Who should pay for a wedding?

In My Humble Opinion
41

[QUOTE=Harmonious Discord]
The couple getting married need to pay for the wedding.
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I agree. If you can’t afford to pay for a big party, you have no business getting married.* Ivygirl already told me she wants to get married on the beach. I told her fine…but if she expects me to pay for it, I get a vote in who, what, when and where. She seemed a bit shocked, but I figure she should know now, when she’s 15, what to expect.

(*That’s not to say one must throw a big wedding. But expecting Mummy and Daddy to pay for it? Nope. Not in this day and age.)

42

[QUOTE=Hello Again]
Oh, agreed. “Destination weddings” where the wedding-throwers cannot afford to pay everyone’s travel costs are Tack-AY.

Edited to add: the thing where you have a really small wedding at a destination, then invite the rest of the people to a reception party that is local or at least reachable at a reasonable cost, is not tacky.
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See, I respectfully disagree. Although I did the latter thing, I don’t know if it would have been tacky if we’d forgone the reception.

What if instead of a “destination” wedding, I had my wedding in my small hometown far from most friends and my groom’s family (getting married in one’s hometown, at one’s home church, is one of the traditional customs in American weddings, so this isn’t that farfetched)? Most of the people we’d have invited to this traditional, non-destination wedding would have to fly. Would I be expected to pay for everyone’s flight? In my reading of wedding etiquette, I believe the bridal party’s travels are supposed to be picked up*, but not every single invited out-of-town guest.

If, instead, we had it in his hometown, my family would have been similarly inconvenienced, and some friends would still have had to fly. Again, however, I don’t think we’d be expected to pay their travel costs.

So why is the rule changed when the location is no one’s hometown–in other words, a destination wedding?

Believe me, I understand why people jump to that conclusion, and I get that question a lot. But when one considers the travel often involved in non-destination weddings, especially in this day in age when people meet and marry later and are less likely to marry their hometown, highschool sweetheart where everyone is conveniently local, I don’t see why the “rule” should be different.

*FWIW, despite the supposed rule about the wedding party, I have not had my travel costs reimbursed for weddings I’ve travelled to as a bridesmaid. I never really expected it.

43

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
See, I respectfully disagree. Although I did the latter thing, I don’t know if it would have been tacky if we’d forgone the reception.

What if instead of a “destination” wedding, I had my wedding in my small hometown far from most friends and my groom’s family (getting married in one’s hometown, at one’s home church, is one of the traditional customs in American weddings, so this isn’t that farfetched)? Most of the people we’d have invited to this traditional, non-destination wedding would have to fly. Would I be expected to pay for everyone’s flight?
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In my opinion, yes. It is tacky and grasping to expect your friends to shell out large sums of money for what is (truth be told) a rather trivial event.

Maybe they wouldn’t expect it but that doesn’t mean it’s not tacky to ask them to spend their own money.

In my opinion, the rule doesn’t change, but at least a hometown wedding has the argument of being home to half the guest going for it. A destination wedding is pure, self-centered indulgence.

I have refused to attend weddings unless I have my expenses paid in advance. I hate weddings in the first place. Everybody who knows me knows that. I find them to be an ordeal. People literally have to pay me to attend. No way I’m coming out of my pocket for anything but a gift.

44

The thing is, plan your wedding in Kansas City and anyone who wants to can zip in for the weekend, pay $59/night in a Comfort inn and be gone in time for work on Monday, $400 poorer.

Whereas, if you’re going to Hawaii there’s a 10 hour flight to consider and for a trip of less than 5 days it would hardly be worth it to step on the plane (lose a full day to travel, and another to jetlag). So, you have the travel expense, which is a constant between the plans, but the destination adds to the amount of vacation time used and the hotel costs are 5 times more at least, a lot more than that really, because try getting a hotel room in Hawaii fir $59. I can’t see how it can happen for less than $1000.

45

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]

Maybe they wouldn’t expect it but that doesn’t mean it’s not tacky to ask them to spend their own money.

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So to make sure I’m understanding you clearly, would you say that no couple should invite any guest that lives in a town other than that the ceremony is being held in? This would be tacky, unless they also offer a per diem & mileage?

46

Listen, my thinking is this: the average traveler to the average domestic wedding is X. (I want to say, $200 flight, 2 nights at $159… x=$500 just for the sake of argument). Most people will spend this for dear friends and well-liked relations.

If your wedding plans call for the average guest to pay 2X,3X, or 4X just to attend, you are asking a little much, IMHO.

If your wedding would cost 10X to attend and you send out 300 invites “knowing” that most will not be able to attend, you are a gift-troller and a crass and unseemly person. Oh, you heard me.

47

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
So to make sure I’m understanding you clearly, would you say that no couple should invite any guest that lives in a town other than that the ceremony is being held in?
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Nope, you don’t understand me clearly. That’s not what I said. Let’s put it this way. If plane fare or a hotel room would be required for the invitee to travel, the couple should pay for it.

48

ETA: I see on review that we cross-posted, HelloAgain, and I get what you’re saying. I’ll leave this as it stands but I think we’re basically on the same page.

[QUOTE=Hello Again]
Whereas, if you’re going to Hawaii there’s a 10 hour flight to consider and for a trip of less than 5 days it would hardly be worth it to step on the plane (lose a full day to travel, and another to jetlag).
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I think Hawaii is problematic for that very reason, and same with, say, Italy (I’m looking at you, TomKat). I agree with you–a couple who did that may be unrealistic (and even rude, depending on how their family/close friends feel about it). I am a big fan of destination weddings but I’m certain my reaction would be “you gotta be kidding me” if someone sprung a destination wedding invite to Hawaii on me.

But couples also plan destination weddings in nice stateside locations or the Caribbean. The costs may be more than KC (where I paid $150 for a hotel room last month!) but not by such a large margin, and the travel time and jet lag issues are smaller. If I’m going to spend $400-$500 in travel costs to a wedding, I confess I’d much rather travel to a lovely vacation spot like New Orleans or Savannah or even Las Vegas than to Kansas City (sorry SkipMagic–it’s not that I don’t love Kansas City).

I admit I have a personal bias here–I had my own wedding this way, and I’m looking forward to my BIL’s wedding in Bar Harbor next year (who made this choice after liking our destination wedding). They thought carefully about things like whether their family could drive if they chose, and if it would be possible to rent a vacation house as a group, and how they’d keep the guest list very small, all that stuff. Naturally I don’t think it’s nice to screw your friends and family with huge travel bills, but I’ve (voluntarily) spent at least as much going to weddings in my friends hometowns, or declined to travel to hometown weddings for cost reasons, so I don’t regard travel expenses as a special destination wedding issue. I don’t think the expenses necessarily trigger an expectation that the bride and groom pick up every cost (that they could otherwise ignore if they picked some equally inconvenient place that has some “home” connection). It just seems inconsistent to me.

Maybe it’s a continuum I’m thinking of, rather than a hard and fast rule. Just as with any kind of wedding, there are nice ways to do it and inconsiderate ways. At any rate, I guess I think it’s less a matter of being tacky and more one of being arrogant, if a couple chooses a far-off, pricey place that’s out of reach of a lot of their potential guests–but invite a lot of people.

49

At this rate, with these rules you guys have put forth and my circumstances, I might as well set up the “wedding in front of the hot dog stand” fund right away. Neither my fiance nor I have any real disposable income right now, and everyone in our family lives in different areas. No matter where we’re located, it’s a destination wedding for somebody. So, let’s say we have it where we’re at; that means that we have to pay for his grandparents, aunts and uncles to fly out from different corners of the US and my aunts and uncles from Iceland. Just on the aunts and uncles from Iceland, that’s going to be $8000 in airfare alone if they all choose to bring their spouses. That doesn’t add in putting up any relatives or any of the costs of even getting the marriage license. We’re waiting two years as it is so I can finish grad school, and things aren’t going to look a ton better financially at that point either.

Do you think our parents would be horribly insulted if we eloped so we wouldn’t go into debt just inviting them to the courthouse and then out to dinner?

50

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
ETA: I see on review that we cross-posted, HelloAgain, and I get what you’re saying. I’ll leave this as it stands but I think we’re basically on the same page.
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Oh Cranky, let’s never fight again! :smiley:

51

[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
. So, let’s say we have it where we’re at; that means that we have to pay for his grandparents, aunts and uncles to fly out from different corners of the US and my aunts and uncles from Iceland. Just on the aunts and uncles from Iceland, that’s going to be $8000 in airfare alone if they all choose to bring their spouses. That doesn’t add in putting up any relatives or any of the costs of even getting the marriage license.
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Look on the bright side–with all that expense, you’ll hardly notice the extra expense of buying Diogenes a plane ticket and hotel room. May as well invite him too!

52

[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
Do you think our parents would be horribly insulted if we eloped so we wouldn’t go into debt just inviting them to the courthouse and then out to dinner?
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Diogenes is just being a crab because he hates weddings. I have family flung out all over the country. There’s no way to have a wedding in a location where someone who would be deeply hurt and offended not to be invited wouldn’t have to fly. Since I can’t afford to pay for these people to travel, what are my options? To not ever get married? That’s ridiculous.

I also think Ivylass is completely wrong to say you shouldn’t get married if you can’t afford a big wedding. If you can’t afford one you shouldn’t have one (unless someone else wants to throw it for you), but not having $30K you can afford to piss away on a party doesn’t make one financially irresponsible or too immature to get married.

53

[QUOTE=Obsidian]

I also think Ivylass is completely wrong to say you shouldn’t get married if you can’t afford a big wedding.
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I think you have greatly misunderstood Ivylass’s post. As I read it, she was saying that if the bride and groom want a huge lavish wedding, they should be the one to pay for it, rather than expecting parents/family to pony up. If they want a huge lavish wedding and cannot afford it themselves, they should wait to marry until they can afford it, or choose to make it a smaller affair.

54

I don’t know who said it, but they have it largely right. In my grandparent’s generation, they could spend $1.50 at the county courthouse and totally transform their lives. Which, incidentally, is pretty much what my grandparents did. The preacher later solemnized the thing, but that was a small affair as well.

People today cannot transform their lives in this fashion. If they tried, they would leave their shared apartment together, head to the courthouse, and then head home together, perhaps to their kids. It’s about as romantic as heading off to the DMV, because the transformative notion of it has been removed by our cohabitating culture. And this applies to small church weddings as well.

So what do people do to make it a transformative event? They turn it into a huge party. And while the social aspect of weddings has always been important, I don’t think any of us can deny that today they are far more lavish, expensive, tedious to plan, and things that were once reserved for weddings of the wealthy are now expected for all weddings, even for people who really can’t afford them.

My parents held their reception, IIRC, at an American Legion hall. This sort of thing is considered horribly declasse today, from what I can see. Yet they are still married forty years later, bless them. The average wedding now costs over $20,000. How many of them will go the distance?

I don’t want to turn this into a debate, but if people focused more on life before and after the party, we’d be better off.

55

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
Diogenes is just being a crab because he hates weddings. I have family flung out all over the country. There’s no way to have a wedding in a location where someone who would be deeply hurt and offended not to be invited wouldn’t have to fly. Since I can’t afford to pay for these people to travel, what are my options? To not ever get married? That’s ridiculous.

I also think Ivylass is completely wrong to say you shouldn’t get married if you can’t afford a big wedding. If you can’t afford one you shouldn’t have one (unless someone else wants to throw it for you), but not having $30K you can afford to piss away on a party doesn’t make one financially irresponsible or too immature to get married.
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Oh, I was just pointing out a deep flaw in Obsidian’s theory with my own quite complicated familial situation. We’ll still be inviting the closest of relatives, but it’s not a completely horrible thing if my aunts and uncles (or anyone else coming) from Iceland don’t want to spend a lot of money just to see me get married. We don’t want anything big, but at the same time, we’re going to be lucky if we can scrape together $1,000 on our own to contribute to our own wedding. It’s not that I want filet mignon served off of half-nude belly dancers, but that I don’t want to have hot dogs in the park and the cheapest ugly white dress possible just to come in under budget. ::shrugs:: My family is willing to help out, but I feel an obligation to not make it cost a whole ton of money anyway.

56

I got married to my first husband when I was 19 and as recently as 6 months prior to that I was so poor I didn’t even have electricity for over a month. We got married at the courthouse without telling anybody. Then when my mom found out, she FREAKED OUT and got extremely hurt and angry. So we had a wedding and she agreed to pay for it, which surprised me. It was very nice and cost $4,000 which is way, way, way, way, way more than we could have paid for on our own. It may as well have been $4 million to us at that stage of our lives–we were students, I worked at Pizza Hut, he worked at McDonald’s… we had no savings, we lived in a tiny cottage with cement floors… we could not have had a wedding if we’d had to pay for it ourselves. We were married for 15 years and eventually divorced as close friends, which we remain today.

My current boyfriend and I are talking about weddings and we assume that we’ll be paying for it ourselves, since we’re both in our 30s and so on (though once again we’re both students). His parents have said they would help out, but I don’t expect my mom will pay toward a second wedding. We’ll find a way to make it work, though it probably won’t be very fancy.

I think that who pays for a wedding depends on the couple and the families in question. I think it’s stupid to try to set some sort of universal rule, and arrogant to insist that the way YOU think is right is the way EVERYBODY should do it.

57

[QUOTE=Hello Again]
I think you have greatly misunderstood Ivylass’s post. As I read it, she was saying that if the bride and groom want a huge lavish wedding, they should be the one to pay for it, rather than expecting parents/family to pony up. If they want a huge lavish wedding and cannot afford it themselves, they should wait to marry until they can afford it, or choose to make it a smaller affair.
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Bingo.

If the bride and groom can afford to spend $50K on a wedding, and they want to, then let them. If however, Bridezilla and Spineless Groom expect Mummy and Daddy to pay for the $50K wedding, then they can go to the courthouse and drag in a homeless guy for a witness.