hardly a uniquely American thing.
That’s what I’m wondering about. I would not invite or be invited by colleagues who weren’t friends. So I guess that part, at least for you, is true. Of course, on TV all their friends are invited as well, but I’m assuming that’s just so the entire cast can go to the wedding. These people didn’t invite the ditzy blonde or sarcastic snarker you lived with?
This fascinates me…I’ve never heard of it before. It could be fun, I suppose…
Where is this a thing?
And for funerals, too?
I dunno—I can imagine how it’s meaningful and symbolic for some people, but to me it seems kinda creepy. 
Again, where is this common?
Also, Is it a full time career for him, or just a side gig?
Dove releases are common in this area (western Pennsylvania). It’s a full time gig! He has several employees and sometimes has to turn away business because he’s so busy.
He had pigeons all his life (Birmingham Rollers) as a hobby. He started breeding white homing pigeons and training them for releases, built wicker baskets with release mechanisms used in RC airplanes, and devised a sound system.
I thought it was silly, then a friend hung himself and the dove guy offered to do a release at the memorial party we had. Not a dry eye in the house as skillfully placed baskets opened and released 25 doves that flew up and formed a group that circled overhead, getting their bearings to fly home. The birds arrive home before he does.
Worst case scenario? He will lose a bird to predation (hawks and falcons). Absolute worse case, it happens overhead at the cemetery or church with spectators aghast (hasn’t happened yet).
When I was a kid, I went to lots off huge weddings. Big family, and my uncles were caterers.
For our wedding, there were fewer than 20 guests, all very close friends or relatives. Perfect.
Perhaps they aren’t including weddings that were simple enough to organize that the organizers didn’t bother to use tools like “the knot”.
I’ve never been to a wedding where I didn’t know one of the couple quite well - but I have been to some weddings where some of the guests were friends of the parents of the couple more than being friends of the couple. I imagine, for such guests, the wedding reception is more of a reunion for the older generation than a celebration of the wedding. Not my sort of thing, yet (but maybe when I’m that old, I’ll feel the same way).
Well, when my engineering tech got married she and her then fiance had been over to my house a couple of times for bbqs. She invited me wife and I and another engineer from work. We were the two people who treated her as human (there was an unfortunate sexual harassment thing going on and we helped her find another job and get out) but I only heard from her once or twice more after we stopped working together.
The one that was more like TV was a coworker had a high school friend move to two so I let him rent my house while I was on assignment for 6 months. When I got back to town he moved out a couple of weeks later we continued to go out to bars or go to his house for bbqs or have him come over to mine. After another 6 months or so he invited me an two other coworkers who came up and partied at my place a lot. The coworkers and I flew down to New Orleans and spent a night at his moms house (without the groom) and went out on bourbon street. The next morning his mom gave us a Bently of hers to use as a car while we were there, we hit a drive through daiquiri bar and headed off to Mississippi for the wedding. After that more hijinks occurred we went to the wedding drove back the next day and flew home. It would have been a pretty perfect two part travel episode for a TV show.
Gruppen, I suspect that we can never give you a remotely accurate answer to this question. Most of this thread consists of just personal anecdotes. The only numbers available are ones collected by people whose jobs are planning and supplying the materials for weddings, and they don’t seem to be terribly concerned with overall accuracy. There is so much variance in wedding sizes that it appears to be impossible to generalize, especially since the groups of people who have small weddings and the groups of people who have large weddings apparently don’t hang out with each other very much. All it seems possible to say is that there is a spectrum of choices that people make from huge weddings to very small ones to getting married at the county courthouse without guests to not getting married at all. It’s like many other questions foreigners ask about American customs to which the answer is that there’s little consistency in our customs.
Well sure. People tend to get married a few years out of college over the next decade. It seemed around my mid to late 20s through my mid 30s there was a wedding every few months.
Maybe I’m “fancier” than most, but my experience with weddings has been pretty similar to what the OP describes. Not so much “not knowing who the bride and groom are”. But the typical “event” wedding at some nice venue (sometimes a “destination” wedding) with around 100 to 400 people.
Our wedding was around 120 people. It adds up quicker than you might expect. Bride and grooms immediate and extended family (plus "guest). My wife and I don’t have a ton of cousins, but if you come from a large family, that can add up quickly. Then you start inviting friends (plus “guest”). That can become a whole thing in and of itself. I have my New York friends. My work friends. My high school friends. My college fraternity brothers. My wife’s sorority sisters. My high school friends. A couple business school friends. And they form “clusters” as friends tend to do, so it’s tough to invite some but not all.
Weddings tend to be expensive to go to for the guests as well. Particularly if it’s a destination wedding. You have to buy a gift. Travel. Hotel. There have been a number of weddings we didn’t go to because, well, I normally don’t put a price on friendship…and yet here we are.
I think it’s fairly common to issue invitations to unmarried guests with a “plus one,” and those dates may not know the bridal couple at all. But I think it’s pretty rare that the person whose name was on the invitation doesn’t know at least one half of the couple well. Even when the parents are paying and inviting their friends, those friends typically know the adult child getting married. The exceptions would be, as others have mentioned, those large weddings of ethnic diasporas, especially south Asian, where the parents may invite any number of business associates who have never met the bride or groom.