As a guest, I mean. And that only counts weddings I attended as an adult, and doesn’t include my own. I’m going to #42 on March 1st, and #43 on March 23rd.
Lest you wonder why I’ve been to so many, I was in a college fraternity whose members are apparently good husband material, and I had another very large group of college friends with minimal overlap. I’ve also stayed in the city where I went to college and part of high school (Orlando), so I’m still in touch with those people.
I’m now 31, and my friends are mostly married off. However, although my wife is the same age, her friends seem to have held out a bit longer and we’ve mostly been attending their wedding for the last two or three years.
Somewhat amusingly, I’ve only been in the wedding party once in all those weddings (and that was the only wedding I’ve attended out-of state.) Apparently I’m everybody’s sixth-best friend. Also, only two of the couples have divorced. I’m good luck!
So yeah, ask me anything. I totally have the etiquette stuff down.
Do you ever get annoyed at getting so many invitations? I was thankful when I got out of my 20’s and the weddings announcements switched over mostly to divorces. People don’t invite you to go to court proceedings with them.
Nah. I like them. There’s been the occasional one here or there where the wife and I didn’t know anyone, but I make friends* quickly. We’ve only turned down one invitation as far as I can recall, and that was for a ceremony in Toronto right after we bought our house and were flat broke.
It’s a rare year that I don’t go to two or three. First, my friends, then all their extended family, now the kids. So, multiply that by over 30 years of adult life…
No exact numbers, because I don’t keep a record of all of them.
In weddings, I was best man three times. I performed one in Colorado.
As a job, I’ve done scores, even tho I don’t market myself as a wedding photographer.
Do you take secret notes of whose weddings you will be attending AGAIN in 5 or 10 years?
Also, as a contrast, I’ve kept in touch with almost no one from my youth, and have been to maybe a half dozen weddings total. But I’ve been best man at 2 of them. Apparently I can claim quality over quantity!
I grew up in England and I’m not in touch with any of my friends from before the age of 15 or so, and all my family is in the UK or India. I’ve participated in one or two divorce pools, yes.
Depends slightly on how well I/we know the recipient, and whether my wife is invited to the bridal shower. She always buys a nice shower gift so we usually cut back a little on the wedding gift in those instances. Minimum of $50, but we normally spend around $80 nowadays.
I didn’t keep count; it just occurred to me at 35ish that the number must be really large, and I spent an hour going through my Facebook friend list and such trying to count them up. Since then I’ve kept count but I may actually be off by one or two.
I should note that I missed the entire ceremony for one of the divorced couples because the directions flew out the window on the interstate. So that doesn’t count! I got there just in time for the reception.
Most humorous - we were in Milwaukee for the wedding of Mike and MB for the one where I was in the bridal party. The Milwaukee Brewers were in the NLDS that year. We all took a trip to the casino two nights before the wedding, and our bus passed a huge office building whose lights had been set to spell out “Go MB!” We all had a good laugh about how they were trying to tell the bride to escape while she could. We (including the bride and groom) also ended the wedding night singing karaoke with Robin Zander from Cheap Trick at a bar/speakeasy thing called the Safe House. I guess that could be “most unusual” but I’ll have to think about that one a bit more.
Uh-huh. Your poor grip on the map cost those friends their marriage? You might want to bump up the gift allotment spent for that poor guy’s next wedding.
Funniest: I hope good photos of “Go MB” were taken for their wedding album.
Weird. I am the opposite. Performed 5 weddings, Best Man in another, Groomsman in one more. Only been to two I have not been in.
So, performing weddings has become a bit of a hobby for me. From your perspective, what makes for a good ceremony? Which ceremonies were most touching, made you feel most included, or were most memorable? How much humor is good?
Oooh. Good question. I’m a lapsed Hindu who tends towards militant atheism, so I obviously don’t go in for the heavy-god-and-jesus thing. Obviously, though, the officiant and the sermon/ceremony stuff are about the bride and groom and their families.
Basically, just don’t do that “the ring has no beginning and no end and symbolizes eternal love” thing. I’ve probably heard it at 90% of the weddings I attended and, well, it’s a fucking awful cliche. The only ceremony that really sticks out for me is one where there were two officiants, a rabbi and some flavor of Protestant minister. The rabbi had obviously done a lot of them before, and he did an amazing job of trading off with the minister. The minister obviously hadn’t done a lot of similar stuff and talked in cliches, though.
Hell, my wife has actually been a bridesmaid 24 times. I have no earthly idea how many weddings we’ve attended, though Facebook would certainly be a good starting point.
