I realized as I had dinner with a few couples the other night it’s all a matter of perspective. What do I mean? Well one couple had just gotten married over Memorial Day weekend. It was a lovely wedding. But from their perspective it was a small wedding of 175 guests.
My jaw started hanging, when two other couples agreed that 200 people was a small wedding, I laughed. Then I said we had 56 people at our wedding and that was a “small” wedding. None of the couple had been to our wedding, but I realized that a matter of perspective can be huge.
Then we started to talk about the cost of weddings. We mentioned ours was the cost of a new car, $15k for everything including honeymoon. It was very expensive to us. But everyone else scoffed and said that the minimum for their weddings would be $50k.
Again I was shocked. I didn’t say anything, but thought about it later. It’s a matter of perspective. To these people $50-100k for a wedding is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. To them, they’ll never do it again (or so we all hope), it’s a special day, and you can’t buy memories. All very understandable reasons.
But to DH and I, it’s the down payment on our home! Granted many of our friends don’t own, mostly because they are or did wait until after marriage to own. So again a matter of perspective. We’re the crazies who bought a home without being married! So I’m sure we raised more than a few brows.
So no matter what decision you make, someone might make a different decision. It’s all a matter of perspective.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Ashley @ Wide Open Wallet // Jul 7, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I’m with you 100% We had 26 people at our wedding and spent about $3,000 on the ceremony and reception. Which I still think is a lot for a party.
2 Lindsay // Jul 7, 2008 at 2:49 pm
I’m a newer reader so you might have blogged about this a while back… BF and I have talked about having a small wedding [proposal is in the semi-near future, I know that much] - about what you had. Did you have a small wedding party too? I only see pictures of large parties and would love to see ones of a smaller one.
3 LivingAlmostLarge // Jul 7, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Nope, I haven’t really blogged about our wedding. It had a total of 56 people including us. We had 2 attendents each including the best man and maid of honor.
It was pretty much only family we each had about 6 friends invited. The very close and personal friends.
And our wedding reception was about $5k. Everything for our wedding including travel, honeymoon, photographer, etc was $15k.
It was a lot. But like I said it’s a matter of perspective. People think they are having “small” weddings of 100+ people. I think under 50 (we were close) is a small wedding. Anything above is mid-size, definitely over 100 is mid-size. And above 200 people is large.
But to many it’s not. And this applies to money too. $10k wedding is expensive to some and exorbitant to others. But to others $100k weddings are a minimum.
4 Lindsay // Jul 7, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I think we’re going to end up somewhere between 50-75 or so? We both come from small families [not a lot of extended family either] and only have a handful of close friends. Plus we’re moving [from Boston to NYC] so time will tell who we stay in contact with. The plan now is to have two people on each side for our party [his bff and brother and my sister and his sister] which works out nicely.
We haven’t talked costs yet since it’s not that near in the future, but we’d like to have it at a nicer place since it’ll be small. Having it small means we don’t need to cut corners as much to save either - at least that’s the plan now. Another big issue is that a lot of people will be traveling to come so we’d want to make it worth their while too.
5 LivingAlmostLarge // Jul 7, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Ours was a destination wedding for his side and friends. But for what it’s worth, we too had to travel to Hawaii to get married.
Our friends were all friends longer than 10 years to be invited. I didn’t even really invite college friends and neither did DH. They had to be really old friends to garner an invite.
We had tons of friends from grad school and undergrad that were angling for an invite. Easily we could have added 50 people we worked with, but we chose to just cut it.
So when asked we said 10 years was the minimum for friendship. And the rest was family. My BFF has been for 25 years, my other bridesmaid about 12 years. DH’s BFF for 20 years and the groomsman his brother.
So this way people we knew only a couple of years and we were invited to their wedding, we just explained it was “small” and intimate.
6 dogatemyfinances // Jul 7, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Ha! This post is so funny.
I’m not phased by wedding expenses, but the CRAZIEST thing I can think of is buying a house with your boyfriend. I practically begged a girlfriend not to do it–it really hurt our friendship. He just left one night. She can’t even find him to sell the thing.
And 175 does seem small when you have families as big as my fiance’s and mine. All in the perspective.
7 Meg from FruWiki & All About Appearances // Jul 8, 2008 at 12:43 am
I can’t imagine spending $50k on a wedding. I thought spending $5,000 was a bit pricey, but I wanted a “big” wedding.
My husband and I spent about $5,000 on a wedding and dinner reception for over 100 people — and much of our honeymoon expenses, too! I even bought a brand new big fluffy white dress (which was almost a grand).
If you’re curious, some of my frugal weddings tips are at: http://www.fruwiki.com/index.php?title=Weddings
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