What was your wedding like?

It was perfect! Ha. My mom pretty much planned it and it was lovely. I really didn't have a clue about most of it, I vetoed a few things, but for the most part it was pretty stress free and fun. I did have to include my SILs because apparently I wasn't the only one getting married that day.

For my next wedding… it will be in Jamaica on the beach.

It was the traditional wedding in a church. DH and I planned and paid for everything. It wasn't extravagant, but we had a sit down dinner reception at a hotel. What would I do differently...elope in Vegas and save the $$.
This is a pic with us and my side of the family.

It was a small wedding (50 guests) in a little outdoor chapel in my town. We were on a super tight budget, so I did everything myself, from writing the ceremony, to invitations, to flower arrangements and I baked and decorated our wedding/grooms cakes.

I had complete control of the ceremony and all the details leading up to the reception. Our reception was held at a local meeting hall where DHs aunt works. She took control about 2 hours in and basically kicked us out because some of our older guests wanted to leave, but didn't feel they could do so until after we did. We ended up going home to change and then came back to help clean up the reception hall because she was such a tyrant everyone else left her with all the clean-up work. Fun...

If I could go back and do things differently, I'd have eloped and saved myself a ton of work, or at the very least held the reception elsewhere.

We had 9 people at our wedding, I wore my great grandmother's dress from 1908, and it was the BEST wedding ever. Would not change a thing even after 27 years I still feel that way.

Married young, real young. No choice in anything. I didn't even get a say in my dress. I was happy to marry, but if I could go back I would have done it way different. I think we would have eloped, just the two of us on a beach

Even though it was a shitty wedding & nobody supported us, we've been married 27 years this year & we still love each other like crazy. It hasn't been all roses, but we've made it this far & will continue.

Our wedding was nice. We got married on Mother's Day (what was I thinking)! Our anniversary (22nd) is Sunday which is Mother's Day again. It doesn't always coincide though.

It was small, outdoors and at a retreat center. My mom paid for the venue and simple reception. About 60 guests or so. Only 1 attendant each. I had to use my sister (who I am/was not close to) as my friend flaked.

DH is Catholic and I am not so I was able to find an "American Catholic" priest that could perform ceremonies outside. It was Catholic enough for his side and non-Catholic enough for mine.

I wore a peach, tea length Gunnie Sax dress and we had a simple sheet cake with a raised heart on it that held our baseball boy/girl cake toppers. It was perfect for us. Ironically, the baseball boy fell and the leg on the figurine broke..and it was DH that broke his marriage vows. However, we are going to a Marriage Encounter weekend next month so hope to right the ship.

I walked in with my dad to "Pachabel Cannon in D." Perfect. We also had a harpist and heard rave reviews about that.

If I had to do it again, we would get married with just immediate family inside a luxury box or on the field at a baseball game and then invite everyone to a game and pay for their food/drinks!

My sister went there too! Funny story!

First time - the whole in a church, everyone including people I barely knew invited thing. Traditional long wedding dress, reception with a DJ. I did it that way because that's what my Mom expected. It was implied that if I didn't include the future SILs as bridesmaids, they were going to hate me forever. Um, they didn't care for me in the first place. Adding them to the wedding party didn't improve things. They ignored my invite to get their hair done with me and my friends. They waited as long as they could to get their dresses. And they were late. Not late as in they held up the wedding but late as in they didn't eat with us, nothing. It was like, then why in the hell did you agree to be a part of the wedding party?! All the usual bridal party fun was me and my friends only. Same with ex. Because he and his mom more or less insisted I include them, ex had to include his BIL and his stepDad to even things up. They didn't participate in the whole getting ready thing either. Plus, we were forced to accept a family friend's offer to do the photos as a gift. I didn't get some of the pictures I wanted and others were crappy.

Second time - it was parents and grandparents only. Actually, it was supposed to be parents and grandparents only but somehow we got sucked into inviting his aunt and uncle (that he doesn't like) as well as one of my aunt and uncle, simply because my cousin (their daughter) was going to the wedding too because she was her caregiver and would've been the one who took my grandma to the wedding and home. The only person that was not related to either one of us was my BFF who was my maid of honor. We had a simple ceremony in a park, had dinner at a restaurant, and then went to the local casino. I wish I had picked out a different dress. I wish we hadn't done the stupid casino. Neither one of us even liked it. All it did was remind us that we had no friends. I would've been happy to go home after dinner, pack up the car and headed out to go camping with the boys. Part of me wishes we had waited a couple more months and got married elsewhere and just sat around the campfire with the family.

We were married in 1984, long before pinterest perfection. It was about 100 people at a Catholic Mass, then a reception at a nearby hotel. Dinner, drinks, and dancing. Pretty traditional, but it was lots of fun. I wore my mom's wedding gown, and I still love it. The bridal party was my two sisters, my SIL, my BIL, and two of DH's best friends.

The only thing I would change would be the fact that I had to plan everything myself. I was pretty stressed out from all those decisions. It would have been nice to have someone else deal with all that. My parents paid for a good part of it, and we paid for the rest.

Mine was 21 years ago, completely traditional church wedding with the sit-down reception, band, etc. There was some family influence but not a ton. About 120 people. It was very nice.

What would I do differently? Everything. If I had to do it again I would rent a B&B at my favorite seaside town for the whole weekend; and have maybe 30 people.

We got married in 1990, straight out of college. I'd say that 90% of the wedding was my ideas and plans. The other 10% was my parents. It was a huge wedding--over 300 people. That was my parents. I come from a huge Catholic family and we went to all of their weddings, so they came to mine. Dad said that if he was paying for it, he was inviting whomever he wanted. And he did pay for it all. I made my dress, which was very Princess Diana with huge sleeves and a huge skirt--about 15 yards of satin. DH wore his mess dress (active duty Air Force.)

It's been 26 years, so we must have done something right. If I had to do it all over again, I'd do a much smaller wedding. But I was very happy with my big dress and big church wedding.

The only thing I really remember arguing about was the photographer. I picked a photographer that I'd worked with previously (I worked in publishing.) Dad thought it was too expensive, but she threw in a second photographer and her photos were amazing. I knew that was what would last and it was important to me. Dad gave me $10,000 and I only went $53 over budget. Pretty darn good for feeding all of those people a sit down dinner and a dance after.

First wedding was fairly traditional. 1997. I was 21. I was the first of my friends to get married so I didn't really know what I was doing. We stumbled our way through it so I'd say I had as much of the control as I could handle. I did include my future SIL as a bridesmaid. We had five attendants on each side and two flower girls. Even a week later I realized that was far too many people in the wedding party for my taste. Catholic church ceremony. Buffet and dance reception at a hotel ballroom. About 250 guests, but catering later told me that 50 people never showed. That made me livid - I paid for 50 extra people that didn't show up. Long-long train on my dress. I didn't realize how long until I went to pick up the dress the day before the wedding. They had the dress hanging from the rafters and I saw it and said, "Who would ever get a train that long?" Lo' and behold - it was me. It was my dress. It was a full day that started at 6am and ended around midnight. I was exhausted by the end. I did change out of my very heavy, off the shoulder dress part way through the reception and the DJ thought I had left even though I was right in front of him for hours. I'd do a lot of things differently looking back. I certainly wouldn't spend so much on invitations and response cards and maps, etc. What a waste for something that people just throw away. I definitely would have gotten a different dress. When I chose it I was naive and thought the dress shop would order one in my size. Nope. They took this dress off the rack that was multiple sizes too large for me and charged me almost as much as the original cost of the dress for alterations. The alterations weren't fantastic. The corset eventually left my ribs bruised and my arms were bloody under the sleeve cuffs by the end of the night.

Second wedding was completely different. For one, we paid for it ourselves and we ended up spending about a quarter of the cost of my first wedding. We ended up having it in a movie theater. We wanted somewhere fun. There's a theater here in town that has multiple lounges and a beautiful vestibule that looks out over the city. I got a very simple dress. We were married by my husband's uncle. Our reception was in a lounge on the upper most floor of the movie theater and some of our guests went with us to a movie after the reception ended. We limited the guest list to 50 people - only immediate family and really close friends. The only thing I'd do differently knowing what I know now is to try to be on time. I was driving my mother and me there in my mother's car. I still maintain that it was the other person's fault, but we got into a car accident on the way there. As a result, we were VERY late. We didn't get any photos done before the ceremony so we had to take most of our photos during our reception. We only attended about half an hour of our two hour reception. That was disappointing. Oh - and the place I ordered the cupcakes from (we had cupcakes, no traditional cake), lost our order. I went to pick them up that morning and they had no record of my order at all. They quick whipped some up (I think we ordered five dozen), but I was pretty perturbed at the time because I had to get my sister to alter her schedule for the day to go pick up our late cupcakes. Oh! One more. I would have invited my close friends from the town I'd recently moved away from. We had our wedding in the middle of a weekday (because the date meant something to us) and I thought they wouldn't drive the 3 hours for a midweek, midday wedding - plus we were trying to keep the guest list small. I regret not including them.