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Wedding Etiquette Forum
themosthappy91
member
Are Wedding Showers Becoming Obsolete?
So on another thread someone was talking about showers and how the point of them is "to prepare you for something you've never done before", which led me to wonder- do you foresee a time in the future when wedding showers are obsolete or no longer considered good ettiqutte?
The reality is more and more people are either living with their FI before marriage, and therefore don't need to worry about furnishing their new home together upon marriage, or waiting until later in their lives to get married, so they are likely to already have enough material possessions for their home on their own. Do you look less favorably on people getting married and having showers thrown for them in those situations? Do you think that the necessity or practicality of wedding showers in general is fading?
(Full disclosure: I got married after living with my SO for five years and happily accepted a couple's shower thrown by my best friends where we received lots of awesome but admittedly non-essential gifts that were mostly upgrades of things we already had. Just for background.)
The reality is more and more people are either living with their FI before marriage, and therefore don't need to worry about furnishing their new home together upon marriage, or waiting until later in their lives to get married, so they are likely to already have enough material possessions for their home on their own. Do you look less favorably on people getting married and having showers thrown for them in those situations? Do you think that the necessity or practicality of wedding showers in general is fading?
(Full disclosure: I got married after living with my SO for five years and happily accepted a couple's shower thrown by my best friends where we received lots of awesome but admittedly non-essential gifts that were mostly upgrades of things we already had. Just for background.)
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Re: Are Wedding Showers Becoming Obsolete?
That being said, I'm happily attending a baby shower in a few weeks.
Every so often if I can't attend or don't want to attend (don't know anyone else going, don't like anyone else going) I'll send a gift or bring the gift to the wedding.
I will agree that I'd rather see showers die out then people continue to try and turn showers into cash grabs.
I dislike baby showers. If you can get knocked up you can buy your own baby stuff. I just hate buying stuff off a baby registry and knowing that they will not get a ton of use out of it. I would rather give something sentimental which I will give after the baby is born. i am more a fan of very close family/friends being at a shower instead of absolutely everyone you've ever met which unfortunately is how they are done in my area.
Our bath towels are on their way out; I got them on sale about 9 years ago and some of them have holes in them, the hems have somehow come off so they're shredding, there's bleach spots for some reason, etc. I've never had nice pillows or nice sheets.
My blender is broken because it got dropped down a flight of cement stairs while I was moving. Some of our other kitchen appliances are old junky hand-me-downs. I've never owned nice pans (definitely registered for a couple copper-bottomed ones and I REALLY hope I get those!).
We own one lamp and I bought it at Goodwell for $4 because I thought it would be fun to spray-paint it a cool color (and I was right, but it's so old that we unplug it when we're not home because it seems like it could be a fire hazard).
I mean I could go on and on. We've been getting by with the old junky stuff, and most of it is just fine as long as it can function, but some of it is really falling apart.
I get what you mean about showers not being so necessary, though. I have a friend who just got married and had a full house full of stuff that was pretty new and nice, but she registered for tons of new stuff anyway because she felt like "redecorating and picking a new color scheme." So that cast-iron roasting pan had to go, because she needed a RED cast-iron roasting pan. That's the crap I side-eye.
When I called my Aunt/Godmother to tell her I was engaged she said she wanted to throw me a shower. She was so excited about it she was talking about it that early! This was my one official shower and the only one I will ever have. It was family only and under 20 people. I barely came up with enough things to put on the registry since we already had most of what we needed and two of many things, but we worked at it and put together a list of things that would be nice for starting our married life together.
It was a lovely afternoon spending time with the women in my family and while I am not a fan of showers this type of family event is an exception because it is more about family than it is about gifts and is a rite of passage of sorts. If my niece/Goddaughter gets married one day a family shower for her will be one shower that I actually want to host and look forward to.
On the other hand, I hope showers with large guest lists of people that don't know each other go out of style. They are not intimate and seem more likely to be about gifts.
If anything, many of us have grown up with the idea of cohabiting before marriage and if it doesn't seem to run counter to the idea of showers now, then why would that change?
As for me, I used to be pretty painfully shy and sort of hated showers for that reason, but I can enjoy them now. Some of my favourite shower gifts were from off-registry, and when we were having our first baby we didn't register at all and I loved receiving books, handmade toys, handmade quilts, and the like.