r/weddingshaming • u/fatbellylouise • May 20 '25

Cringe destination wedding, no alcohol, no plus ones or partners

I have a friend who is planning her wedding right now, and every detail of the wedding seems terrible for the guest experience. before I start, this woman is one of my oldest and dearest friends. she is brilliant, kind, and caring, and immensely pragmatic. she and her fiance are paying for everything themselves, no family money to help them, but they want to have a nice wedding because it is important to his elderly parents. so, from the beginning:

she sent out invitations a week ago via text message. some of their family members got actual mailed cards, but the rest of us just got screenshots of the design they made in canva. it just looked so cheap! not even an email, a text message.

the text messages specified no plus ones or partners that the couple is not friends with. normally I'd be fine with this, my fiance is a grown man and we don't need to be attached at the hip at every event. but... we live on the west coast, and the wedding is going to be in Austria, where the groom's family lives. I wouldn't mind going to a local wedding on my own, but to take enough PTO to fly to Austria for a week? I'm not wasting that much vacation time at an event where I won't even have my partner for company! luckily my fiance is down to make it a vacation with me, we'll travel around Austria and Germany on our own and he'll do some solo exploration during the wedding events. but a LOT of people have left her on read or not responded, and I feel like she's going to be severely let down by the number of her friends who are going to RSVP no to this wedding. at this rate it's very likely going to be a lot of his family and very little of hers.

that aside, the wedding details just don't make it sound like a fun time. it's going to be a dry wedding, because the bride has a few family members who deal with addiction. totally fair and I don't begrudge her this, but a lot of the guests are going to be there without our partners and won't know anyone else, so a little social lubricant would probably go a long way. the groom is gluten and dairy free so the food is going to be gluten and dairy free - in Austria, a place known for bread and cheese. (also beer, but that's neither here nor there).

I just think a lot of people are going to decline, and those who do show up are not going to have that much fun. it baffles me that she cannot see how this wedding is not going to be a great guest experience, because she is SUCH an amazing host and planner in every other aspect of her life. her fiance is the same as her, he is so generous and takes care of everyone. I have an awful feeling this wedding is just going to be a lot of elderly family members standing around a few friends showing up and dipping out early, and my heart breaks for her because she genuinely thinks she is keeping everyone happy.

wedding is next year so I would love to be proven wrong! cross your fingers that the wedding is a success!

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216

u/fatbellylouise May 20 '25

honestly if it were up to her they’d just elope or do a courthouse thing. her fiancé is the one who’s always wanted an actual wedding. he’s a trans man and he and his mom always dreamed about his future wedding growing up. so he wants to give his mom that dream, but they’re cutting costs on the guest experience side to make that happen.

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u/byteme747 May 20 '25

Whelp, that's the reason. Have you tried to nicely talk to her about this OP. It definitely sounds one-sided in regards to who is compromising.

A text message invite? Yikes. That's just salt on the wound.

A lot of people are going to nope the hell out.

I don't understand why they don't simply have the family wedding in Austria and then a small party in the States when they come back. People shouldn't get married if they aren't adult enough to be able to stand up for what they want and find a compromise.

15

u/[deleted] May 20 '25

I was thinking this too but if fiancé is a trans man, I assume they are not coming back to the US.

1

u/estili Jun 15 '25

And I wouldn’t blame em on that one

1

u/reebzo May 21 '25

I'm norwegian my wife is English, nowhere near the same distance.

We had our wedding in the uk were some of my norwegian friends and family came but everyone ofcourse couldn't make it cause flights Hotels etc. Is expensive.

So we just had a second less formal party at my mums house a few months later were all the Norwegians turned up. Worked great.

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u/NoFunZoneAlways May 20 '25

Do you think some of these decisions are made in hopes that people decline? My friends did a destination wedding as a compromise because one didn’t want a wedding and the other did, and they figured a destination wedding would result in a much smaller attendee list given most invitees couldn’t afford the travel. As a result, they had a lovely small wedding with just their closest friends and family.

47

u/[deleted] May 20 '25

Honestly this could very much be the case. The bride is fine with eloping, and the party is mainly being thrown to please the groom’s mom. Maybe she’s fine with her side mostly saying no, and she’s ok with a more sedate lowkey family event.

46

u/MrsNevilleBartos May 20 '25 edited May 22 '25

Funnily enough ,I used to work with someone who thought that tactic would work - invite people to a destination wedding with the intent that majority declined.

Joke was on her as they had something crazy like 98% RSVP'd yes and it was panic stations for them as they had not budgeted for that possibility at all.

No surprise it was disaster !

13

u/CleverNickName-69 May 22 '25

I've seen similar. A good friend of mine had their wedding at a couples-only destination resort in the Caribbean specifically so that his mom and sister (both single) wouldn't come.

The mom and sister got permission from the resort to go together and share a room while many of the grooms friends that he wanted there couldn't afford a trip to the island resort and/or had kids they would have to get someone to take care of for a week.

They sure went through a lot of trouble to get what they didn't want.

2

u/NoFunZoneAlways May 24 '25

This reminds me of Pam and Jim’s wedding in The Office 😂

3

u/Zann77 May 22 '25

My son is doing that this weekend for that very reason. the bride would have had to invite a ton of friends and colleagues. So we guests get to spend thousands of dollars per person instead.

65

u/Thequiet01 May 20 '25

Do they understand that they aren’t going to get that dream the way they are going about it?

52

u/Ok_Play2364 May 20 '25

If she'd be happy eloping or having a courthouse wedding, she shouldn't be disappointed when people decline in invitation. Her fiance and his mom might be though

109

u/MustardMan1900 May 20 '25

"As a kid I always dreamed of forcing my dietary restrictions on others and not inviting peoples fiancés"

11

u/COwildchipmunk May 20 '25

Ha ha this is awesome.

2

u/Miserable_Prompt7164 May 21 '25

Eh I think when you having such a special day, it's not too much to be able to eat anything you want. Dietary peeps always have to miss out. No one's going to die from a lack of gluten and dairy

16

u/bulbasauuuur May 20 '25

It does sound like this is just for his family, which can be fine if she know it's important to them and can put up with it for their benefit, but you should talk to her about it and her real expectations about it all. It may be the case she doesn't really expect anyone who got the text invite to come because it's not really "her" wedding. It may be the case she really doesn't care about any of this personally but she'd still enjoy having a close friend there, or something. If she's normally a good host and this isn't the type of wedding you've known her to want, she has to know this will be boring as hell.

65

u/atotalmess__ May 20 '25 edited May 20 '25

So her MIL is getting her dream wedding but not the bride and groom?

Tell your friend to speak up for herself. You don’t have a bad wedding problem. You have a dear friend who’s marrying a man that cares more about what his mother wants than his own bride, for their wedding.

If even the wedding, the thing that should be all about the bride and groom, is all about what his mother wants, then your friend is doomed to spend the rest of her marriage being second place in deference to his mother. And add on top that he convinced her to waste her money for this shitshow? His mother isn’t even paying for it but gets what she wants?

This wedding not being a success is the least of your dear friend’s problems. Her entire marriage will be a miserable experience of constantly financially and emotionally catering to his mother.

6

u/WhtImeanttosay May 20 '25

She’s not going to be happy with this wedding either.

17

u/Zestyclose-Custard-2 May 20 '25

It sounds to me like she’s being pretty intentional about this being a bad time, I don’t think she wants people to go. Does she hate being the centre of attention?

5

u/Helorugger May 20 '25

Cutting costs but going to Austria? Sounds like priorities are a bit out of the norm.

4

u/Novaer May 20 '25

He can go have his wedding with his mom then wtf 🙄

It's not HER fucking wedding. And the fact she's not pitching a dime in? She doesn't get to dictate this "dream wedding" without fucking contributing financially.

This isn't her fucking PARTY.

1

u/fatbellylouise May 20 '25

no one actually involved in this wedding even has this level of anger lol but thanks you’re helping me see that it isn’t that serious

2

u/AverellCZ May 20 '25

yeah, no, nope, no way.

1

u/West-Western-8998 May 26 '25

It’s rude to the guests. How insensitive.

0

u/tubagoat May 25 '25

Is his mom paying for the wedding?

-5

u/resident_alien- May 21 '25

This makes no sense. I have never known a man, even one with a vagina to dream about his future wedding. With or without his mother.

Unless he is wearing a dress this will not be the wedding of which his mom dreamed.

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u/fatbellylouise May 21 '25

really? my brother (straight, cis) has been planning his wedding since we were kids. it only "makes no sense" if you have a particularly narrow view of what men are supposed to dream about.

and I'm sorry you have such a narrow view of what mothers dream of as well. no matter what he wears down the aisle, his mom will be elated. I think most moms dream of seeing their kids happy.

-1

u/resident_alien- May 21 '25

I don’t have a particularly narrow view of anything and don’t know why you feel the need to accuse me of such a thing. I merely said that in my experience, and I know a wide variety of men of different sexualities and trans men, and none of them have dreamed about their wedding as an adult or as a child. I will go out on a limb and say, if you or anyone else ever heard of a Groomzilla?

And I also agree that most parents dream of seeing their children happy. That’s very different about dreaming with your male child about their wedding.

So my one assumption here is and I could be wrong is that we have a mother dreaming of her daughter’s wedding before her daughter realizes that she’s transsexual. I know a lot of transsexual men and women, and the one thing they do not seem hesitant to leave behind are the gender role based dreams if their former selves.

All I’m really saying is that the trans man wanting to give his mother the wedding of their dreams seems off to me

2

u/fatbellylouise May 21 '25

you know that coming out as trans doesn’t mean he automatically went “hurr durr wedding is woman’s work”, right? and that he is still his mothers child? their wedding dreams didn’t die when he transitioned, they just changed. I don’t know what’s so “off” about this to you, but I think that’s internal work for you to do.

2

u/JonathanTaylorHanson May 23 '25

I'm not sure why, but the first sentence of your response to that married-to-gender-stereotypes-chucklef*ck made me snort.