Alternatives to Wedding Reception?

knottie6804210c911e5a37

We are very early in our wedding planning but it has still been very overwhelming to think of all the little parts that go into a wedding! Our friends are scattered across the country and it feels hard to make them all fly out for our wedding. I'm entertaining the idea of doing an alternative to a traditional ceremony/reception. I'm thinking of doing a small ceremony/dinner with just bride/groom and nuclear family (maybe doing this in a nice destination location). Then, we're thinking of hosting smaller "buddymoons" or small vacation weekends with our friends near the major cities where they live. We'd probably pay for a large AirBnB with our friends and maybe treat them all to dinner or something. We're thinking we could turn the $$ we would've spent in a traditional wedding into more intimate and spread out celebrations with our loved ones. Has anyone heard of or done something similar? Does it sound totally crazy?

flantastic

knottie6804210c911e5a37 said:

We are very early in our wedding planning but it has still been very overwhelming to think of all the little parts that go into a wedding! Our friends are scattered across the country and it feels hard to make them all fly out for our wedding. I'm entertaining the idea of doing an alternative to a traditional ceremony/reception. I'm thinking of doing a small ceremony/dinner with just bride/groom and nuclear family (maybe doing this in a nice destination location). Then, we're thinking of hosting smaller "buddymoons" or small vacation weekends with our friends near the major cities where they live. We'd probably pay for a large AirBnB with our friends and maybe treat them all to dinner or something. We're thinking we could turn the $$ we would've spent in a traditional wedding into more intimate and spread out celebrations with our loved ones. Has anyone heard of or done something similar? Does it sound totally crazy?

This doesn't sound crazy in the sense that you'd rather spend more quality time with your friends and have a small wedding. Great. Go for it.

But the "buddymoon" title is kinda silly. If you're not going to include your friends in your actual wedding, there's no need to pretend like you somehow are. These are not actually wedding-related events. Just budget time and money to treat your friends to vacationing with you, if that's what you'd rather do with your money.

MyNameIsNot

Inviting people to your wedding is not making them fly anywhere. It's inviting them to do so if they want to. If you don't want to invite people to your wedding, then just don't. Your framing it that it's some sort of favor to not invite them is odd, though. Believe it or not, some of your loved ones actually do want to see you get married. That's why weddings are culturally such a big deal that people are willing to spend the time and money going to them. 

The buddymoon thing is a little off-putting, though. Inventing an event and pretending it's some sort of substitute for inviting them to the wedding just comes off like a consolation prize. By all means, visit your friends, but there's no need to shoe horn it into a wedding related event.