However I would challenge the notion that most or all of the work done by the bride, is done for the sake my My Special DAAAAAY minutiae. I used an all-inclusive venue (actually, it was an Aquarium) and there was still a lot of shit to be dealt with. There are so many things done purely for the convenience of guests, from hotel blocks, to providing maps of how to get to the venue, to booking a bus/cab so no one drives home drunk, seating charts, making sure the music that is played will be enjoyed by all, and so much more.
There is also juggling the social expectations of the bride, mother, and mother in law, an dynamic which the groom is normally shielded from, because “he doesn’t want to be bothered” with that. Guess fucking what, I didn’t want to be bothered either! But as bride, I am the default go to person for anyone with a complaint to go bitch at. If the groom is not taking a firm hand with his own parents and family, he is really dropping the ball.
I truly do not personally know of one bride who drove herself crazy because she was so obsessed with, I don’t know, monogrammed toilet paper (I mean, other than TV Bridezillas who are being paid to bring the crazy). I do know plenty of men who decided any “detail” was just the “bride being pushy” and “caring about stupid shit” which is frankly a pathetic attitude. If you agreed to a large party you should take some responsibility that it gets done, and according to your preferences.
Yep. Everyone told me to do the wedding I wanted, but I still got crap (behind my back, of course) about how they couldn’t believe I did this or didn’t do that.
We spent $2,000 on our wedding and I was annoyed it was that much (though our highest priority was the food; we had 26 guests at a sit down restaurant dinner). I got crap for:
not having a bridal party
having my brother be my man of honor and my husband’s sister being his best broad
not wearing an all white dress
not having any church decorations
not having any reception decorations
driving ourselves to the wedding instead of renting a limo
since we stopped at the flat we were moving to (he was already there for 2 months and I’d move in), we walked the 10 minutes to the restaurant which is apparently JUST.NOT.DONE.
didn’t feed each other cake (we drank our handcrafted beers with our arms entwined instead)
absolutely refused to acknowledge the tink-tink-tinking on glasses to kiss *
The things I did care about, I’d ask my husband if he cared. Actually, I’d take the pressure off of him by saying something like, “hey, do you care what kind of flower you have in your suit? I’m guessing not, right?” That would let him say, “well, I don’t want pink, but that’s about it”.
If she honestly cares about every detail, then she can plan it out. Make sure that she knows you care about her, but sheesh.
this was a huge one for me. I absolutely detest this. I’m not a trained seal, assholes! I also had specifically told my MIL at the rehearsal dinner that I will not kiss if there is tinking; I will ignore and my husband said the same thing to her as well. She still tinked for over 30 seconds before she realized we really weren’t gonna kiss to shut her up. :rolleyes:
Some 20 years or so ago I went through this. My inlaws picked up the tab on a $10k wedding - well within the infation adjusted guidelines. The cost was mainly due to inviting a lot of their friends, as the wedding was in their hometown.
My parents did not pay for jack shit, and my wife and I had just graduated from college and she was headed for grad school while I was looking for a job.
We hired a wedding coordinator. Luckily she was a family friend, and damned good. She would come to us with several options to choose from: Examples (with our decisions in Red):
Real or silk flowers?
Sit down meal, buffet, or just appetizers?
Reception at the Church (no alcohol at that one), a park, a hotel?
She did all the leg work based on our choices, and did a fabulous job. We never worried about contracts, phone calls, or follow-ups - we just had to choose from the list of options that our coordinator presented to us. She also paid for herself through her industry contacts - while we might have paid her $500 - $1000 for the job, she saved us at LEAST that much by knowing who to call and what angles to cut.
I will say that it is important that you communicate with your wife. This IS a big day, and it IS something that in American culture girls are told to really really care about. Think about it - traditionally the woman wears a brand new expensive dress, while they man rents a suit and shoes. That alone shows the difference in approach and attitude in our culture. That is the current you are fighting.
The anti-Bridezilla folks here have a point, but IMHO there can be an excluded middle as well. Your wife wants a wonderful wedding, and she wants to feel that it is both of yours at least on some level. Your involvement is a way of showing that the day is important to you as well. If you treat it too casually, then you might be communicating to her that you are casual about getting married.
Congrats - by the way. I loved my wedding, I loved the rented tux, I loved the memories, and I loved the photos (even those of the bridesmaid butts - there were some nice butts at our wedding!).
We are planning our wedding right now and I have found a perfect solution to this kind of thing. Any time anyone complains (as in seriously complains, not makes an offhand comment) I point out that we would happily go down to the courthouse tomorrow and not think about this whole thing again. That tends to make people shut up pretty quickly. I’ve found that the only people who actually complain are our immediate families. Everyone else is perfectly happy to have an excuse to go to Vegas for a few days and know that they can have a few drinks on us at the reception. My mom bitched about my choice of cake and my dad complained that I refuse to allow children at the ceremony. They both really, really want pictures of their oldest child’s wedding though and learned to shut up quickly lest they push us to decide that this is too much work and head to the justice of the peace over the weekend.
This is one of those things where the solution is somewhere in the middle, and while I am not a supporter of the “woman is always right” idea, in this case the actual wedding probably does mean more to your fiancée than it does to you, so try to help her out with this one. If she’s a keeper, you’ll get it back in her spending Saturday afternoons in a hardware store or at a football game with you*.
*Yes, I know, many women like hardware stores and football. I was using stereotypes to make a point.
We discussed this in advance, as we hate this shit too. When people started banging on their glasses, my husband and I kissed. Once. When they started it up again, he turned the other way and laid a big wet one on his best man.* We never heard another clink.
Yes. This. I don’t know why people do it after the ceremony in the first place. I suppose there’s the whole “we want the pictures to be of us WHEN WE’RE MARRIED” thing, but frankly no one’s gonna care. They want to get to the food and booze. For my sister’s wedding, they told the guests to show up at 5 PM, and we took our pictures at 3. No fuss, no muss, no one was kept waiting and our hair and makeup still looked decent.
I think it’s more of the superstition of the groom not seeing the bride before the wedding. And I gotta admit, my favorite part of any wedding is the groom’s face when the bride first comes into his view! Priceless (usually).
If you’re superstitious, there’s no help for it. Personally, my husband helped me pick out my dress. And we both came into view at the same time, as we walked up – and down – the aisle together.
I just got married last week, and I’ll relate a story to you about wedding planning.
I worked with an ex-wedding planner / event coordinator, and we exchanged services. I would build her a website for her kid’s high school choir, and she would help plan our wedding.
After talks, and talks, I mentioned to her that we were considering not spending a dime for the wedding.
Her personal opinion was something very similar to this:
We took her advice, and flew to Vegas and got married.
In a couple of months, we are going to take a week at a 3 star or better hotel in Maui or Oahu.
We spent a total of maybe $1500 on the three day trip to vegas
We are expecing to top out about $5000 on a five day trip to hawaii (including tickets !$1200)
I, personally, am much happier we decided to do this.
**
edit
**
Oh, and the entire expenses are coming out of less than a year’s worth of savings, so no debt incurred in the trips!
Well I haven’t been on here in a little while, wow, thanks to everyone for all the advice and perspective. LHoD, I’ll try to remember the 3 things tidbit. As far as whose expectations are trying to be met, it’s some combination of hers, her extended family, and her mothers (isn’t this always the case?)
As far as money, it’s going to be expensive (“average”) regardless–she has a big extended family and between her relatives and mine that will put us at ~70; add in friends and we’re well over 100. Her mom is paying for the lion’s share but we’re forking up almost half (i.e., probably $8-10k) ourselves. The money is just retarded beyond belief but I think I’m over it, or at least have made some peace with it. I’ll never be entirely comfortable with the idea of a $20k party by and for people who are middle class, that’s just not who I am.
So I guess the next time I get asked what color I want the border of the tablecloth to be I’ll just ask her “gee, what do you think?” and then pick one of the three options.
Also, photos before the wedding… yeah I should see if we can get that hooked up. If we’re going to spend enough to feed an African village for their lives we might as well enjoy the party rather than being stuck in photo-land for the first 40 minutes of it.
We had just started to do some planning when my mom got diagnosed with cancer, so we ended up putting it on hold for a while. After she died, I had the responsibility of planning a wedding while finishing grad school, and there were a lot of things I just did not care about to do. We took care of most of the big stuff right away (location, photographer, food, dress) and the other stuff got taken care of as we went along. We almost didn’t have flowers or a DJ because of this, but it all worked out.
Although that’s a nice idea, it doesn’t always work out that way. When planning, I had my own ideas of what I wanted, and I made them clear to my husband and friends. When it came to family, though, there were some conflicts as to whether our mutual ideas were “okay” or not. MIL spent months arguing and trying to force us into a church wedding, which we were not interested in and nobody else cared about; if she had gotten exactly what she wanted on this one, 2/3 of the guests would have been uncomfortable standing for several hours through a church service in which most of them would have no clue as to what to expect next. Just about everyone was really into the “don’t spend the night before with the bride/groom” bit, so we went along with it, which worked out; however, the location manager (one of several we’d seen over the course of a year) tried to push things on me that I didn’t want two months before the wedding up to the day before. The most egregious of all of these had to be her interrupting the officiant to insert the “you were planning on doing the ‘who takes this bride’ bit as well, yes?” during the wedding rehearsal and me responding to the officiant that we weren’t planning on doing that part, so go along with what we’d discussed/planned.
A lot of the conflict that arose was because family members had differing notions of what we should be doing than what we wanted to do, and we ended up having to compromise on some of those. A lot of it was a case of “this is what we do at weddings” without an expectation that it’d be different elsewhere. When my mom was around for the planning, she’d stated it wasn’t going to be a “kool aid wedding” and she’d discuss a few ideas she had about location, but encouraged me to do what I want within the strictures of what I knew was expected of me*; she was completely okay with us having a casual wedding or a fancy one, as long as we all had a good time. On the other hand, my in-laws had a different idea of what weddings were supposed to be based on completely different cultural experiences, and balancing out what my husband and I wanted with not completely offending people was part of our obligations. MIL was used to much more formal weddings with a bigger emphasis on following the Emily Post Rules of Weddings, so my husband had to spend a good bit of time doing what he had promised to do when this all started-- he talked to his parents when conflict arose because he was better able to manage the conflicts with his family than I would have. Now, we had a different monetary dynamic going on than you do-- my family and I were paying for 80% of everything, but sometimes even in those situations there are expectations that I would have to go along with whatever was requested regardless of whose money I was spending.
Even though it’s your future wife’s family spending the money, you still need to have some input into the planning. Talk with her about what she wants, what the extended family wants, and what her mother wants out of it and figure out what’s going to work between those; she may be compromising a lot so she doesn’t piss off a distant relative or is trying to please her mom, who may be trying to run the show. A large part of why weddings cost a lot is because you’re throwing a party with food for a lot of people; even with paring down costs, it’s still going to be pricey because you’re feeding people and entertaining them, which is rarely both cheap and good.
*I was lucky that there wasn’t a ton of expectations, as (in my experience) Icelandic weddings run the gamut from fancy hotel parties to getting married by the pool in the backyard while wearing a dress borrowed from a family friend. It was more about making sure that the guests get enough to eat and drink while celebrating a new marriage.
you have $8-10k but have some other immediate use for it
you’ve never spent that much on a party before?
If it’s #1 or #2, it might be worth talking with her and her mom about how you might scale things back a bit.
If it’s Door #3, throwing a party for a lot of people is an expensive thing to do, and you may just have to come to terms with that. If this is the issue, don’t gripe about the expense every time she mentions something about the wedding- that shtick gets old fast. Complaining about the same issue over and over again also means you will have a harder time getting anyone else to listen to you when you talk about that issue, even if your complaint really is legitimate. See “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” for how that works.
It is normal to freak out when you’re spending more on something than you’ve ever spent in one place in your life before. I had that experience when I planned my wedding, the first time I bought a car, and when I bought my house. You do get a sinking feeling in your gut. But you have to get past that and set a realistic budget.
Set a budget for your expenditures, make sure it is a realistic budget, and stick to it. Don’t use any of the following in making up your budget, since it won’t contribute to a realistic budget:
what somebody else paid for a wedding 5 or more years ago
what somebody else in another country or another area of the country paid for their wedding
what somebody who had a very different wedding than yours paid
your gut feelings on what things should cost
the cost of things unrelated to weddings and that you aren’t buying for this wedding, such as cars
An unrealistic budget is a source of stress. It may well be worth less than no budget at all, because budgets (like diets and exercise plans) aren’t worth a bucket of warm piss if you can’t stick to them.
Find out what things usually cost in your area from an up-to-date source, put in some cushion for the fact that in the real world you’re just not going to get the best possible deals every time, and make your budget with that information.
That’s how to do it. I learned it too late, but I have advised many young men who came up after me.
If she asks for an opinion, have one even if you don’t care about the thing she wants your opinion on. Be prepared to support your opinion with some reasoning, even if that reasoning is complete bullshit.
Example 1:
“What color should the flowers be? Red or yellow?”
“I don’t care. Whatever you want.”
“You are doing nothing to organize this wedding. Do you even like me? :mad:”
Example 2:
“What color should the flowers be? Red or yellow?”
“Red.”
“Red? Why red?”
“I think it brings out the color in your face.”
“You’re a moron. The flowers are going to be yellow. Thanks! :)”
This can be good practice for other decisions as a married couple, too. The same technique could be applied to “what do you want for dinner?”
It can be frustrating to live with someone who never has an opinion on what you should eat or whether you should go out. It’s no fun to cook for someone who doesn’t care what they eat and is willing to let you know it at every turn. Some people go over the line from easy-going to spineless or indifferent. You don’t want your spouse thinking you’re a wimp or that you don’t care what he or she does. It’s easy to resent someone for acting like that, and resentment is one of the most toxic things you can have in a marriage.
If you think something is vulgar, or childish, you should not have it in your wedding. I didn’t have the garter toss because I think it is so often undignified (and hard to keep it from getting that way, if the wrong person catches the garter, and the wrong people so often want to catch it). We didn’t feed each other cake, because I have thought since I first heard about it when I was around 7 that smashing cake in someone’s face is childish. We skipped the cake feeding altogether, because we’re klutzy and would be likely to get cake on each others’ faces, and we wouldn’t want anybody to think we were smashing cake. My mother-in-law wanted us to do the cake smashing, but I stuck to my guns on that, and we didn’t do it. AFAIK, we’re still married.
IME most of these fluff decisions (napkin color, bridesmaid ribbons, gift favors, etc) are directly or indirectly being driven from the bride’s mother, who wants her baby girl to have the ridiculous fantasy extravaganza.
I found many times that politely asking the bride-to-be, “Is this something that you care deeply about, or is it your mother?” to put choices in perspective will help make your bride an ally in the planning, instead of a torment.
