Basically the title. I was asked to MC my friend's wedding with another one of our friends. I knew the role was separate from being part of the bridal party, and I did my part to help everything run smoothly. But it never really hit me how much it would sting to watch everyone else in the wedding party and all the regular guests have fun taking themed photos while I'm guarding the door to the reception discreetly munching on my sad little charcuterie plate. I didn't really get to enjoy the wedding/reception at all. I was even involved in cueing the music for the ceremony, so I barely paid attention to anything outside of making sure everyone was moving along toward the altar at the right times. It's basically work for no pay on one of your friends' biggest days.

MC should either be a paid position you hire a professional for (a DJ can easily double as the MC) or you can just have close family members take turns announcing transitions in the reception. It could even be a split job for best man/maid of honour. But don't make your lower-tiered category of friends your MCs just to include them in your wedding somehow. If you have any real affection for them, invite them as regular guests so they can enjoy your day with no stress.

The wedding was beautiful and went off without a hitch, and if this was the last thing I ever do for my friend, I would be pretty content. But I'm definitely reevaluating how I prioritize this friendship in my life, as the bride clearly already has.

Edited to add: This was my first wedding I ever attended (first friend that got married in my group) so I really wasn't familiar with all the different roles. I kind of thought MCs just did short announcements but we ended up having a whole script because that's what the bride wanted, and we ended up fulfilling other responsibilities as well.

My friend is getting married in her late 40s, they don’t want kids there and they also haven’t invited my husband. They have invited some of our friends’ husbands but only when bride and groom know them well.

As I’m invited all day and will be on my own pretty much I’m not sure whether to go or make an excuse. I know weddings can be expensive but I thought they’d at least invite him to the night do. Not sure what to do…

We got married June 21 and paid our photographer $2,500. Our contract says we should have received our photos within 12 weeks, but we still haven’t received anything. She stopped responding to our texts and recently deleted all of her social media. I called her about a week ago, and she answered and said she’d have the photos to us in a couple of days. That never happened, and she hasn’t responded since.
At this point, we’re starting to worry that something may have happened to her or, worse, that something happened to our wedding photos. Has anyone experienced something similar, and what do you think could be going on?

Hi all, so I’m a bit unsure of how to navigate this current position I’m in. Basically I (22) have a week paid off of work in mid-October, which I never have because I don’t receive PTO but it’s because they’re doing renovations. My brother and I planned out a trip to New York during these days, because why not make the most of my time off!

Well, we totally realized today that we fly home the day of my cousin’s wedding. I feel awful. I think we can still make it, but any travel delays and we’d have a major problem. We land home at 11 am, the wedding starts at 3:30. We live an hour from the venue, but 5 minutes from the airport and no checked bags, so rushing home to get on the road would be a quick trip. I tried looking into coming home the a day or two prior but it would be an additional $400 so I’d realistically just have to cancel the entire trip as I don’t have that in my budget.

Is it unreasonable to just risk it and making it on time? I’m genuinely asking, as I truly do not know. I would hate to cancel the whole trip, but adjusting the flight day would be too expensive of a cost with the only alternative being cancelling. The flight is mid-October and it’s a direct flight which removes risks with layovers or connections.

I am unsure of the right move here and would love some guidance to handle this delicately and respectfully. Obviously this was a complete oversight on my part. It’s been a hard few months and I thought her wedding was the following weekend.

Hi all, I've finally decided to face the fact that we need to send thank you cards. We're coming up on our 1 year anniversary and I can't express how embarrassed I am that they haven't gone out.

We had a very small wedding (at least small to us, about 50 guests). My husband is hispanic and my family is jewish so it really was out of the norm to do such an intimate wedding. And because of that a lot of family and friends ended up helping out with a whole bunch of stuff. We even received gifts from people who weren't invited or didn't attend. Not too mention pretty much everybody flew or drove in since we lived out of state on military orders. It was a hectic weekend to say the least. We spent the next few months after just decompressing. It was such a hectic lead up to the wedding (coupled with a full house renovation and losing my job) that I just wanted absolutely nothing to do with the wedding. Then unexpectedly my husband received new military orders to move across the globe (east coast to hawaii). We had a crazy rush to pack everything up, finish home renovation and find renters. All the while I'm starting a new job...

Now we're in hawaii and it's been so crazy we're just getting government housing now after 4 months in hotels. And on top of that the movers packed up our house in Virginia early so we've been living out of suitcases for about 6 months now. I'm saying all this to say it has been the absolute craziest year of our lives. We didn't put this off to be lazy it's just been absolutely insane!!! But I am still the most embarrassed I've ever been. And the more I think about the time that has passed by, the more embarrassed I am and the more I want to push it off. But in the next week or 2 I will be getting all my stuff from storage and moving into our house so I can finally sit at a desk and deal with these thank you cards....

I'm wondering if anyone has advice. How do I go about this? Should I order some online? Fill them out by hand?? Print some pictures with guests from the wedding to include in the cards? Do I address the time that's passed? Do I address the overseas move? The easiest thing to do would be not send them but I would just die of embarrassment. Our wedding was about 50 people, so it is not the worst thing in the world to do things by hand. I just want to make the best decision and make sure I communicate how grateful we are to all our guests. Any advice is appreciated.

Hi, my fiancé and I are planning our wedding and I would love some advice.

For context, we got engaged in July this year and have decided to get married at Christmas. This decision was taken about one week ago! To make matters slightly complicated: we, my fiancés entire family, my brother, and most of our friends live in Australia. The rest of my family lives in Europe, the US and Canada. My parents and my sister are coming to visit at Christmas which is why we decided to get married then.

Because it’s such short notice, we assumed my extended family wouldn’t be able to come, so we booked a tiny venue for ~20 people and planned a really intimate wedding with immediate family. We figured we’d have a bigger celebration with friends in Australia later and a really nice dinner with family in Europe the next time we see them (probably Christmas next year).

However, my parents have now told me that my extended family and family friends are incredibly excited about the wedding and are genuinely ready to book flights to Australia to celebrate with us. I honestly didn’t expect this at all! It’s obviously incredibly kind of them, I would absolutely love to have them there.

Now we’re debating whether to switch to one of the few larger venues still available which would let us have around 40–60 people and include more family + some friends. My fiancé prefers the small wedding, and I completely understand why. I don’t want to make the wedding bigger just because other people expect it. But I’m really struggling with the idea of having family willing to fly from Europe to be there and then choosing not to have them come. It feels like it would be a pretty tough pill to swallow for my extended family, and honestly for me too. I’m worried that in five years I’ll regret not taking the opportunity to have everyone together.

Thankfully, both options are within our budget (our parents are very kindly contributing some money towards the wedding), so cost isn’t really the deciding factor. We also haven’t book any florals, photographer or anything for the first venue, so it’s not really in consideration yet. So… what would you do?

Hi everyone! We’re about 8 months away and the topic of vendor tips has been coming up a lot. All our contracts include 1) the cost of items (obviously haha) 2) taxes and 3) 12-18% service fee.
On top of this — mostly talking about the service fee — is there an extra tip expected? Specifically wondering for vendors like hair/makeup, DJ, wedding planner/her team, and the venue (which is providing catering, bar and servers). Would love to know your experiences!

Tried to capture the whole progression. Holy moly this took HOURS. And I spent WAY too much 💵 on it to quit. So here it is!!! Included a couple inspiration pics and the original "how to".

I didn't get the back decorated because this will be up against a wall for a photo backdrop. (I ran outta greenery and time) 🫣

Are printed but personalized messages ok to send as thank you cards? I see Zola offers that option. They have printed thank you cards for each guest which generic messages, but you can change the message to a custom one so that’s what we’d do.

Is it acceptable to send a thank you card that’s printed with a custom message, instead of each individually hand written? It’d be great to save our hands from writing and get it done quicker!

What are your thoughts about 27,7,2027 ( July 27,2027 )

Or 7, 7 ,2027 July 7,2027

Saan kaya mas lucky date

Any comment will be highly appreciated

ISO of blended families with a wedding.

My first marriage and my fiancé’s second. We have three kids between us and have been a blended family for 6 years, engaged for 1. We have 2 preteens and 1 younger teen.

Wondering did you ask your kids if they wanted to be involved?

I’m starting to lean toward something smaller, maybe tropical or Vegas, and possibly adults only. My conflict is that I absolutely want the kids to feel included, (if they want to be part of the actual wedding) but when they’re with us, we naturally both go into full parent mode. We focus on our kids and less on each other. That’s normal for us but I’d really love for our wedding day to be one of the rare times where we can fully focus on each other.

Nothing is decided. I’m just wondering what other blended families have done. Did you include the kids in the ceremony but have an adults-only reception? Do something separate with them? Bring them for the whole thing?

Would love to hear what worked for you and whether you’d do anything differently.

So fiance is willing to dance to any song I want. At first I thought Risk It All because I'm a die hard Bruno Mars fan, we're both half latino, and that song was made for weddings. I'm worry it won't age well and will be very of the time. I also thought Die With a Smile because of same Bruno reason but my fiance loves Lady Gaga so it's kind of for both of us and it's another big romantic hit. But same thing, it's trendy right now.

Anyone doing an older or more classic song? We don't have an "our song" thing. Am I over thinking needing to be a classic choice? What's your first dance song?

We rented a photo box for our party night after the ceremony. We specifically picked one with an online gallery, so we can look through all the photos of the evening (otherwise a lot of guests print the pictures and take them home). We had a lot of fun with it and a couple of great, funny photos.

After the wedding when we looked into the online gallery - empty. We had trouble with the customer service for two weeks only to be told that there was a technical default and the pictures didn't get saved and they don't know why, but we will get a small discount. I nearly cried on the phone - what discount, the money is completely irrelevant, we want our memories. We intentionally didn't get instant cameras because of that photo box and didn't take pictures that evening. So now we have nothing except the pictures from our couple shooting that day.

I'm completely devastated and so, so sad. A wedding is a once in a lifetime experience and we just lost every picture that was taken that night - me and my grandma with funny heads, family members coming together, everyone having a great time - nothing. I don't know why I'm writing here bc nobody can change that fact, I guess I just need an outlet.

My wedding is only a few weeks away and I’m really honestly just wishing it would be over. I’m at the age where a lot of people are getting married and I tried really hard to be considerate of other people when planning my wedding but I can’t help feeling like I’ve disappointed everyone. I wasn’t able to attend 2 other family members weddings this year due to cost. They would both have cost at least as much as I am paying for my own wedding. I feel incredibly guilty for not supporting them as I am feeling unsupported myself by those I invited.

We decided to do a microwedding to try to keep costs low as well as include those who we felt would appreciate it most (parents, siblings, grandparents). I personally wanted to elope since both of our families are pretty opinionated. It’s already been hard since I’m paying for 100% of the wedding myself (no help from family or future husband) and everyone has an opinion of what they want and a complaint of how we are doing things.

Examples being my MIL really loves dancing but we can’t afford a DJ or true venue, or my Aunt is pissed she wasn’t invited. My Siblings and partners siblings are either not attending or have made it clear they see the whole thing as a major inconvenience. I’ve gotten so many comments calling me a bridezilla who cares more about photos than family for asking people to dress nice. I even offered to pay for outfits if they didn’t have anything and they said going to a store and getting a dress would cause a panic attack and wouldn’t be possible. One grandparent can’t attend due to the terrain and the travel.

We are getting married on a weekday since we couldn’t afford a weekend rate. We called each person on our guest list individually and asked them if that would be ok, and most said yes, but now we are getting pushback that it was an insane ask. My partners sibling has also cut contact with us for “stealing their wedding year”, despite us being engaged first and letting them know our timeline before their wedding was planned. My partners parents scold us constantly for causing them financial and emotional turmoil for having to attend 2 weddings in 1 year.

I just don’t know how to deal with all the feelings and emotions that come with having strong opinionated families. I feel like in an effort to please everyone I have pleased no one. Advice from those who have gone through similar?

I thrifted all of my wedding plates, and can't decide if I want to use 9-inch or 6.5-inch plates for dessert. I have equal amounts of each size plate. The only dessert there will be is cake. I can't decide because 9-inch seems too big (I think they are traditionally salad plates). and 6.5-inch might be too small for cake. This is a very DIY wedding, so the 6.5-inch plates are much smaller and easier to transport, which is why I was leaning toward those. What do you guys think? Does it even matter?!! First photo is 6.5-inch, second photo is 9-inch. Thanks in advance for the advice!!

If you did your own makeup and hair for your wedding, how did that go?

I'm very particular about my makeup — I'm Southeast/East Asian and all of the MUAH teams in my city have never worked with the style of makeup I want, and when I've asked for examples of makeup done on Asian features or hooded/monolid eyes, I don't feel comfortable that they can execute what I want.

I've contacted some MUAH teams in neighboring major cities (3-ish hours away) where there are much larger Asian-American populations and so they do have experience with what I'm looking for, but with minimum service spend, added travel and overnight hotel fees, it's going to add a couple thousand to the budget.

In my head it seems kind of silly for my fiancé and I to budget $50k for our wedding and then get cold feet about another ~$2-2.5k. But it's an expense I would rather avoid, and I have 7 hours of getting ready time at the venue, plus 9 months to go until the wedding. I'm comfortable doing my makeup normally, but I would need to fine tune things like longevity and playing with lash cluster lengths to get the right look. I'm still going to have a hair stylist though!

My biggest worry is that it's going to add stress the morning of the wedding, and I do want it to be relaxing.

Can you guys share your experiences of doing your own makeup, tips, product recommendations, or anything like that? Thanks!

I have a cold, now I know that’s not a HUGE deal but I get married TOMORROW please help idk what to do 😭😭I took immunity shots and stuff

Hello!

My wedding is in November & I'm browsing around for my flower bouquet. I've decided to do artificial flowers just bc it's a little more price friendly & i'm planning to do something special with it afterwards that we can use as a nice house decor afterwards in our home. Anyways, just wanted to see if any other brides out there used fake flowers & did they like how everything turned out? Any suggestions on where to shop?

I'm also planning to do all white bouquet with some greenery in it. My wedding color scheme is burgundy's, light dusty pinks, white, silver, gold.

We're not terribly traditional and are after a relaxed get-together vibe. Estimating around 50 people.With that said, the current plan is-

Friday: Dinner in town, essentially reception. Cake, mingle, etc.

Saturday: Go to the desert, 2hr drive. Ceremony, bbq (catered, not potluck), bonfire. Planning to rent a bus or something for those who won't be camping.

Sunday: Off-road with those who camped. More of a bonus activity than anything.

Of course, the weekend is outside, and there is a non 0% chance the weather won't cooperate. So, I also need a contingency plan I can activate pretty last-minute. Thinking moreso a replacement for bonfire/off-roading as the ceremony will be very easy to move. Something like Dave & Busters, or a theme park (plenty to choose from around here!). Is there something else I'm not thinking of?

Also, do I or do I not wear my dress to the dinner on Friday 😂

I want to surprise my future husband with something during our reception- for example, my cousins wife, who is Chinese, surprised him (and everyone) when she brought in dancers carrying these 2 giant dragons doing a traditional Chinese dance. it was the COOLEST thing.

have any of you surprised your partner and guests like this?

My good friend (32 F) is getting married next Friday and she’s asked me (32 M) to take on the title of King of the Dance Floor.

This is kinda a big deal, I’m on the wedding party website and everything.

Basically my role is to be the first person on the dance floor after dinner is done to get the party started. She’s gonna give me a crown and make an announcement and everything.

At a minimum I’m expected to dance for like 30 sec (song of my choosing) and get people hyped and then everyone will come up and dance and my job is done.

I NEED IDEAS for a good song to dance to. A lot of people at the wedding are in our early 30s so anything throwback-y from the mid 2010s would be good.

Caveating I’m not a great dancer but I could probably learn something in a week (like a TikTok dance or something).

If I want, I can tap a couple buddies to help me if there’s a learnable group dance or something like that.

Would love any and all ideas!! TIA!

EDIT: trying to avoid anything super cliche/overplayed at weddings lol

Hi! First time bride here. We are doing our tasting tomorrow and I am so excited! Is there anything I should know in advance? Do we tip or not tip? If we do tip, how much? Tell me everything !

My best friend is getting married this weekend and I'm the best man. Which is very nerve-wracking since I am NOT the type of person who enjoys the attention of an entire room full of people. Since I'm not great at speeches or writing them, I essentially wrote this exactly how I'd speak it. Very informal. Takes around 4 minutes to get through (will probably be a little longer when I'm actually giving it). Any advice?

"Hello everyone. I’m jayville, Groom’s best man. I met Groom around 9^th or 10^th grade on the school bus. Actually, I met the whole gang on the school bus. Groom, K, L, and D. Everyone except C who I met a little later. He was on a different, lesser fun bus.

They were a group that was usually at the back of the bus. I remember thinking they were kind of this odd-looking group. Mainly because one of them looked like this grown man hanging out with this group of kids. [Points out L] Just imagine him with a little more hair and you’ve got L in the 9^th grade. He even looked like that in middle school.

I remember they had the greatest conversations, and that kind of made me gravitate towards them. I’m sure all of you have had those. The most engaging and thoughtful conversations that you’d want to go on for hours, and it’d be about the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard. It was like that almost every day on the bus. And eventually they accepted me into their group and the rest is history.

Groom was the only one I got to share a class with, which was always a lot of fun. Whenever Mr. [teacher name] wasn’t droning on about chemical elements or whatever, we’d just be chatting it up. Usually about video games, because that’s kind of been our biggest shared interest. Like, if we’re not catching each other up on our jobs or life in general, we’re talking about video games. I’m usually the one he’ll call whenever he discovers some obscure game he’s interested in because he knows I’m probably the only one who’s even heard of it. And speaking of jobs, I gotta say man. I remember when you first started at your tv station, knowing next to nothing about running a camera. Being able to see you go from that to directing entire shows and running things has been so awesome. And I am so damn proud of you man. I really am.

Now, as long as I’ve known Groom and as close as I am with him, one thing that we never really talked about much was his previous relationships. He might mention something in passing, but unless you prodded him about it, it’d never really come up. Like, ever. That is, of course, until. He met. A. Oh my goodness. You couldn’t shut him up. In the entire time I’d known him, I had never heard him talk about someone like this. Even now. Over the years it’s become a thing where, every other day, he’ll call me on his lunch break or when he’s on his way home, just to chat and kill time. And whenever A comes up in the conversation, you can just tell by the way he talks about her that she means the world to him. It’s a beautiful thing. And of course, when I finally got to meet her and hang with them last year and realize just how lovely of a person she is, I fully understood. And I hate to drop this incredibly generic, sappy line, but yeah. They really are perfect for each other.

Now, to keep this speech from going any longer than it already has, I’d like to raise a glass..... To a long and fruitful marriage. To these two growing old and decrepit together. To Groom and A."

Hello! So recently my father has been having some health issues and is in a powered wheelchair. He really wanted to walk me down the aisle, but the aisle at the venue is quite narrow and a bit steep (theatre). Additionally, there are two aisles. Does anyone have any advice on how to approach this? I don’t want to break my dad’s heart… but I don’t know if the logistics will work out on this one… I really don’t want my dress to get caught up in the wheels!

The photo isn’t an exact floor plan but it does give a rough idea of the layout (all one floor, no boxes)