Yeah, I’m finding this out more and more every day. If I had my way I’d cancel everything right now and elope but my parents and my fiance’s mom really, really, really want the ceremony so we are doing it for their sake. Hopefully we don’t have to kill them all before the wedding they all want so damn bad. I just want to be married and eat cake. I don’t care about the rest of it at all.
I’m pretty sure I did, but I honestly don’t remember. I think the most appealing thing to me was the dresses part. Hell, I still like looking at pictures of them.
Now, though, I’m actually somewhat dreading the idea of being engaged. Not because I don’t love my boyfriend and all that, but because I hate the idea of planning a wedding. I can’t plan anything to save my life, much less a big production like that.
Nope, never. As a child, I never even imagined myself as married, or in a family with children. Just, never. I guess that’s weird, but maybe not.
I am married now (but no kids), and it kind of still surprises me every once and a while. Even though I love Mr. Snicks to pieces.
I’m finding out it would have been easier to have thought about this a little bit beforehand. At least to work out what we, either of us, have preferences about (not much) and what we don’t care at all about (quite a lot - which does help, in a lot of ways) - if you know what you want it to vaguely look like, it makes planning the whole thing much, much easier. Like having the picture on the front of the jigsaw box.
So I’d recommend you do that, at some point before you tell everyone you’re getting married. It’s much easier to avoid getting the wedding your mother, or your future mother-in-law wants, that way. (We’ve mostly avoided this by being in another country. You may wish to consider that idea, too. I generally recommend it, apart from now we have two countries’ wedding traditions to deal with, neither of which we know much about…)
Been there, done that!
That was me, too.
I don’t enjoy being the center of attention. So I didn’t enjoy my wedding much. The dress shopping was OK, but the rest of the planning and the actual wedding kind of sucked.
ETA: Being married, OTOH, I love. I worried that my not enjoying wedding planning was a sign that I wasn’t ready to be married. It wasn’t. I wish somebody had told me that. You hear about people who really enjoy the wedding planning but don’t like the part about being married, but not the ones who are the other way round.
I didn’t. For the longest time I never even thought I’d get married, and when I did, I essentially eloped.
We got guilted into throwing a party for his extended family (none of mine showed up) when we got back, and that sucked. I can’t imagine actually getting married while having to be a hostess to a bunch of near-strangers. Ugh.
Most of my cousins are 10 or so years older than I, all but one were girls, so I went to a lot of weddings, including a couple which were major productions. I also had a Barbie with a gorgeous wedding gown - my mom made it for me - beaded it and everything! But I didn’t have any great wedding fantasies. I was aware of all of the silly expectations about napkins and favors and all that, but as a kid, it was too far off to be real.
When I did get married, we eloped. I was in uniform - khaki slacks and shirt. A couple of people at the Notary’s office signed our certificate. We went to McD’s afterwards. Cost me $35 plus lunch. Easy-peasy. My daughter wanted a bit more of a foofy day, but not ridiculously so. The “china” and “crystal” and “silver” all came from Oriental Trading Company. The cake was from a grocery store (custom ordered, but still, not too fussy) and all in all, it was just a big party with my baby in a foofy dress. It wasn’t a life-long dream of hers - just something she wanted to do. I think I spent less than $3K all told.
Um. I can’t decide whether this makes me glad or jerkish that I wasn’t able to make it.
Nope. I attended weddings, but never wanted (or want) my own.
My parents eloped. 
Mom told me a while back that since she eloped, she was not going to expect me to have a traditional wedding and all that. I guess she’ll be thrilled at this point if I just give her grandkids. A grandbaby will be worth more to her than a whole ceremony complete with ten layers of wedding cake.
Incidentally, I have male friends, and have dated guys who are much more into a wedding than I am. It is weird… Sort of… they want a wedding, but definitely they’re not the ones who want to plan it, and they chide me that the wedding will not be for me, but for my family. Well hell, my family knows I’d hate to do one!!!
I told the current one, if you want a ceremony, you organize it. I’m not moving a finger on that other than showing up and getting food.
I’m guessing that. Playing “School” and “Work” and “House” were all way more fun than real School, Work, and House.
But yep. I played “Wedding” and knew what kind of music I wanted and the colors and the dress. Especially the dress. After which I would go off to my fabulous job doing something undefined, but wonderful that made a whole lot of money, while my husband stayed home and took care of our kids. (It was the 70s. A much more hopeful era.)
I also played with trucks and climbed trees and did non-girly things as well. But Wedding was right there among things to pretend. (As was “Fairy Princess.” I have yet to find out whether that too was better in pretend than in real life)
I never cared much about the wedding. I have always known I wanted to get married and have children, but the fantasy was about being married, not the wedding itself.
So now I’m married with children, and I’m very glad I am. But we eloped and I’m glad we did.
I think what helps is that I’ve gotten quite a few ideas from my sister’s wedding. She had a very small wedding party (bride, groom, best man, maid of honor), a quick, 15-minute ceremony, a venue that was both beautiful and secular (neither bride nor groom are religious), and a theme that was clear, but not suffocating. These are definitely ideas that I could store away for future reference.
I read a popular psychology book that names Greek Goddesses as metaphors for types of women, or rather, archetypes of women that we all are influenced by, in different degrees.
Hera, the goddess of marriage, is the kind of little girl that dreams about marriaged and her wedding, and experiments with changing her last name to the name of the boy she’s in love with.
For Demeter, the goddess of motherhood, notjing is more important then having children of her own to care for and nurture. She will play with dolls.
Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and home, wishes a peaceful home. I was like that; I fantasized about how my house would look like.
Aphrodite, or Venus, will dream about love and sex;
Diana, or Artemis, wishes for freedom and adventures and athletical prowess…
Athena, the goddess of reason and strategy, is not much of a dreamer. She makes plans, learns and makes useful stuff.
And lastly, Persephone, the daughter, or Eternal Girl, has vague dreams, and she mostly just waits for someone to tell her what to do, or to whisk her away from it all into some exciting future.
I thought they were useful metaphors.
I was about as much as a tomboy as you get, but I did fantasize about my wedding as a teenager. Not as a child though. Of course the wedding I dreamed of is the one that became reality… I got married on a softball field, at home plate. So what I was dreaming of certainly wasn’t traditional in any way. Don’t know if that makes a difference or not. 
Hell NO. I have pretty much always known I didn’t want to get married, let alone have a wedding. What a huge waste of money and energy. I don’t like being the focus of attention either. If I did marry, I’d go to city hall. I felt that way as a kid, too.
I didn’t play with Barbies (well, I did, but I ripped their heads off and chuckled). I definitely didn’t dream of my wedding; I was a terrible tom boy. I still don’t dream of my wedding - although I would like it to contain our family and close friends, whereas the SO would just like to segue right from being engaged to signing a marriage license :P. When it comes down to it, I’ll probably just ask my parents for the $ I’d have spent on a wedding (what’s an average one now, like 30 k?) and use it to buy our first house.
Both of our sets of parents were married in very small (under 10 people) ceremonies; and none of our grandparents attended the ceremonies in protest (his parents were of different socioeconomic statuses, mine were of different races/religions/ages). Oddly enough, we’re much closer and more respectful of our parents than our parents were of their parents - case in point being that we’re waiting to get engaged until he graduates. (We actually talked about this today - I’m afraid they’ll find out that we live together.) We’re almost sure that our parents would lose their shit/be furious with us if we didn’t wait till we both had our bachelors’.
I think a lot your outlook has to do with what your mother was like. Mine was very practical and a athlete/tomboy herself, and I grew up in her image.
Nope. I fantasized about being the protagonist in an action adventure and falling in love while kicking ass and taking names.
I still fantasize about that.
By Maastricht’s guidelines I would have been an Artemis/Aphrodite hybrid.
No. I was raised by a single mother, and I suppose I mentally modeled my future on that. When I envisioned being an adult, it was always on my own without a partner. I never imagined my future wedding.
When I did eventually get married, we eloped in Vegas, and it was awesome.
Not at all, but I did have many friends who did. I distinctly remember one dinner while at college when all my friends discussed the music, dress, colors, etc. that they’d have. Then there was a painful pause in the conversation when they looked at me for my plans. I had none.
I could be a pretty girly-girl too (loved pink and sparkly things, played with Barbies, etc.) I just never got into weddings, playing house, or any of the domestic stuff.
Hell no. I had better things to do, like setting up my Amazon women Barbies to rescue the Lego people from the evil Cobra and Thundercats Mutants forces atop the backs of my Voltron lions.
Getting married and having kids were always decisions I figured I’d hash out when I was in a long-term relationship. I never really cared either way, so I didn’t make plans or daydream. It’s only in the last 5 years or so I’ve seriously thought about weddings or kids, and even then it’s like this abstract, hypothetical thing along the lines of “what I’d do if I won the lottery.”