My fiance and I dated for a year and a half before getting engaged in June. The plan is to get married in May 2012, then at the end of the month we'll be moving about 1200 miles away for a better job market in his line of work. We announced our plan to move to our family and friends about two months before we got engaged, and everyone reacted pretty positively.
My fiance's sister has been dating her boyfriend for about five years. They got engaged in early November. They've decided to get married a month after our wedding (two weeks after we move) in a town about an hour and a half away from where we all live. The rationale is that they are both teachers, so they have to get married in the summer, and she wants an outdoor wedding and is deathly allergic to bees. They are to be married in a tourist town where there are a lot of flowers and food present.
If we went to the wedding, it would be a huge expense for us after just having moved. Our wedding will be small (less than 60 people) and we're paying for all but about $750.
My fiance is not close to his sister, but he talked to her about our reservations, and she said that it doesn't matter to her if we come to her wedding or not, and if we choose not to, there won't be any hard feelings. This is a total pile of poop. She is the type of person who routinely brings up things that happened to her as a little kid.
To top it off, we were going to ask my fiance's aunt to officiate the wedding. We wanted to ask her in person and she lives several hours away, so we were going to ask her over the holidays. We had told my fiance's family back in July that we were going to ask her. On Christmas Eve, his sister announced that she had called the aunt on the phone a week or two before and asked her to perform her wedding. We've since found a friend who is looking forward to performing our ceremony, but I'm paranoid now that anything I plan about our wedding that she likes is going to end up at hers.
His parents don't see an issue with any of this- in fact, they have commented that she is more deserving of a wedding because she dated her fiance for a longer period than we dated before we got engaged. They insist that we quit our jobs when our apartment lease runs out and move in with them (they live about an hour and a half away) for the two weeks before her wedding. They don't have an extra room, so we'd be crashing on the couches in their living room, with all of our stuff in their driveway.
Normally I go to my mother for advice, but she thinks we should just cancel our venue and have a double wedding. Is this all as ridiculous as I think it is? How do I respectfully voice my disagreement without sounding like a bridezilla?