r/weddingplanning

I got married a couple weeks ago, but I never decided whether or not to change my name (and if so, to what). I’ve been thinking about this since we got engaged. I’m having a really hard time deciding, so I’d love other experiences and ideas!

1. I’m applying to medical school, so I hope to be Dr. xxx. I’d like to be Dr. mylastname, but I think I’d run into licensing issues if I took my husbands last name. I’m not 100% attached to this though.
2. I was initially thinking about adding his last name in front of mine, but I’d been thinking more recently about completely getting rid of mine or moving it with my middle name.
3. His last name is long and mine is short. His last name also has a cultural significance, and is hard to pronounce.
4. I really like the idea of having the same last name for family unity if we have kids and even for the two of us. We’ve always felt like our own little team, and I feel like sharing a name would make that even more tangible.
5. We ran into some big issues with his parents the day before our wedding that make me feel like I’m not accepted. I don’t know if having their name is something I’m 100% happy with.
6. I’m the last person in my tiny family with my last name. My mom gave me her middle and last name, so I’d probably keep my middle name going if we have kids.
7. I don’t think I want to socially go by a name that’s not my legal name, but I’m not 100% on that either.

Any advice or other peoples experiences would be greatly appreciated!

Edit: does anyone happen to know if I add his last name before mine if going by just my maiden name professionally would cause issues with licensing?

It would legally be hislastname mylastname, but go by Dr. mylastname.

I have a relatively common first name and had a friend growing up with the same first name. She wasn’t my best friend but I have a lot of memories with her throughout middle and high school and plenty of mutual friends. Because we shared a first name, I always referred to her by both her first and last name. She became a bully to some of our mutual friends, our lives grew apart and we haven’t spoken in 10+ years. She’s also since married and changed her last name.

My fiancé, however, and this ex-friend have the same last name (no relation, also just a common name). I have zero attachment to my maiden name but it feels so strange to me to take his last name because I already know someone with that name! When I think of my married name, I can’t not think of her because we always were called by both names when we were friends.

Fiancé doesn’t care what I do, I know I can keep my last name, but also know I will still be called by the married name in certain settings and will still feel weird about it!

Any advice? Has this happened to anyone else? How do I stop associating this name with someone else! TIA!

Hi brides! How much are you spending on your wedding for 150 guests? We’re approaching $70k, and I just can’t believe it 😩 Our initial budget was $40k. We’re having a formal wedding with a plated dinner, and I can’t help but feel a little guilty about spending this much money on one day. At the same time, it’ll definitely be the wedding of my dreams, and we won’t be going into debt for it.

We are currently in the throes of planning our microwedding (30-40 people) and have a few options for venues. One option that will likely save us money would be to use a venue for our ceremony (the only available time slots are 8am or 10am) and then have our reception later in the evening for dinner and drinks, maybe starting at 3pm. There would be about 30 mins of travel between venues, which would allow lots of time for checking into hotels if using, getting lunch, etc.

This venue for our ceremony is one that we’ve chosen as an option because it’s a lovely, nondenominational chapel that has “free” ceremonies— you have to pay $2.50 a chair and $75 for the arch, but otherwise there’s no other charges. It is a 1.5 hr time slot. The location is in a rural area which is 30 mins away from the city which may be a hassle for people.

My thought is to include the option to attend the ceremony on the invitation and make it very clear that there is a bit of travel and a time gap between events involved. They may choose to attend the chapel ceremony and RSVP, or they can just come see us for dinner and drinks at the reception! Is this rude or is this considered acceptable? I really don’t want to be a total accidental asshole. Thank you for your input!

Edit: I should’ve included that we would absolutely never force people to show up at 8am for the ceremony omg lol that’s entirely my bad. We would only choose the 10am. Sorry for that misunderstanding!!

My wedding is May 2027 and i feel like i am so far behind, we have already rescheduled once. For some background, I never wanted a big wedding, my vote was to do it in our front yard with some friends/family and a food truck. But my fiancé LOVES a party and really wanted the big wedding (150 people). We originally set to get married in May 2026, but rescheduled last fall after my crying and begging in therapy because we just hadn’t done enough planning and i didn’t think we could pull it off (we had also recently undergone a serious personal tragedy so that contributed majorly to the lack of planning). We ultimately decided to push the wedding 1 year, but now with the date creeping again I’m feeling so distraught and anxious over an event i never wanted in the first place. Have we done enough? Or do we need to do more and fast?

What we have done so far:
-Booked the venue! We chose our venue soon after engagement and it was how my fiancé sold me on the big wedding, also why we had to reschedule more formally, but they were super nice about it.
-Bought my dress and his tux.
-Bought my wedding band (he is being very indecisive and lazy about picking his)
-Sent out Save the Dates
-Cake Tasting, but no cake booking yet

TBD:
-literally everything else
-food
-flowers
-photographer
-invites/wedding website
-entertainment/music
-HMUA
-Veil/shoes/jewelry
-anything i am missing here??

Any advice welcome! My fiancé and i also both have super busy jobs and severe ADHD so big organized events like this are not really in our skill set. Are we screwed and need to rush? Or do we still have time and I’m being overly anxious? I’m seriously considering a wedding planner even though it’s not in our budget, just to offload the mental anxiety.

I am a 10/10 bride so coming up to the final stages of wedding planning. I’m not sure if I’m posting to vent or for advice or to warn but here are the reasons I chose WithJoy:

Most of our guests are out of town and they partner with local car dealerships to offer discounts this was a factor that I didn’t see offered by any of the major websites

The UI seemed better than some of the bigger hosting sites

HOWEVER, it doesn’t seem like most of our out of town guests are utilizing the car rental discount and we have had major problems

1. Their travel section redirected our guests from our room block and took them to a 3rd party website that booked them at a much higher rate and confused a lot of guests
2. The registry is a lot more expensive than any other website and while we have encouraged our guests to shop around, I understand the convenience of ordering directly from the registry but some guests feel like they’re getting screwed. I have had to explain the concept of shopping around to grown adults which is frustrating bc every e-commerce place sets their own price but it’s frustrating
3. My main frustration, everything I picked for our registry was unavailable once people started purchasing. We now have to thank a bunch

of credit

1. for shit we will never be able to get because the catalog is not updated regularly or I don’t even know how they integrate with other sites. We’ve gotten about half of the gifts that have been ordered, mostly for the bridal shower and 40% of those gifts were purchased on external registries.

Would it be wrong to reschedule my wedding after already sending digital save the dates?

There has been so much family drama happening lately. One of my siblings is struggling with addiction and has been threatening multiple people, including me and my fiance. My mom enables him and gets upset with everyone when we set boundaries or refuse to help them financially (they are codependent on each other). It has been a lot emotionally, and honestly, this just doesn’t feel like a happy time for me. Myself and my fiance even helped my sibling get to rehab only for my mom to help him out.

My fiance wants to keep our original date, and part of me feels bad about changing it because we already sent the digital save the dates. I also know it would be some work to contact all of our vendors and guests.

But another part of me feels like postponing might give me a chance to breathe and actually enjoy being engaged and planning our wedding instead of just trying to push through everything. I can cancel out the noise. Right now, I feel like I can’t catch a break.

Our venue said we can move the date without a rescheduling fee. Has anyone postponed their wedding because there was too much going on personally or within the family? Did you feel relieved afterward, or did rescheduling make things more stressful? We’re people mad at you?

I’ve been debating between two hair and makeup artist teams. Both are highly recommended and do good work. I slightly prefer the style of HMUA A, but they’re a good deal more expensive than HMUA B. I can afford it, but have been debating if the extra spend was really worth it. I emailed B this afternoon saying I’d like to book and asked for next steps, but now I’m really wishing I had gone with A even though it’s more $$. I’m kind of taking this as a sign, and I think I will reach out to A first thing in the morning asking to book them. I realize I have no legal obligation to B, but how much poor form is it to back out only a day or two after saying I want to book them?

Hey y'all! We're stressing about our Halloween wedding as it gets closer. I was planning on having a tarot card reader for entertainment during reception since there will be no alcohol and probably little to no dancing.

However, fiancé thinks it's unnecessary money spent because it's only 30 people and he thinks everyone will just mingle and catch up with each other anyway.

I am torn because everyone loved the idea when I pitched it and I have a reader waiting with a contract so I need outside input.

Yay or Nay??

I'm desperately trying to find out the length/width/height dimensions (12"x18"??) for the Whole Foods Berry Chantilly Cake Half Sheet cakes, which serve 32 people and are $99.99 each.

The website, social media, and google all don't turn up how big this cake is. It's not even on the official online description.

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/catering/product/whole-foods-market-berry-chantilly-cake-half-sheet-serves-32-b0d35v1rtq

My wedding party has to transport these cakes in a cooler to drive to our venue. We've been going insane because we can't be sure that our cooler box is big enough to fit the cakes with or without their cardboard boxes for delivery.

I just called a store's cake department today and they said none of the cake team members know how big it is.

Can anyone go into a whole foods and just ask for a poor fellow bride how big a half sheet cake is??

Thanks so much.

So my original idea was we would have our introductions 10 minutes shy of cocktail hour ending, mingle and then we serve dinner at 6pm. But my fiancé just said that he would rather have us do our first dance right after introductions. Sure that’s fine. The MIL doesn’t want to do her dance after our first dance, and instead she wants her dance with my fiancé to be the one to open up the dance floor. Halfway through her song she wants everyone else to start slow dancing, and then party music starts after that dance is over. I don’t have any family, so I would still be sitting down at our sweetheart table alone away from the dance floor. Is this really our only option?

I had my bachelorette last month and it did not go well. It wasn’t fun for my friends, and it was extremely stressful for me. I’m struggling to figure out how to bring this up with my friends or even if I should, I feel so ashamed.

Planning isn’t my strong suit, so I asked my maid of honor to plan the event after I had made some key decisions. I don’t know where the breakdown happened, but I think part of the problem was that a few of my decisions started things off on the wrong note, and then some of her planning style rubbed the other bridesmaids the wrong way.

I picked a location that was about two hours from the nearest major airport, on the other side of the country from where many of the people attending live. I recognized too late that this wasn’t a good choice because travel would take up so much time, but by that point it was too late and people had already booked their flights. We ended up spending so, so much of the weekend driving back-and-forth to the airport because it was either that or someone had to sit at the airport for four hours and wait for the next person to arrive. By the time we all got there, it was late on Friday night and everyone was exhausted. We had all day Saturday together, then people had to start getting up at 5 AM on Sunday morning to go to the airport so that day was basically a loss.

I also heard a lot of complaints about how my maid of honor handled the planning and time leading up to the bachelorette:

1. She started a group chat immediately (which made sense to me!) and then released one to two new pieces of information per week, so there was a lot of conversation occurring every single week. There were a lot of one off requests like “lets make a playlist” or “please send your dress for approval” or “please update the spreadsheet with your flight arrival time” - all of these seem like very fair requests to me, but my bridesmaids told me it was annoying to have a group chat run in this way.

2. A few of the planning decisions weren’t complete until the last minute, which meant there was a lot of confusion about logistics, transportation, etc. This is what caused us to have to make so many airport trips.

3. We did a lot of venmoing back-and-forth all weekend. Two of the bridesmaids privately expressed to me that after spending so much money on attending the trip, getting very specific outfits for the event, etc. they were offended that they were nickel and dimed for their portion of food and gas during the weekend.

4. Because we picked a place none of us had ever been to or had any familiarity with, we didn’t know there was no cell service, and we went on a long hike that started out fine but then once we realized we had no cell service people started getting scared about an emergency situation and what we would do, so most of the girls just turned around.

-

Basically, each individual thing was fine and understandable, but it all added up to me feeling like my girls absolutely hated attending this trip and feel resentful toward me for making them do it. I admit that I could have picked a better place, but outside of that, all of the requests seem very standard? All of the bachelorette I’ve been to have included a group chat, Venmo, lots of travel for a short weekend, everything I just described. But I feel such sadness about doing this to some of my very best friends in the world, all of whom are again spending lots of money and time to attend my wedding in a few weeks. I don’t understand how this happened or why I feel so bad. Please help.

My (28F) fiancé and I originally had a wedding planned for May this year, and we were planning it around Spring 2025. Unfortunately, just before putting our deposit down for a venue, I lost my job. I earned a significant amount more than my partner so we chose to postpone. We've been together 10 years, engaged for 3 (I started dating him at 18 with a year of college left, then went to uni an hour away for 3 years, which set us back on engagement timeline as we wanted to live together).

I changed to a freelance career, so I will never have that much money again, and now we are doing a much smaller wedding. We really love the registry office we decided on, and his work offered us their beautiful bar/restaurant for free as long as we pay for food (which was my partner's suggestion). I asked if having it at his work would be depressing, but he said he would actually really like being in a familiar space and being able to help with menu choices as a chef because he's passionate about food. I think it's stunning and such a steal with the cost of weddings, so why not?

However, he has started asking me weird questions. His mother and sister have learning difficulties and autism (me and my partner are autistic too but both level 1 and did fine in education). His dad isn't diagnosed but definitely isn't typical. I have been asking him about the guestlist, because I literally can't pick who he wants there for him, and he started asking if I think his family are "very disabled".

I said yes, your mum and sister went to a special school (not in a mean way of course, just matter of fact because I was surprised by the question). And he seemed genuinely surprised. I understand it must have been normal to him, but I think he's grappling with how strange it is to be a very switched on guy, who was raised by a family with learning difficulties.

Days pass, and he'll ask more questions like "do you think my situation growing up stopped me from achieving as much?" - I said I think what he's achieved in his life is already amazing, but I'm sure it was a hard barrier to overcome.

Now, it's come to a point where he's completely shut down about anything to do with the wedding and is visibly upset when I mention it. I suggested he try therapy as I think he's having a lot of issues with his family and identity, but he said the waiting list is so long that it wouldn't help in time and he can't afford private.

He didn't do any of this with the previous wedding, which is what is throwing me off. He was super excited, enthusiastic, stuck in. And now I can't ask him literally anything without a total shutdown.

His core family are invited along with his grandma and some aunts/uncles/cousins, but we can no longer invite distant cousins/aunties we've never met as a couple in the 10 years we've been together. The same sacrifice is being made on my end. His mum will vocally not be happy about it, but unless she has 15k sat around, there's not much we can do about that except never have a wedding (she also didn't want to drive 30 minutes for our previous venue, so we wouldn't have been able to win regardless). I will have annoyed family members too, but I just think that's part and parcel of small wedding planning.

Right now, we're in the position of needing to put deposits down for different time sensitive things, and I can't pin him down for a conversation whatsoever. I want to be sensitive but I need him to answer like, four days ago. I need his guests too. I really empathise, but we've discussed his family in the past and I'm really confused as to how he's just having this revelation now. I know the big event must be bringing a lot up, but I'm at a loss on how to proceed.

I can't tell if he's nervous that his mum won't be happy with the reduced guestlist (not that we ever discussed it previously, but she's like cartoonishly traditional and thinks weddings are a family reunion), or just really struggling with his past. I'm torn between wanting to be there for him/give him space, and literally needing him to be there for the wedding before things fall through.

EDIT: I wanted to thank the people who have responded so far, I was really worried that my partner would be slated as a "disinterested groom" or that people would be judgemental of our relationship/time together without getting married/earnings. Thanks for taking it at face value and having empathy for him.

Do European people, or more specifically Dutch people know of the rule not to wear white to someone else’s wedding?

This question has been eating me alive since my MIL tried to wear 2 different white dresses to my wedding. She sent the first dress, which was completely white, to my now husband roughly 5 days before our wedding and he immediately told her it was too white and not to wear it. She said it was cream coloured and was irritated but kept looking.

The next day she sends a white dress with a small floral detail on it, to which my now husband told her once again, that it was too white and to pick literally any other colour to wear to his wedding. She got really irritated and ignored him until the wedding.

The day of the wedding she showed up wearing blue, which was fantastic! But, she had been complaining to family about how we said she couldn’t wear white, and ultimately complained to us that she had to order a dress off Amazon a few days before. Mind you, she had known about our wedding for 2 years, so she had time to plan, she just left it to last minute.

There have been other instances of my MIL being undermining or undercutting towards me, but I’m wondering if this is genuinely just a lack of etiquette knowledge issue and maybe she doesn’t hate me as bad as it feels like lol.

We do live in Canada, and she’s been here for over 20 years, but she was born and raised in Holland.

Do Dutch people wear white to weddings?

I am getting married this October in the town where I grew up and currently live an hour away from.
We have lots of family flying in from Europe including all of my mom‘s siblings who haven’t visited her at the same time since her own wedding thirty years ago as well as her childhood best friend.

Long story short we have two guest houses which my mom manages and blocked out for the wedding that have six bedrooms that are currently allocated to my moms brother, two sisters, childhood best friend. That leaves two bedrooms one of which I have asked to save for my best friend who can’t drive and is also virtually my only friend attending.

My fiance is upset with me because he invited his sister‘s brother in law, his BIL‘s brother and his BIL’s parents and they are flying from California which is expensive and he feels it isn’t fair that all of our accommodations are going to my side of the family which I understand kind of.

I really do want to share with him and be fair but I also feel that guests who have I have known for decades and are immediate family obviously take priority over people who we have only known for a handful of years. Again we also own these homes, are missing out on the profit (they would definitely be rented otherwise) and my parents are paying for the entire wedding. His are helping us out with a down payment to reciprocate which is so kind.

The wedding is 90% my family because ours is huge compared to his but he has met EVERY SINGLE GUEST! And it kind of feels like he is just inviting people so that he feels that his side is represented too which is totally valid! but again we have only met the family (his brother in law and parents - and also his sister who is married is not even attending due to visa issues) who he wants to give our limited accommodations to maybe four times and I just can’t justify putting one of my mom‘s siblings in a hotel so that he can make them happy. But maybe I am being selfish? I just feel that whenever we talk about it he gets so defensive but it feels to me like it really is fair for the closest family members to be given accommodations.

Edit- just to be clear the guests he wants the rooms for are his sister‘s brother‘s parents and his friends from California. His immediate family is local.

I know the general etiquette is to send Save the Dates about 6-8 months in advance for a local wedding.

My wedding is in October 2027 and will be local for most of our guests butttt I already know quite a few people who either have weddings booked for that month or are planning big trips pretty far in advance. I’m in Canada and October is not only a popular travel month because of Thanksgiving, but also a really popular wedding month. If you don’t opt for a summer wedding, fall is a pretty obvious choice here because the autumn is so beautiful (unless you're one of those people who loves winter!!) There have already been five people who, when we told them our date, said they were glad we mentioned it so early because they either already had other weddings around that time or were considering travelling that week.

Would it be crazy to send our Save the Dates in September 2026, about 13 months in advance? Is that way too early? For reference they are not physical save the dates but via e-mail.

Part of me is just excited and eager to send them but I’m also genuinely worried that if we wait too long, some people we really want there will already have other weddings or travel plans booked.

I started a new job 6 months ago and they have only known me in my fiancè era. Whenever my new coworkers make conversation with me it was always about my upcoming wedding. I would often change the subject to get to know them more.

I got married a month ago. I am not realizing they are having trouble starting conversation with me because they don’t know about my other interests.

Thinking about it now, I feel like I have lost myself. I have been so consumed in wedding planning that I don’t have interests and hobbies anymore.

Did anyone else feel this way after getting married? What hobbies/interests did you pursue after getting married?

When sending out wedding invitations, did you use digital invitations or paper ones? What were some pros/cons? Feeling conflicted. I don't want to spend too much $$ either..

Hi!
I am starting to think about ideas for my bachelorette trip, it would be in the winter sometimes in late February or first week in March.
We all live in NY, and I would prefer to keep it cost friendly so no flying. I was looking into the poconos and they have the snow tubing that looks fun but I didn’t see much else. It would be a long weekend and I don’t want to be stuck in a cabin the whole weekend. My friends are party people and can stay out late lol
Open to all ideas! TIA