r/weddings

**I am my sisters maid of honor and my husband is the best man, she wants my help/opinion in planning this wedding since I got married 2 years ago** My sister is planning her wedding and wants a small wedding with close friends and family (40-50 people) locally so she doesn’t get over stimulated by a large group. But then she wants to have a celebration of marriage potluck a week or a month later and invite all the friends and family that didn’t make the cut. (Side note my parents are paying for the wedding and she wants them to also pay for the potluck) I’ve tried to explain to her this could come across as rude and it’s not proper wedding etiquette and that it could really hurt people’s feelings, especially people whose weddings she had attended over the year + recently!! I’ve tried to suggest other options like a micro wedding (just bridal party + immediate family) or a destination wedding (few hours away) so the second party would be more justified. She’s somewhat open to suggestions but gets very argumentative. (Other side note her fiancé wants his friends and family and to have a larger wedding BUT more importantly just wants my sister to be happy) just looking for advice so my sister gets the wedding that she wants, my parents feel comfortable paying for it and that people stop arguing :)

I have been watching Say Yes to the Dress, Four Weddings and other shows where young women talk about their weddings and have noticed that many are planning to be wed on restored plantations that are now rented out for weddings or other events. Some even offer bed and breakfast services! To me this is beyond offensive, ignorant and even macabre. If people are happy having the happiest day of their life where people were bought like objects, abused and worked until they perished, would they also consider a destination wedding to the gates of Auschwitz? To me its the same idea, just a different place. Does anyone agree?

My sister is planning her wedding and wants a small wedding with close friends and family (40-50 people) locally so she doesn’t get over stimulated by a large group. But then she wants to have a celebration of marriage potluck a week or a month later and invite all the friends and family that didn’t make the cut. (Side note my parents are paying for the wedding and she wants them to also pay for the potluck) I’ve tried to explain to her this could come across as rude and it’s not proper wedding etiquette and that it could really hurt people’s feelings, especially people whose weddings she had attended over the year + recently!! I’ve tried to suggest other options like a micro wedding (just bridal party + immediate family) or a destination wedding (few hours away) so the second party would be more justified. She’s not open to suggestions and gets very argumentative. (Other side note her fiancé wants his friends and family and to have a larger wedding BUT more importantly just wants my sister to be happy) just looking for advice so my sister gets the wedding that she wants, my parents feel comfortable paying for it and that people stop arguing :)

My fiance and I want a wedding, either indoor or outdoor in the fall. And we want a wedding that has a dark and moody victorian/haunted vibe.

We're also having a very small wedding, 15 people max.

Are there any hotels/mansions/airbnbs in either the United States or Canada that has this vibe?

I’m getting married at a high-end restaurant that has old Hollywood vibes with luxurious decor, art deco art, and historical pictures. I want to lean into the vintage Hollywood vibes and plan our wedding around it. I’m struggling with what colors would be best for the bridesmaids and flowers; men will wear tuxedos. The wedding will be during fall and we hope to have a quick ceremony on the patio and then go inside for the dinner/reception.

What wedding colors would best fit this theme? I was going to allow the bridesmaids to pick their style of dress but keep them the same color. What color/style bouquets should I do?

I am a 25F and suddenly everyone in my life is getting engaged and planning their weddings. I moved out of state so expect lots of travel and expenses in the next few years. I am wondering how people financially prepared for this season of life, what they said no to, etc. Is there any advice you wish you had gotten or things you’d done differently? I make a decent salary for my age but I still can’t afford bachelorettes, weddings, travel, dresses and gifts without a lot of budgeting and attention. I also want to be able to have discretionary money to spend on myself too! Any advice appreciated.

My fiancée and I are getting married in India in 5 months. My parents hired a wedding planner based on a referral before really taking our preferences into account. To their credit, they helped us negotiate with the hotel and secure the venue.

The problems started afterward. It took them almost 2 months (despite repeated follow-ups) to provide a basic décor proposal and cost breakdown. During that time, we found another design company whose aesthetic we strongly preferred.

We proposed a compromise: let the original planner handle everything except décor (planning, logistics, transportation, guest management, hotel coordination, AV, vendors, food, execution, etc.) while the new company handled only the creative design and décor.
Instead of discussing it, the planner immediately rejected the idea, became defensive, started calling my parents directly, and later began offering discounts to keep the décor scope. They also implied we owed them additional money for hotel negotiations, despite already having been paid ₹1 lakh.

Now they’ve said they’ll only continue if they handle the décor too. My parents don’t want to sever the relationship and are pressuring us to let them do everything.
The problem is that **both my fiancée and I no longer want to work with this planner.** My fiancée has been incredibly flexible throughout the wedding planning, is contributing around **$60,000** of her own money (despite only 17 of her guests attending), and this is the one issue she’s firmly stood her ground on.

At the end of the day, I feel like preserving a vendor relationship has become more important than what the bride and groom actually want.

**Are we being unreasonable for wanting to move on?**

We all saw the climbers on top of the ESB ; besides where you DID get engaged, (the best place, no matter where!) if you could pick anywhere on the planet (or off), danerous, illegal or not, where would you pick for your proposal?

I honestly couldn’t think of any physical gift we could put on the registry because we pretty much have everything we need. Would it be bad to only have the “Honeymoon fund” and “New home fund” on the registry with nothing else?

I don’t want to make it seem like we’re asking for money and we have a lot of family who are older who might question it. There’s even some younger people who might not be familiar with it (we’re in our early twenties and the first of our friends to get married).

I could really use some outside perspective.
A few months ago, I lost one of the most important people in my life. She was a surgeon I worked with and initially my mentor/direct supervisor, but over the years she became one of my closest friends.
I’m in my 20s and she was in her 70s, so I know that dynamic probably sounds unusual. Working in surgery, we spent hours together in the OR several days a week, often just the two of us. Outside of work, we texted constantly. I’d watch her dogs when she traveled, spend time at her house, and we’d go on walks or grab drinks together. She became one of the people I talked to almost every day.
She was honestly more excited about my wedding than I was. She talked about it all the time, and was obviously supposed to be there. Her wife is still invited.
I’m considering inviting her two siblings and their spouses, but I don’t know if that would be inappropriate since I don’t really have an independent relationship with them.
I met one of her sisters three times while she was alive. I met her brother and his wife at the hospital shortly before she passed, and then again at the memorial, where we spent hours talking together.
At the memorial, I told her brother it was hard to explain my grief because people just saw her as someone I worked with. He told me, “What you tell people is you lost your friend.”
When I apologized to her sister for feeling like I had overstayed my welcome, she told me not to apologize because while my mentor was in the hospital, she had heard her call me her daughter. Explaining how happy it made her knowing that her sister got to experience that type of relationship as she did not have children.
Family meant everything to her. Before she passed, I’d actually considered asking if she’d want me to invite her sister because I knew how important family was to her. I genuinely think she would have loved having her siblings included.
If I decide to invite them, I’d need to ask her wife for their mailing addresses, and I worry that might come across as overstepping. If I do invite them I plan on including a handwritten note explaining that she was honestly more excited about our wedding than I was, how much it breaks my heart that she won’t be there, and that it would mean so much to have them there if they’re able. I’d also make it clear there’s absolutely no pressure to attend.
Would inviting them be thoughtful, or would it put them in an awkward position? And if you were her wife, would you think it was strange if I reached out to ask for their addresses?

Just like my title I (26F) have my wedding coming up in early September and for this last week every single night I am having vivid ass dreams about something going wrong;

finding my fiancé cheating on me the night before my wedding, (this wouldn’t happen so pretty irrational and my fiancé gave a ton of comfort and we had a bit of a laugh bc of who it was with in my dream, literally would never happen.)
my venue getting double booked with another bride, none of my venders showing up to the wedding, screaming at one of my bridesmaids that they are not my maid of honor so stop trying to be them and then they shut down the wedding,
my friends wanting to renew their vows a weekend a July and thinking it’s the same day as my wedding and having a bunch of people leave early from their vow renewal to go to my venue to only figure out when I get to the venue that it’s not my wedding date.

Every morning I wake up after these dreams in basically a panic attack for a good few minutes until I talk myself into reality.

I have always lucid dreamed/lucid nightmares growing up, but I am typically one to realize inside of the dream that, it is in fact just a dream. These are just getting a bit too real and I’m having a harder time coming out of them to just wake up then having to take time to regulate my body.

Did anyone have this the months coming close to their wedding and was there anything they did about them?

I planned almost the entire look of my wedding around the flowers. Bright summer colors, big ceremony arrangements, matching bouquets, centerpieces, the whole thing. It was the part I was most excited to see come together. Then on the morning of the wedding, while I was getting my makeup done, I realized I had not heard from the florist. I texted them for an update and they replied saying our wedding was not on their schedule for that day. Apparently they had the wrong date in their system. I sent over the confirmation emails and invoice, but they said there was no way to pull together our order with only a few hours of notice. I felt like I was going to throw up.

My maid of honor somehow stayed calm, grabbed a bunch of family members, and sent them to every grocery store and flower shop nearby. They came back with whatever they could find and made it work. Was it the floral dream I had spent over a year planning? No. But it was still beautiful, and I will never forget how hard everyone tried to save it. We ended up spending way more than expected, and I definitely regret not double checking every vendor one last time that week. Also, I get wedding insurance now (used to joke aabout it all the time, definitely some karma moment).

My wedding is Alice in Wonderland themed. I obviously want my site to match. The few sites that have AIW templates aren't great. Where can I build my site with my own backgrounds and stuff? Oh, and I don't want it to cost a fortune.

I'm very newly engaged, and me and my fiancé both agree we'd like to hold our wedding in our backyard as we're not going to have many guests at all. Like.. 10 people max. The only issue is every actual backyard wedding I've seen they have a fully fenced yard, or they have a *huge* and seemingly neighborless backyard so they rent a tent. We have privacy thanks to a line of trees in the back, but from the sides we have neighbors and no fence. And while out backyard isn't tiny per se it is also not big enough (or a big enough group) to warrant a tent. Any advice on what to do?

I am really stressed about getting wrong photographers, can't redo wedding photos right? Every photographer has a polished portfolio that looks great but I can't tell who delivers reliably vs who just has a great instagram and not much else behind it.

Where are people finding photographers they could trust before booking. Real reviews, not just false ratings. Recommendations from people who were not actually paid to give them.

Hi Reddit!
I’m a young soon to be wife looking for a *budget friendly* fairytale forest wedding venue. I.e.: big trees, lots of green, overgrown look, maybe some water and a cute little bridge somewhere for photos, stone, etc…. Hoping for a South Carolina location (ideally not too far from the Summerville/Charleston area but if it’s the right vibe it can be a bit of a drive). I don’t necessarily need a lot of amenities - I’d rather set up a big tent and call it a day then spend a couple thousand extra on a nearby bridal suite. Please if anybody knows of a venue that might work I would be so grateful - I literally downloaded Reddit for this purpose 😁.
Blessings!

My fiancé and I were recently chatting about wedding plans and the topic of a wedding party came up. He was a bit nervous that I have more friends than he does, and of how that would work with our wedding party. I have about 12 people I would like in my bridal party (which I know is already kind of ridiculous but I can't figure out how to cut it down lol), and if he stretches and includes my brothers, he will have 6 in his groom party. Not really a problem, just a personality difference between us!

Then we kind of jokingly said, "maybe we just shouldn't have a wedding party at all!"....but now have been thinking about it more, and I wanted to hear people's opinions and experiences with their wedding parties, or if you have been to a friend's wedding that didn't do bridal parties, before making a choice on whether or not to have one!

For context, we will be inviting about 60 people to our wedding, and it will be a destination wedding for most of them, except for a handful who live in the same state as us. I had never planned on having a matchy-matchy bridal party, and hoped to just let them wear whatever they feel most comfortable in (maybe within a pretty wide color scheme). There are a lot of different style preferences, skin tones, body types, and gender expressions in the folks that would be in our party, so it seems silly and rude to force them all to wear the same things. Also, our guest list is just over half our family, so of the 25 or so guests that are friends, we would have 10-18 of them in our wedding party?? That seems kinda weird to me too lol. But I do want to still feel like my closest friends are part of the whole thing, and we had thought to maybe have a combined bach party with those people...so I'm not sure how that would work out if we choose to forgo a wedding party.

But I also realize that being on a wedding party is expensive and can be stressful (as someone who actually kind of hates it myself, even though I obviously love and support my friends who have chosen me as a bridesmaid!!), so I wonder if it might actually a bit of a relief for them to just be able to experience it as guests. Any and all advice is welcome!