Elopement

As usual, you're spot on. When I look back, I'm very glad we decided to have a wedding instead of bolting for Vegas, for that very reason.

 

Agreed. And while there is often stress involved in the planning and it can get expensive, getting married can be a wonderful experience. Mrs. OOP have some wonderful memories from our wedding and receptions (Yes, I wrote receptions. Long story).

If you don't want all that, the choice is yours. If your family or her family doesn't like it, too bad. It's your wedding and your marriage. Always remember that. The first thing to ask if they argue is if they are going to pay for it. That should shut them up pretty quickly.

 

I have some good friends that got married on April Fool's Day and didn't reveal it to the public until a couple weeks ago.

Their friends all took it fine. The groom's parents are very pissed.

The couple had a wonderful little wedding with the judge and if the groom's parents don't come around, oh well, that's on them.

 

If your families are both nearby, and there is no bad blood, I think it would be hard to elope. But if the families are far away, I think it would be nice to elope, then have a party for the groom's family and one for the brides wherever is most convenient.

 

I think it is disgusting to make your parents take out a second mortgage to finance your princess fantasies. If you're old enough to be getting married, you're old enough to pay for it. Plan what you can afford, and consider it a bonus if parents chip in.

My advice to anyone who wants to avoid the Wedding Industrial Complex is this: prioritize what's important to you and your significant other. If minimizing family drama is a higher priority than gathering all your friends to throw a few back, then make a plan that supports that goal. If you know this will be the one event that gets the whole family together, then go for it. If both of you are shy people who get stage fright, maybe elopement is for you.

If you do decide to elope, there will be some hard feelings at first but I think you'll find many might be relieved, especially if they're suffering from wedding fatigue (I've got a friend attending six weddings this summer. Six!).

As for presents, you may not get that food processor from Great Aunt Martha, but I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume immediate family will give you a gift. Besides, with the money you'll be saving for not serving Great Aunt Martha a catered dinner and wedding cake, you can buy the food processor for yourself.

 

Cadet, I agree with your points, but would like to add that sometimes the princess fantasies are being spun not by the bride, but by her mother. I fought those throughout our wedding planning.

 

If you knew a single detail about my wedding, you'd know that it had nothing to do with princess fantasies. Anything we could do on our own, we did. I made my own bouquet with fresh flowers I paid for. We made all of our linens and center pieces. We made all the appetizers for people to eat when they got the reception before the dinner. We decorated the morning of the wedding. We bought our own alcohol and a family friend bartended out of the goodness of his heart. Our photographer was the cheapest available in my region of the state and we ended up paying for that later because our pictures weren't great.

And I designed and printed all of our invitations and assembled them by hand as well as addressing the envelopes and putting together RSVP cards.

In fact, we did everything we could to make our wedding as cheap as possible and it was still between 10 and 15K. Doc and I actually maxed out our credit cards paying for what we could because I was doing an internship that paid poorly at the time.

So don't be so quick to judge on what you think are princess fantasies.

 

WT, I totally understand the conflict that can be presented. But this is another benefit to bankrolling your own celebration: other people have less leverage to complain about your choices.

 

I had a really good friend who got married while her mother and (step)father were in the process of getting divorced. She was much closer to her father, but whenever she tried to talk to her mother about the wedding, mom insisted that her father couldn't be in the church or at the reception.

My friend and her hubby decided to elope and just throw separate receptions for her parents after they got back from Tennessee. She still got lots of presents, and I got to wear a black dress and too much black eyeliner to two parties.

 

We eloped to Gatlinburg and married in one of those little wedding chapels. My wife doesn't seem to regret it 10 years after the fact and me being a guy, it didn't matter! The chapel provided the reverend, a little wedding cake, pretty professional looking photos and a VHS tape of the ceremony (as a bonus, they also included hispanic couple's wedding which occurred after ours on our now obsolete VHS tape!!!)

We meet several of the elopement requirements posted earlier: We had lived together for seven years; wife's family was (and still is thankfully) 800 miles away; wife and I are both kind of shy. We held a basic reception (no booze - teetotalers in my family didn't want to offend) about a month later at a Holiday Inn close to where we live and then took our honeymoon a month after that. Nobody griped at us (everyone was probably just happy we were making what looked like a common-law marriage official. All said, we spent probably a grand or maybe $1500 on the elopement and the reception. My mom splurged for our honeymoon because she's nice like that. Saved a ton of money.

But again, this came down to personal preferences. Wife and I didn't want to be in front of a huge crowd, so our little one-on-one with Kojak, the local reverend, was perfect for us. And we had lived together so long, it didn't make sense to us to put on a big show.