Those of you who prefer('ed) a small wedding or to elope for yourself, are you not a big party person in general?

Yes, I am an introvert and don’t like crowds. I have hundreds of friends around the world and would love to have them all present for one huge party, though. However, I do not like the pomp and circumstance or the pretentiousness of many weddings.

I simply don’t grasp the concept of having a professional photo shoot with dozens of images of the engaged couple in contrived poses, nor the necessity of custom calligraphy for save-the-date announcements or even the official invitations. I know people who are photographers and calligraphers, and I don’t begrudge them their right to earn a living, but something about it just seems so wasteful.

This isn’t just weddings, either. People blow tons of money on bar/bat mitvahs, confirmation/communion parties, quinceaneras/sweet-sixteen parties, graduation parties, etc. I just feel like the people who make all that fuss are doing it for show. To me, it’s like the people who have to “Like” and “Share” those posts on Facebook that say how much they love their child, and being a parent is the best thing in the world. Who are they trying to convince? Do the folks who do all these things love their kid more than I love mine? No. He knows he’s loved by my actions, and he doesn’t resent that he never had a huge party at a banquet hall with a band.

Yes, not a big party person and I think huge wedding parties are a waste of money!

<—- small, inexpensive wedding (~$500).

I don’t really like parties. I prefer not to celebrate birthdays or anniversaries. I have a 16 year old who probably had 2 birthday parties in his life and they were nothing compared to what most people consider birthday parties. I don’t like gifts. I don’t like loud. I don’t like my extended family. I don’t like alcohol (not only do I not drink, but I don’t like being around other people drinking). My extended family on one side has raging alcoholics and people who drink to severe excess.

I love large religious celebrations. We go to a new year celebration (the Baha’i New Year is on the first day of spring) with lots of people and food and music and dancing. It’s one of my favorite days of the year.

Materialistic or self-serving parties, especially with alcohol, are not my cup of tea. I’m not interested. I don’t even go to baptisms. No thanks.

In terms of inviting others to our house… it’s very small (6 rooms, 1500 square feet), so we only invite another family or two over at a time. I would be fine with having a larger gathering if we had the space… if the purpose was to just have a good time and not celebrate an individual.

I have always dreamed of having a big wedding. I think that it is really fun and a really memorable occasion for everyone when something like that is thrown. I must admit though that it is much more economical to have a small family get together instead of having a big wedding and also I have experienced that the people who have these great, illustrious weddings sometimes don’t last. I mean you have to ask yourself sometimes, what is the sense? For me I like the big weddings and parties, but as for it being economical…no. It is more of a preference for the individual person.

I don’t like parties in general and neither does my husband. We both thought some of the things people did for their weddings were absolutely ridiculous. We are both tightwads as well and didn’t want to go into debt for a stupid party.

I’m not a party person and I avoid them as much as I can. I’m always thankful whenever I have a legitimate excuse to not attend one.

The only parties I throw are birthday parties for my children. If we have friends over it’s just a couple or two and we hang out by a fire or play card or board games.

We eloped but I love big parties. We have people over for dinner and games once a week and a big party a few times a year. I just don’t like weddings. There is something really artificial, stuffy, and wasteful about them to me. And my family is awful, having a big party with all of them would be a miserable experience.

I love all sizes of get-togethers—both hosting and attending, as long as I don’t have to foot the bill.

As for a big wedding or eloping… this time I would elope, but it’s more because of family dynamics than anything. There are some really sour and negative people in my family and my SO’s family that I don’t want near us, especially as spectators when we express our love for each other.

We had a small intimate wedding and I thoroughly enjoy a good party. I have no problem with lots of people and noise and celebration. While my husband is a certified introvert, he doesn’t have problems with parties either (within reason). I wanted a small, family only wedding the second time around because I wanted it to feel extra special. It did.

I’m not planning to get married but if I did it would be a very small affair. I am not a fan of big parties in general.

Not married, yet, but, it wouldn’t be that for me. I love a big party! It’s just big wedding are bloody expensive (and a waste of money). I’d rather use the money towards a honeymoon or setting up a home together.

I wouldn’t mind the big party deal when getting married its the obnoxious amount of money people spend FOR ONE DAY! Yea it’s a special day, I get that but it still shouldn’t cost several grand.

I do not enjoy big parties. They make me incredibly socially anxious, while smaller intimate gatherings are less stressful and more enjoyable. However, I am also a frugal, practical person. I would prefer an extravagant honeymoon (several destinations would be lovely) with my significant other to an over-the-top wedding.

I’m not married but when I do get married, it will be small. All I want is a nice dress, nothing else matters. I could get married in the back garden. I wouldn’t have a party afterwards either. And yes, I’m not a big party person, at all. Very anti social in fact. I don’t even have any friends.

You’re right in my case, although I do enjoy attending other people’s big parties, I just don’t enjoy hosting them and being responsible for everyone and everything. Also growing up for all intents and purposes, an only child, made me treasure my privacy and quiet.

I’m also a tightwad, practical and prone to save rather than spend. :)

Like @KNOWITALL, I enjoy other people’s parties once in awhile, but I don’t like spending money for myself.

I thought of this question because of a Q about what women like to get as a gift if they don’t like flowers. It occured to me that I just don’t get a thrill out of flowers like some people, and hate money spent on them, whether it be my husband buying them for me (which is my money) or someone else (then I rather the money spent be for something more practical that wasn’t going to die an be in the trash in short order). Add in the Q’s about weddings recently, and it got me thinking that the people who really hate the idea of money spent on weddings and the whole big part things, probably don’t like hosting and maybe even going to any big parties, so they easily are very negative, critical, even judgemental about big weddings.

I really appreciate evenryone’s answers.

@hearkat It never once occured to me that people who don’t throw big expensive barmitvahs and weddings don’t love their children as much. I don’t know if you were being sarcastic, but I can assure I don’t think most people are thinking that. I have never heard anyone say anything of the sort.

Interestingly, my neice is very upset her father doesn’t willingly want to pay for college for her. I think she associates it with him not loving her, which is absolutely ridiculous.

We eloped. I enjoy having big parties and getting everyone together, I just don’t necessarily want to be the center of attention (as you are in a wedding) and I couldn’t stand the idea of spending a lot of money on a wedding. We had much better things to spend the money on.

True that I do not like big parties. I find them a waste of time. You barely get to socialize with people you know and usually there is some family politics involved. Doesn’t mean I hate crowds. I use to love going clubbing. I love how alive a crowded room felt with people celebrating being alive and living the moment. But I also loved only have a few close friends with me.

So I find big weddings a huge waste of money. It is short lived and it never really celebrates what you feel.

I had a JP wedding and my heart was gushing. I don’t really remember much about it but the both of us taking our vows in front of the justice of the peace and my heart racing a million miles and hour. I felt the only persons in the room were the both of us and the judge and God. Everything else faded back and meant nothing to me. My whole world stood before me and his whole world stood in front of him. Everyone else was just visitors to our world. They didn’t matter. They were bodies with blank faces.

We later had a dinner at home with some close friends and that was it.

My small wedding was 100% due to having no money.

Small weddings. As my dad said, “It’s the marriage that’s important, not the wedding.”

@Dutchess_III So lovely put.

@Headhurts He didn’t want to have to pay for a big wedding! I c what you did there, Dad! But that’s OK because I didn’t want a big wedding.

@JLeslie – I was pondering if those who feel compelled to have these extravagant, expensive events are motivated by trying to prove to others, or to the kids themselves, how much they love the kids. I wasn’t saying that a reasonably-minded outsider would have that impression, I was wondering why some folks feel it is so important to spend so much on a party.

Paying for higher education is completely different than throwing a huge shindig for some “coming-of-age” occasion. If a parent is capable of contributing to college costs – undergrad, that is – I believe they should. I had classmates who were unable to get financial aid because of their parents’ income/assets, yet their parents refused to help pay – the system is fucked-up in that regard. But especially in today’s economy with the ridiculous costs of college, a kid can’t work their way through school like our generation and those before us could. I totally understand why your niece would feel that way.

There are people who do equate love with money. One of my friends told me in 1997 that she wouldn’t take an engagement ring under $8000 because that’s the minimum at which that her fiancé should value her. She really felt like the cost of the ring reflects how much she is loved. Me? I’d be thrilled with a simple, sterling silver ring with a shared quote on it.
I also was a bridesmaid in a $13,000 wedding in 1994. The bride also had that cost=love attitude and became one of those bridezillas. The marriage lasted 2 years.
There was a good article some time back (can’t find it) that said the average wedding was $25K but that number is skewed because of the million dollar weddings messing up the results of the average. When they the top 1% and bottom 1% out of the equation, the average dropped to something like $3K to $5K. We only hear about the ludicrously expensive ones.

@hearkat I am empathetic to my neice, and I think her dad should help pay also, but I don’t think it has anything to do with how much he loves her. When her parents divorced she was about 5 years old (they had been separated for over two years by then) and her mom, my SIL, tried to get into the divorce documents that he would oay for their college. He would not agree, and the lawyer said it really sin’t something they can fight for. My belief is she already knew he was not the type of parent who believes in paying for college. I know a lot of parents like this, many of them are middle class and could easily help pay. I know mom’s who slip their college children money without the dad knowing, etc. Anyway, since my neice’s mother thinks parents should pay, she makes my neice feel worse in the end. Like her dad is a piece of crap who pays for things for his young child with his new wife, but not her. But, he did pay for her when she was a young child, and bought her a BMW when she was 16, and all sorts of things, he just never intended to pay for college.

If anything, maybe the mom should take a second to realize she married someone who does not look at education the same way she does. If they were still married they would still be having the same fight about paying for college for their children. But, the dad is kind of made out to be the bad divorced deadbeat dad. It doesn’t help my neice. Worse, they live in an area that is very affluent and also very Jewish. Not to stereotype, but Jews tend to pay for their children’s education. I am not saying other people don’t, absolutely they do, I just mean statistically it probably means most of her peers don’t have this problem. Plus, she decided to go to an expensive small private college, where most likely the children have their parents paying, or they might be on scholarship. If she went to a state university she would be surrounded by students who also work part time to help pay for their education.

As far as big weddings, I think part of it is people tend to do what their community does. If everyone around is throwing big extravagant parties it just seems normal. For some people it is about being a little competitive I think, wanting to have the most fabulous wedding compared to their friends. For others it is a kind of fantasy thing, Cinderella-esque. Mostly I think people want their friends and family to have a good time and enjoy the ambiance and food. I definitely was very focused on the party, probably more than the ceremony. I really wanted everyone to have a good time, that is what I cared about most. I worried we had vegetarian dishes for vegetarians, I really really cared that the music was good. I wish I had been a little more focused on the actual ceremony. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with my wedding day all my life, not even close, I just wanted all these people who were flying in and travelling to have a fun time. That was my mindset anyway.

There does seem to be a ‘one-upping-the-Joneses’ aspect to a lot of it.

The situation with your niece is different. I say she should sell the Bimmer and get a clunker, do 2 years at community college, then transfer into a baccalaureate program. A lot of kids put “status” with the name of the school they attend – similar to “needing” a BMW at 16 or a big wedding. That’s poppycock. But again, a lot of it is in how they’re raised to consider such superficial things.

(It was bound to happen…)
Rick and I got married at the lake.

I wore a dress I’d picked up at a garage sale.

The day of the wedding, I stayed home, making a huge pot of baked beans and potato salad for the barbque (burgers) we were going to have for the reception…burgers and beer. Rick wasn’t allowed to see me, of course, so he and my son, Chris went out to set up tables and a canopy and stuff.

I had mentioned a couple of weeks earlier that I would like an arch, but gave that idea up. While at the lake my son spotted some thick, really pretty vines crawling up a tree. He pulled them down and created a beautiful arch! Rick’s daughter attached some pretty fake flowers to the arch. It was so sweet, so touching (he was 17 at the time.) He’d crawled about 20 feet up a tree and out on a limb to tie a long piece of the ivy to the center of the arch so it would stand up. (When I saw that, I looked up and up, then looked at Rick who said, “You DON’T want to know how he did that! If you recall, Chris was forever getting hurt!)
The love that was behind its creation makes me cry to this day.

Chris gave me away, and made a little speech…”I give this women on behalf of her father, Alfred Joseph Henson, who can’t be here today.” (My dad had died by then.) He wore a funky hat because my dad used to wear all different kinds of hats for different occasions. Sigh. Tears all around.

This was our honeymoon valley

This is our honeymoon suite

This is our honeymoon bed

This was our honeymoon boat.

Some of you wis.dmrs might recall this pic of me and my honeymoon dog sitting on my honeymoon bed in our honeymoon suite in our honeymoon valley (it’s the first real life pic of my I ever posted)

I worked to keep it less than $200 because we were poor because we owned our own business…a mower shop.

There were only a few glitches.

My granddaughter, who was 3 at the time, was supposed to be my flower girl. However, she was with her dad that weekend, and he didn’t bother to bring her out. He could have just dropped her off and left, but he didn’t.

Rick’s daughter, Gena, was all excited about the wedding and wanted to do all this stuff. I kept cautioning her to avoid spending money on a lot of fu fu stuff, but she went a little crazy anyway…and I had to pay for it all, whether I wanted it or not. .

Gena offered to make the cake. I assumed that was her wedding present to us because she never said anything about us paying her for it. A couple of days after the wedding though, she started harassing me to pay her $50 for it. I was a little taken aback. It was a beautiful cake, and worth $50, I’m sure, but I would never have paid $50 for a cake! I would have bought the fixings myself and made it for less than $10! So that frustrated me, but I scraped the money up and gave it to her.

I choose gold and maroon for my colors. I picked up a mid-calf length maroon skirt at Goodwill, and I bought some very wide (about 5”) trim to put around the bottom of it. It was really, really pretty trim, gold and green and maroon and kind of glittery. It was rather expensive too, but I figured since I was the bride, that was my splurge on me. I envisioned this sort of retro-hippy Woodstock kind of dress. Like wood sprite or something.

Gena sewed too, I didn’t, so I asked her to sew the trim on the dress. The day before my wedding she brought it to me. It turns out I hadn’t given her enough trim to go around the bottom so she went out and bought some different trim…it was really thin, maybe ½ inch gold trim. It looked more like ribbon than trim (In fact..it WAS ribbon. She used it on things like the wine glasses.) Her words were “I figured what the hell. It’s gold and it’s cheap!” NOW you wanna go CHEAP, Gena???!!! The skirt was SO UGLY! The narrow trim caused the hem to bunch up and…it looked like a clown dress! I was stunned. That night I told Rick how upset I was about it, but he said, “Gena worked hard on that Val! You can’t hurt her feelings and not wear it!”
So I started crying! I have NEVER been one to use womanly tears, but I REALLY cut loose that night! I had to get Rick on my side, or I’d never hear the end of how hard Gena had worked (doing stuff I didn’t want her to do!) and how rude it was of me to not wear the dress and yadda yadda yadda. Didn’t want Rick mad at me on our wedding day! So I bawled and bawled and bawled and bawled. Every time he started to say something in Gena’s defense, I just cried harder and harder and louder and louder until the dumbshit came to his damn senses and said, “Uh…it’s YOUR wedding day, Val! You wear whatever you want! You certainly don’t have to wear a dress that you hate! It’s YOUR day!”

So I quit crying. Boom. Just like that I quit crying and picked out another dress

I could see that Gena was miffed the next day, when I showed up in a different dress, but oh well.

That last glitch was…the beautiful arch that my son so lovingly made..? Yeah. It was poison ivy! Everyone who came to the wedding had poison ivy! For the next few days my guests would be walking around town and people would say, “Oh, itchy! You must have been at Rick and Val’s wedding!” My son had almost been literally ROLLING in it, and he got it bad, bad. His whole body swelled. His head looked like a pumpkin, the poor, poor kid. Had to go to the ER. Later he said it was worth it, though, when he saw my face, which just lit up when I saw the arch.  I will never, ever forget that arch

That night we took the honeymoon boat out on the lake to just float around and look at the stars. But…I was really nervous. We were floating out there with no lights, and boats weren’t supposed to be on the lake after dark but you never knew (hell, WE were on the lake!) and I was afraid someone was going to run into us, so that didn’t go quite as planned.

Also…well, when I went to change from my wedding dress to my reception duds I went to a cluster of tall bushes down by the lake so my guests couldn’t see me. It was open to the lake but there were no boats in sight, and I figured it wouldn’t take more than a minute. Just as I dropped my dress and had on nothing but my bra and panties I happened to glance around to the lake behind me….and there was a boat full of KIDS, 20-somethings, quietly sitting there, watching me, grinning their heads off! SHIT! Where the hell did they come from? I never heard a motor! Oh well. I got my other clothes back on. The kids applauded and I bowed and went back to my party.

Another friend of ours took the pictures and even put them on a CD and created a slide show set to music. He didn’t charge us for it.

Our mechanic, Shannon, and his wife were there. Shannon had a TERRIBLE, terrible potty mouth, but he was a good kid. About 5 minutes after they left I got a phone call from him. He was all choked up, touched by the wedding. I could hear the trembling emotion in his voice as he said, “I just wanted to tell you congratulations and all that shit again, and it was a really nice fuckin’ wedding!” I cracked up!

I liked my wedding.  It was very simple for what it was. But Lordy, I can’t BEGIN to imagine the womanly tears I would have had to shed had my wedding been more elaborate! I would have been totally dehydrated! One of the bridesmaids would have had to have held a saline bag hooked up to a saline IV drip in my arm.

The next day
Rick

My favorite pic

Other

Who needs water?

Absolutely beautiful. Nice to meet you.

Who you talkin to Willus? ^^^

@Dutchess_III Sorry, you.

O! Well, thanks! Yes, my name is Valerie. My husband is Rick. He is a nutcase!

I do love looking at peoples pictures. Your wedding pictures were lovely.

Thank you! I do love people who look at my pictures! :)

@hearkat It’s her mother who wants her to go to the expensive private school, my neice wants to actually go away to a larger university, which would most likely also be much less expensive as long as it was in state. Not because of the status of the school, but because a friend of hers convinced her my neice would do better there, because the classes are very small. I actually disagree, but who am I to say. I don’t even think the private school is very well known. There have been Presidential debates at the college, but still I bet most people have never heard of it.