I quickly came up with more than a dozen weddings either of friends or the children of friends, and I’m sure there’s some that have slipped my mind, and some instances where I honestly can’t remember whether I was at a particular couple’s wedding back in the 1970s. (Was I at David and Betsy’s wedding? Carl and Sally’s? After all this time, hell if I know.)
I’ve only attended six or seven family weddings, since all our cousins lived at least halfway across the country so we only attended one or two cousins’ weddings.
This reminded me of another non-family wedding I’ve attended. It was the smallest wedding I’ve ever been to: besides the two brides and their kids, my wife and I and one of their friends attended. They had another friend officiate and the ceremony was held in their living room. We had dinner and some cake afterward. Another ceremony that was about as far from traditional as you can get.
This is exactly how they were. I went to a bunch of them as well. I can’t count the amount of red punch I drank. Huge family plus many people from the congregation.
I went to three receptions for friends in Utah when I was in my 20s, as well as a ton of family ones.
Also, one non-Mormon wedding where my girlfriend at the time was playing the harp and I had a pickup truck so I took her, but that doesn’t count.
Weddings for two friends in Japan and a coworker. My wife’s friends got married in Korea so we went there.
We went to the reception of one of her colleagues in Taiwan.
OK, to me, attending a reception = attending a wedding.
I rarely go to the church part (out of fear I’ll be struck by lightning), so if I am invited to a wedding, I show up at the reception with my gift. My friends pretty much do the same thing. Maybe it’s a regional thing, because I’ve talked to people from elsewhere who were shocked by this.
I can think of 10 that I attended. Since you mentioned ones you could not attend in your OP, I can think of another 3 that I was invited to but did not attend.
I got 7…no, 8. I expect there are others I can’t think of just now. An odd assortment of people…my best friend from childhood, two friends from college marrying each other, a former student of mine (I teach in an elementary school), the son of friends of ours, a woman who became friendly with my wife for juuuust long enough to invite us to her wedding. Not any kind of clear pattern.
We did have two invitations in a week not all that long ago, and accepted provisionally, but then had to decline both at the last minute because our grandson came a little early.
Like some and unlike many, I have been to substantially more family weddings than nonfamily weddings. I guess we unwashed folks need to, um, stick together.
I am also surprised, and it looks like you and I have been to a similar (large for the thread) number of weddings, although I can think of a number of factors.
Age. The older you are, the more weddings you’ll have been to, obviously. I’m in my late 30s. There’s definitely a cluster of weddings among the 30-something crowd.
Location/wealth. You often have to travel to weddings, which can be expensive. I live a one-day drive from where I grew up, and two hours driving distance of where I went to college, so a lot of weddings aren’t too hard for me to get to. But I’ve also flown across the country more than once for a wedding, and not everyone can easily do that.
Culture. There’s a lot going on here. Some people may live near large extended family, and so family is much more of their social sphere. Some people may have mostly unmarried friends. Some people are more likely to have larger weddings where lots of friends come, and some will have small mostly-family weddings with a few close friends.
Most of the friend weddings I’ve been to were pretty large: 100+ or even 200+ people. And it kind of has to be that way. I’m not close enough friends with enough people to get invited to very many 20-guest weddings.
Also, I thought of another one, so I’m at 20. And we just got a save the date in the mail, so it’ll be 21 in a few months.
I’m in my 60s, and the last wedding I attended was in the mid-1980s. I had no extended family, just my parents and myself in West Texas, where my father had ended up for a job. My mother was an only child from Arkansas, my father was from California, so I rarely saw any relatives.
I think I remember one more wedding, in the 1970s, making I think it’s four, plus a reception in Bangkok 20+ year ago.
12 or so friends of family as a kid (I came from a small family, but my parents were friends with a lot of huge families. Someone, somewhere was always getting married)
1 wedding for one of my teachers
1 college roommate
3 co-workers
1,000+ while I was working as a minister
“Gareth used to prefer funerals to weddings. He said it was easier to get enthusiastic about a ceremony one had an outside chance of eventually being involved in.” – Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)