Sorry, this will be slightly long winded, but you kinda need the back story before I get to the drama lol.
When we initially began planning our wedding my partner and I sat down and wrote up a list of all of our immediate family and a handful of our closest friends, this includes, parents, step parents, grand parents, aunts, uncles, siblings and their families and cousins. As the list hit close to 70 people, my sweet girl started to panic, but she didn't want to tell me that. She's not one of those outwardly emotional people, nor is she a person who likes to have attention on herself so having a big wedding scared the hell out of her. So she started making weird suggestions like having the wedding at my moms house in the backyard, that's when I realized something was wrong and found out that the number of guests was freaking her out. I told her that we could have something smaller for the wedding and invite everyone else for the reception and that seemed to make her feel better. After going rounds about having the wedding in one place and the reception in another we finally settled on doing both in the same place, but they would be separate. We would have a sunrise wedding with just parents, siblings and her grandma, bringing the list down to about 15 people and then have a big reception later in the day that everyone else would be invited to.
Here's where the drama starts -
She asks two of her sisters to stand up with her at the wedding when the list is at 15 people. Now bearing in mind that this family is known for drama anyway, we totally should have seen this coming. We explain to the older of her two sisters who we're inviting and why, the why being because my DF just can't make herself get up there and talk in front of a bunch of people and I totally respect that. Being in front of people has never bothered me so I'll take it either way, I get to spend the rest of my life with this incredibly amazing person, how we get there makes no difference to me as long as we do. (haha, see what I did there?)
So her sister goes off on this tangent about how we should just invite everybody to the wedding because so many people are going to be hurt and upset, that we're effed up for trying to only invite certain people and nobody will want to come to a sunrise wedding.
NOW DF doesn't want to invite anybody, just us, our kids a photographer, witnesses and the officiant. She's been through so much drama with her family over the course of her life that she just refuses to have drama over our wedding and she feels that she'd rather have them deal with it now and get over it before the time comes than end up with drama on our day. I totally get where she's coming from and respect the decision. This is our special day and we want it to stay that way. (BTW, my family doesn't care if we elope, they're happy for us either way, my mom offered to send us to Vegas until I told her it wasn't legal there lol)
That being said, once we cut the wedding down to the bare minimum I started to feel kinda bad, everyone but the officiant would end up being from my side of the family. The photographer is my cousin, our witnesses are my two best friends of 28 years who I flat out REFUSED to get married without and then there's our kids. Before we were engaged or had even discussed getting married, her dad asked when we were getting married and offered to give us a wedding. This is a really big deal because she had never been quite sure how he felt about her being gay (their family just doesn't talk about it), much less marrying another girl, so now I feel very guilty about him not being invited, and honestly, his immediate family is mostly drama free, BUT, if we invite him then her mom would flip out (yes, they're divorced) and it would all go downhill from there. I personally adore her dad and would love to have him present. I could care less about her mom and what she'd think, neither of us care much for her, but she's stil DF's mom.
Is there any RIGHT way to handle this whole situation without being selfish or do we just have to do what's best for us and hope that over time they understand?
The Stressed Out Brides
C&C
