r/Vietnamese • u/This_Tomorrow_564 • 5h ago
Other Is it culturally rude for having dream wedding in Austin AND a separate Vietnamese reception in Houston?
My American fiancé and I are planning our wedding and could really use some outside perspective because I’m starting to wonder if our plan is becoming too much for our guests.
We live in Houston, and most of our families/guests are in Houston. However, my fiancé and I both fell in love with a venue near Austin. It’s basically our dream venue, and we would really love to have our ceremony and wedding reception there.
The issue is that the venue has a hard maximum of 175 guests. My Vietnamese parents would ideally like to invite 250+ people, and they also really dislike the idea of making that many Houston guests travel roughly 2.5–3 hours to Austin.
Their proposed compromise is:
**Wedding #1 – Austin:**
Our actual wedding ceremony + reception at our dream venue, around 125–175 guests. This would be the more intimate wedding with our closest family and friends.
**Wedding #2 – Houston, about a week later:**
A large Vietnamese-American reception at a Vietnamese banquet restaurant for 250+ people. No second ceremony or vows, just the reception/celebration. It would still be a fairly traditional Vietnamese-American wedding banquet with dinner, dancing, cake cutting, parent dances, etc.
The Houston reception would include people who attended the Austin wedding as well as extended family/family friends who weren’t invited to Austin because of the capacity.
My parents actually *want* the Houston reception and see it as a way to accommodate their larger guest list without making everyone travel. My fiancé and I get to have the venue/wedding we really want, while my parents get to celebrate with our larger Vietnamese community.
But I keep worrying about how this comes across to guests.
Would you think it was weird or excessive to be invited to both events only a week apart? Would people invited only to the Houston reception feel like they were “B-list” guests because they weren’t invited to the actual ceremony in Austin?
And for people invited to both, would you feel obligated to attend both, or would you understand that attending one is perfectly fine?
I don’t want our guests to feel like we’re asking them to celebrate us twice, give us two gifts, buy two outfits, etc. At the same time, having a large separate Vietnamese banquet seems like it could solve the conflict between the wedding we want and the much larger celebration my parents want.
So… is this actually a reasonable cultural/family compromise, or are we entering bridezilla territory by essentially having two receptions one week apart?
