Destination Wedding Etiquette

In My Humble Opinion
81

The only problem I had with it all was her attitude about being asked to perform her function as the bride. She had planned out all these pictures she wanted the photographer to be sure he got…all the cousins together, all the girl cousins, her crowd of friends from high school, the group from college…but when it came time to actually take the pictures, she was trying to rush the photographer, wouldn’t sit still, just wanted to get back to dancing with her bridesmaids. She was rude to the photgrapher, and very impatient with getting people arranged. This was a huge wedding…tons of relatives from both sides, many of whom she hadn’t seen in years, but all she wanted to do was dance with the girls she parties with every weekend. She and the groom did do a tour of all the tables, but then he went back to drinking shots with his friends, and she headed to the dance floor.

There seemed to be no “couple-ness” to their wedding. There was a slide show of pictures of each of them growing up, and then a whole bunch of posed couple shots taken by a photographer (“okay, now both of you peek out from behind the tree…okay, now you sit on the picnic table while she sits on the picnic bench, okay, now switch places”) but not one single non-posed, candid shot of the two of them together, acting like a couple. It was very weird. And then they spent almost no time together during the wedding. The rest of us just didn’t need to be there…it was just a dressed-up college night at a club for them.

I once travelled with a group of friends to a friend’s wedding in Baltimore…most of us live in Ohio, one couple lives in Indiana. We arrived the night before the wedding, and spent the evening together, (without the wedding couple, who were busy with the rehearsal dinner) exploring the Inner Harbor. The next day was the wedding, and we got to see the happy couple during the reception as they made their way around the room, and had fun together for a few hours, and got silly and decorated their car (we were all too old to be doing that!We were in our mid-forties then) and then they left and drove off to their wedding night, and we all packed up and went to the airport. No one felt deprived that we hadn’t spent hours and hours with the couple. We knew they had a lot of people to visit with, and we had fun amongst ourselves. We didn’t need to spend days together to stay and feel connected, and we didn’t resent not having more time with the couple. I guess I just have a different view on the whole thing. We wanted to be there, to see them get married, which is why we rearranged schedules and made the time to fly in for the day (and it was a really cheap flight) but we all had families and kids to get back to, and we just wouldn’t be comfortable spending days and days in each other’s company. That’s how we’ve managed to stay friends now for nearly forty years!

I would always be the person who would not be able to attend a destination wedding like you describe because of my financial situation. And I would feel left out, and probably a bit resentful, if it were the wedding of someone close to me. But then I’m also not a big “resort” type person…no waterskiing, or golfing, or climbing or parasailing! I would feel uncomfortable going to another country for such an important family event, just so I could stand on a beach and have a picture taken at sunset. And most of the people I care about having at a wedding live near me, or could get here fairly cheaply. So count me on the side of “not a destination wedding fan”.

82

I seriously considered the exotic location version of the destination wedding, but ended up eloping to Las Vegas and informing everyone after the fact. I don’t feel the least bit bad about it (and wouldn’t have even if we’d gone with plan #1), as:

  1. His family was all five or more hours away from where we live.

  2. My family was all three or more hours away from where we live.

  3. Neither family could afford the hotels and other travel expenses very easily and were bitching at the concept of traveling, no matter where it would be to.

  4. Picking one home town over the other would have caused a mess of hurt feelings like you’ve never seen. And the losing family would have had to travel six hours.

  5. We didn’t have any close friends in our area at the time, only acquaintances.

Quite frankly, the cute little barbecue in the backyard for everyone only makes sense if you assume that your friends and family (preferably for both sides) are all local. It’s not quite as ubiquitis as you might assume.

83

Risha, that just makes it a tricky situation when all the close family are being selfish about having to travel. When everyone lives a reasonable distance away from each other (less than half a day’s travel, IMO), complaining about not having it in their locale when it’d inconvenience almost everyone else severely is just plain selfish and petty.

I don’t really know what we’re going to do when my SO and I get married. The family is all over the place, so regardless of where we have it, just about everyone will have to travel to get there. We’ll keep it in-state most likely, and probably within a shorter distance of both parental sets, but it’s still going to be a little crazy to coordinate.

84

I’m honestly not upset by the complaints we got or consider it petty. Sure it would have been half a day’s drive for a lot of them. But half a day’s drive, a ceremony, a long party, and a half a day’s drive back is too much for most people, so they’d have to stay overnight. I suspect that most people’s on this board family lives considerably higher above the poverity line then mine do. A hotel room is a serious blow to the budget for much of my family, and it would have been on top of gifts and possibly a new outfit. Sure, most if not all of them would have done it and would have been still happy to be there, but the cost still would have been a legitimate gripe if I’d gone that route.

85

A half a day’s drive was too far?? Geez here I was thinking you meant 3 or 5 or 6 hours flying. Which is what it will be for just about everyone who comes to my wedding. His family is all clustered in the south east, mostly near Atlanta, but the “far away” ones are still only about a 4 hour drive, which I consider to still be local. For this reason, we’d probably have the wedding near Atlanta so that at least his family wouldn’t have to travel much. For me people would be coming from all over the place, virtually none of them within a reasonable driving distance. It’s kinda gonna suck.

86

Opal, we could just do the wedding at the next DopeFest in October and solve all your problems…ready-made guest list, exotic locale (WestPark!) and no griping!

87

My family isn’t exactly wealthy (not working class, but there is some financial hardship in the family), but at the same time, we’re so far flung that there’s no way that a ceremony and reception could be done where more than five people at a time could make their trip less than two or three hours’ drive. Most of the family would have to fly in, some from overseas, so even with the financial hardship of renting a hotel/motel room, I can’t necessarily relate because it is a comparatively minor inconvenience to the ones that my own family are going to have.

88

Sweet! The only snag is that he hasn’t asked yet. We’re doing the whole living-together-test-run now, and I don’t know how long that will take. Hehe!