Ceremony Frustrations!!

hansen84

So FI and I agreed that we would have a private wedding ceremony followed by a big reception (300 guests). I wanted a courthouse wedding and he wanted a full church wedding so this was our compromise. The only people invited to the actual wedding are parents, grandparents, siblings, and sibling's children. We both have large extended families (aunts/uncles, first cousins, cousin's children) that live locally so inviting them would add another 120 people, so we stopped at immediate family.

FI tells me the other day that he told 2 of his aunts they could come to the wedding because he is tired of them asking him about. One is his god parent and both families changed international travel plans to attend the reception.

I completely flipped out....on the inside. All I could say in response was..."why couldn't you have just kept that to yourself!"  I was mentally prepared for various people to "crash" the wedding....but it is completely different if they were "invited". It is not fair to let some of the aunts/uncles come and not others. My mother's sisters really want to attend but instead they are helping set up the reception during the ceremony. They would be really hurt if they found out FI's aunts attended.

I'm hoping that as we get closer to the wedding they will miraculously realize how incredibly rude it would be to attend and I won't have to call them and put my foot down.  Any other thoughts on how to deal with this???

rachel801231

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-club-boards_march-2012-weddings_ceremony-frustrations?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Wedding Club BoardsForum:955e4823-0be1-44ef-9ee7-99a63794e103Discussion:9c7b2c0e-a36e-49b4-a721-553035b9cc63Post:34591c30-e376-4521-b7ed-125e1c069e9a">Re: Ceremony Frustrations!!</a>:
[QUOTE]Is the reception immediately following the ceremony? If so, the only way you could have avoided this would have been to invite everyone to everything. At this point, you'll just have to understand that people that have been invited to the reception are going to want to come to the ceremony... so there isn't too much you can do.
Posted by cu97tiger[/QUOTE]

I agree with this as well.  Unless you were getting married in a secluded island and having a reception later this may work.  FI had originally wanted to do this.  He didn't want to be in front of all these people.  But for me, he is sucking it up and doing it because he knows how much it means to me to have ALL my family there.  So maybe you can reconsider or come to some sort of middle ground.