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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Transatlantic weddings
Hi all. I'm looking for ideas on how to organize our wedding. We live in the US right now, but my family and friends are all in the UK. I'm wondering whether we should just do one wedding here, or do two receptions. Ideally it'd be lovely to have one reception where everyone could meet each other and the UK folks could see what our life is like over here. On the other hand, I worry about the expense for our international guests, plus the possibility that many of them won't be able to make it.
How did you organize your wedding? Did you elope? Have a small intimate wedding? Have two receptions? Were your family and friends willing to travel to your wedding?
Thanks in advance.
Re: Transatlantic weddings
Hello, I understand a bit of your situation. We started planning our wedding while I was living in Dubai and my fiance was living in NYC. Our wedding is in Italy, most of our friends are somewhere in the US, along with all of my family. Much of his family is in Italy, although his parents are also in the US. We had a few people to invite from Kenya, Norway, Afghanistan, South Africa and Japan, so they were going to have to travel no matter what.
A few months into the planning he moved to Turkmenistan and we continued planning our wedding long distance and now we both live in Turkmenistan. We will be going to Italy next week to finally check things out for the first time.
I'd just do the wedding wherever it would be cheapest. If you're in a situation where half the guests have to travel anyway, then that's the best way to choose, in my opinion (now that I have learned my lesson by doing the opposite). Also, I think it'd be easier for Brits to travel to the US than vice versa, since the pound is so much stronger and they get more vacation time.
That being said... you will get a lot of declines. We invited almost 200 people and will probably have about 80 people at our wedding. The person with the most guests traveling will probably have fewer people there. Make sure you're OK with that before you make a decision.
I personally am way too lazy to do two receptions. It's extra hassle and expense, and you can only get married once. The second one will necessarily be a bit half-assed and only you can decide if it makes sense in your situation.
ETA: To clarify we don't live in the US, so having two receptions would really just be a lot of additional work, plus we would have to take vacation time we don't have. It's not like we are returning to the US and could celebrate with everyone there on another weekend. So the choice for us was an either/or - there was never really an option for doing both and therefore there was no way to get around excluding 1/2 of the people.
I am American, dh is Greek. He grew up in Lebanon and then moved to the UK when he was 17 so he had friends and family all over.
Since my family was paying for the majority of the wedding and I knew nothing about a wedding abroad, we had our wedding in the US. I'll add that dh was very much on board with a wedding in the US rather than the UK anyway.
Dh's dad came from Lebanon and dh's family in the UK came, however no one else in his family were a.) able to travel and b.) willing to pay the expense to come.
Dh's friends that were in the wedding party all traveled over for the wedding.
I'd say that our wedding was average size. We invited around 130 (including us and immediate family) and around 100 people in total attended.
We had a civil ceremony in Canada, where we were living at the time, for immigration papers.
Then we had the church ceremony in Italy, where H is from, with all his family and my immediate fam.
Then we had a reception (no ceremony, but I wore the dress!) in Wisconsin with all my family.
We still haven't had a wedding in South Africa, maybe we'll renew our vows on our first anniversary. jk.
That's what we did. We were married legally 8 months before our religious ceremony, but we didn't even tell our extended family and distant friends about it. And if we did, we just shrugged it off like it was necessary paperwork (which it was). I called him my husand at times, but mostly to work colleagues or people that didn't really know us intimately. Don't worry. It will all still be magical and memorable. You just get to do it more than once!
We got married here in the US. The only people attending were his parents and his nephew (who all live here). Nobody else was able to come and we knew that from the begining. It was a very small ceremony, and I liked it that way. I would have loved to have my parents and brother there too, but knew that was not going to be possible with visas and their health issues.
I feel a little sad about it somethimes, but it`s not that big of a deal. This worked for us. I think you just need to think about what do you feel comfortable doing.
We had a wedding in May out side of Philadelphia where I am from. About 17 people came from the UK.
We are having an English reception in Oct which my IL are paying for as most of their family could not attend our wedding. We also had many friends who could not attend so they are invited as well.
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We got married in Switzerland last September. My husbands German family as able to join us at the legal ceremony and we had a small lunch at a restaurant and then cake at his dad's place. It was short notice and my family wasn't able to join.
We arrive back in the US at the end of September and plan to have a church wedding and reception for all our friends and family in the US to join and celebrate with us. It will be around June I'm guessing.
I know some people think it's ridiculous to have another wedding when your already married but for us personally we feel like somethings missing. We really want to have a blessing in the church and have a reception with family and friends.
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We live in the UK, but are having the wedding in the US, because that's where our entire families are. We're inviting some of our friends in the UK (some are American, some are British), but I know most won't be able to make it. When we get back, we'll have a casual open-house in the UK to celebrate with friends here.
Two receptions, IMHO, is overkill.
I'm American, my DH is British, we were living in Canada when we got engaged and we got married in Vegas.
We didn't elope, but we had a small wedding - about 30 people. Of them 5 or 6 came from the UK and the rest came from California. Along with the reception we put on a nice brunch the morning of our wedding and the morning after. We also hosted an arrival dinner.
It still cost a fortune for people to come over, and DH's 2 friends that came over had to stay at a crappy hotel a million miles off the Strip, but it was still a pretty good time.