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IMO, destination weddings or bachelor/bachelorette destinations are ALL inconsiderate.
For a bachelor/bachelorette party that isn't within a 3-4 hour drive, no matter who it is, I'd just say NO unless they are having a local wedding and I was standing up in the wedding party.
As for destination weddings: Sure, you can say no, but when it is a very close friend or relative who means a LOT to you, how can you refuse unless the bride and groom are aware you are in the poor house and absolutely cannot afford it.
We have a destination wedding for my niece coming up in March to an all-inclusive in the Caribbean. We'll have to take 4 planes to get there and back, stay in motel rooms on either end of the flights, then once at the resort, stand in line at crappy food buffets, fight to get chairs at a crowded beach, and swim in a crowded pool. Not our idea of a vacation.
When all is said and done, it is going to cost us $6000+++ which IMO, is simply ridiculous. That is not including the wedding gift which will be considerately less in value than if she'd been married locally because we are spending so much just to get to the wedding.
How I would have rather loved to drive down to where she lives (7 hours away), stay in a nice motel or cabin and enjoy a long weekend with the wedding group.
So, are destination weddings inconsiderate? ABSOLUTELY The bride and groom can fly off to these destinations for a honey moon instead of asking this of their loved ones.
Either don’t go or don’t complain about it. No one is putting a gun to your head.
Most couples that get married at a far away destination do something small “back home” for those that couldn’t make it. Celebrate with her there, or invite the newlyweds over to dinner. It’s not like there aren’t a million alternatives. It sounds like you’ll be miserable there. She would probably rather you stayed back.
I was responding to your overall rant, spread between two posts, but didn’t want to quote the big one. I read your point.
You should simply be thankful that you’re being included and thought of. Go or don’t go. It’s completely optional. It is possible for some to travel, you know? Some may actually enjoy it. One needs to have a pretty rotten outlook to put such a negative spin on something meant to be joyous. “Trolling for presents”? What a nasty perspective.
Nasty, my foot. Let me guess. You went to Cancun or some such to get married and you don't like the other side's point of view.
As far as the rest of your post is concerned, it's absolutely ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the notion of sending an invitation to one's storybook wedding in Hawaii to people whom you don't actually care if they attend or if they cannot attend.
Let me put it this way. You're getting married. You and your intended decide to go to...say...Aruba to say your vows. You book the reservation at the resort with the expectation that X number of people will arrive. If they do, your honeymoon suite is free! Bonus! So it could be interpreted that you're sending out way more invitations than you actually expect to attend so you can fill up your quota of rooms. Talk to any travel agent who specializes in this stuff. It's part of the game.
So you send out the invitation to family members and friends who love you. But your Uncle Bill was just laid off two months ago at the plant, your sister just started her job a couple of months earlier, and your grandmothers both are in their late 70s and aren't as spry as they used to me. One is putting off a hip replacement while the other one isn't in the best of health. All of these people love you and want nothing more than to see you get hitched. But while a quick three-day weekend is in the realm of possibility for all them, an international trip, including passports, just isn't in the cards.
Now. Which one of these people did you not care about attending your wedding? Now that's a nasty perspective.
Last edited by MinivanDriver; 02-13-2019 at 06:35 PM..
This is an interesting view point to me, because most people I know have a different "hometown" than their parents do (and my parents each have their own), have a different hometown than their partner (who didn't grow up the same place their parents did), and even several different versions/definitions of what constitutes one's hometown. There's just no one-size fits all place. It sounds like you're advocating to get married where grandma lives, but remember, there could be 4 (or more!) grandma-type people invited.
This is true. But inviting people to a wedding in a location where the bride and groom are living, or one of the parents live, is a far cry from choosing a destination wedding in a part of the world where no one lives. In the first scenario, the choice of a location understandable and logical. In the second scenario, it's no more the fulfillment of a whim.
Besides, having your wedding abroad at a destination is several orders more difficult and more expensive for travelers than even flying cross country.
A little background on why I react the way I do, by the way. About fifteen years ago, my brother and his fiancee decided to get married in Italy. In the middle of Spring. Hurrah. They wanted all of us to come.
Well, my wife and I were doing okay financially, but flying the two of us and three small children to Italy would have proved exorbitant. My mother? There was no way she could afford it, even if she were in good health. My other brother and his wife flat-out couldn't come, she just having opened her practice. My sister had just divorced her husband, so she and her kids couldn't come.
And, guess what? Given the wedding was in the middle of April, none of us could have come anyway because it was smack dab in the middle of the school year. The same proved true of his fiancee's family.
The alternative would have been for me to go alone, but I'm not going to Italy without my wife. And if the two of us had gone, we would have needed to find someone to watch our 9-, 7-, and 5-year-old kids for a bare minimum of five or six days. If they had just decided to get hitched in California (Where they lived), it might have been a stretch for us, but we would have moved heaven and earth to have been there. Italy? No way.
So instead of actually standing back and thinking, "Huh. Maybe we need to rethink this," they instead saw the fact that almost no one accepted the invitation as some kind of huge snub by the families. They sent an e-mail that said, in effect, 'Well, if no one wants to come to our wedding, then we won't have a wedding.' They cancelled the plans in a snit and just got married by themselves. Had they just done that to begin with, nobody would have thought badly about it. But instead, we had to go through all that drama.
In the end it's little better than narcissism, often excused of the bride with the whine, "It's my day." Well, no. If two families are being joined as one, it's everybody's day.
Last edited by MinivanDriver; 02-13-2019 at 05:44 PM..
As far as the rest of your post is concerned, it's absolutely ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the notion of sending an invitation to one's storybook wedding in Hawaii to people whom you don't actually care if they attend or if they can attend.
I think the point is that the married couple won't be upset if someone doesn't show up at their wedding. They send the invite out of politeness and wanting to include the person. It doesn't mean they don't care about the person himself.
Imagine how rotten it would feel, if all your friends or all your family members got a wedding invitation, except for you? That wouldn't feel good, would it.
As for it being "everybody's day", no it's not. It's only two people who are getting married. In fact, some people elope and don't have a real wedding, for various reasons. That's their right as adults to do that.
I think the point is that the married couple won't be upset if someone doesn't show up at their wedding. They send the invite out of politeness and wanting to include the person. It doesn't mean they don't care about the person himself.
Imagine how rotten it would feel, if all your friends or all your family members got a wedding invitation, except for you? That wouldn't feel good, would it.
But there's a world of difference between someone not showing up at your wedding for whatever reason and creating a situation where it's impossible for most guests to show up at your wedding at all. And doing so not out of any necessity, but because you just want a great backdrop for your nuptials.
And I haven't even talked about the bachelor/bathelorette party thing. I had to give my graduate-student daughter a thousand bucks because her best friend decided she wanted the bachelorette party in the Bahamas. Otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to go.
But there's a world of difference between someone not showing up at your wedding for whatever reason and creating a situation where it's impossible for most guests to show up at your wedding at all. And doing so not out of any necessity, but because you just want a great backdrop for your nuptials.
And I guess that's their problem, then. if I can't go, I don't go.
And I guess that's their problem, then. if I can't go, I don't go.
Have a grandparent? If your grandmother could, say, afford to fly to a wedding a couple of hours away and stay at a Hampton Inn, but couldn't afford to fly to the Caribbean and stay in a post resort, are you going to say, "Tough luck, Grandmom"?
I do. I think it's okay if you have one as a destination, but to ask people twice to spend a significant amount of money for you (and sometimes vacation time) to travel twice for you I think is inconsiderate.
For example one friend of mine had his bachelor party in Las Vegas and his wedding in Jamaica. Now another friend of mine, where all his friends and family live in the Midwest (same deal with his wife) is having his wedding in Santa Barbara, California where neither of them is from nor do they really have family or friends there. I was fine with that. But today I just got an invite to his bachelor party and it's going to be in Miami.
It's like come on, I get it's a big event, but I personally would not want any of my friends to spend that much money on me. Especially when the wedding is in May and the Bachelor party in April.
Like with the first friend I didn't go to the Bachelor Party in Las Vegas, won't go to the one in Miami now. Don't want to spend my time and PTO on places I have been to so many times just to get drunk and wasted like I have so many other times.
I really dislike destination weddings. They are so presumptuous! Unless your friends an family are all millionaires, expecting people to travel someplace that YOU did not select for YOUR WEDDING is kind of the height of arrogance.
My family and my husband's are spread out all over the US. That's hard enough. We live in Ohio. We have a spate of nieces and nephews, as well as the children of good friends, who are marrying right now and have been, over the past five years.
We have relatives in California, Florida, NY and NJ, the Carolinas, three New England states, Texas and New Mexico. That's hard enough. We do like to attend weddings when ever possible, and we generally make a vacation out of it.
Expecting people to travel someplace is kind of the height of arrogance.
Expecting people to travel someplace is kind of the height of arrogance.
I know someone who had a destination wedding. She invited me. I couldn't go. We're still friends and she's not an arrogant person. Where do you meet people like this?
I know someone who had a destination wedding. She invited me. I couldn't go. We're still friends and she's not an arrogant person. Where do you meet people like this?
I think arrogant is too strong a word. But thoughtless isn't.
Last edited by MinivanDriver; 02-13-2019 at 06:55 PM..
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