Family reunion vs wedding

Short answer: My mom and her sisters would prefer that weddings be like family reunions, because in their family they always were (but they also were a lot less elaborate than weddings tend to be today), but my cousins and I are slowly moving away from that direction.

Long answer: When the first of my cousins got married about 10 years ago, every single extended family member that was still around got invited. Second cousins, great aunts, ex husbands. All there. She also was in a sorority in college and hubby was in a frat, so the guest list was close to 300 if I remember right.

Fast forward to February of 2020 and her younger brother got married. Second cousins were invited again and the one great aunt still around. About 175 people invited, and about 100 in attendance (the date got changed to be Friday night instead of Saturday with just two weeks to go due to their venue going bankrupt - anyone who was planning a wedding in Tulsa heard about the Noah's Event Venue fiasco - so a lot of guests couldn't make it with the date change on such short notice and there wasn't much that could be done about it).

The next cousin got married in June of 2020, and naturally COVID shrank that list. It was parents, siblings, their besties, and a few first cousins for a total of 35 or 40. It was PERFECT and exactly what FH and I had pictured for our own wedding.

My wedding will be August of 2022 and I'll be the 4th cousin to get married. My mom and her sisters were trying to get my to invite all the second cousins, who I have only met a handful of times. The main problem was the my FH doesn't really have an extended family. In the States, it's just him, his parents, and his sister. He has 2 grandparents, 2 uncles, 1 aunt, and 3 cousins living in Germany (compared to my 3 siblings, one brother in law, 3 aunts, 9 cousins, 4 significant others of cousins - all before we get to the extended family), so it would have been incredibly uneven and I didn't want his family to feel drowned out by my loud and boisterous crowd.

Anyway, my mom and I butted heads about inviting extended family - FH and I wanted to prioritize people that know us well and who have been a vital part of our relationship this far over people who have never met Lucas or who I haven't seen in years. So now we're having a 40 person destination wedding 😅 The next cousin to get married plans on eloping on a mountain somewhere, so I'd say we're definitely moving away from the family reunion vibe and leavings those for funerals and milestone birthdays (my mom and each of her sisters have had giant bashes for their 60th birthdays haha) and christenings.

Even if you don’t invite every relative to the wedding, do you still make an effort to communicate with or socialize them outside of wedding planning or not?

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I'm close with my aunts and cousins, but a lot of our extended family passed by the time I was 10 so there aren't many left to make a point to see. If we're on the West coast, we see my mom's cousins, but we don't fly out there specifically to see them. Same with the East coast and her aunt/cousins.

We have an insanely huge family (120+ aunts, uncles and cousins just on my mom’s side), and they are spread all throughout the US, so some of them I only see at family events (weddings, funerals, baby showers, holidays, etc.). But some of them I get together with many times a year. And the ones I’m closest with I see frequently. It’s because of this I struggled with staying true to my vision for a small, intimate child-free wedding. All weddings in our family have been massive events (300-500 guests) with tons of kids and extended relatives. I just couldn’t figure out how to draw the line on who to invite and who not to- it felt like an all or nothing sort of thing.

My line of thinking was if I send you a Christmas card/see you at Christmas, you got invited. A few “extras” got thrown in as well. We invited 94 and had 64 in attendance, including us and kids. I’d say a 1/3 of those people I haven’t spoken to since Christmas 2019/just before covid started.

My parents both come from large families, but they moved to Australia from the UK in the 70s and none of our extended family live here. We do make an effort to see them whenever we go back, but they haven't invited us to any of their weddings, and so my parents were clear that even if covid hadn't have been a factor, we wouldn't have been obliged to invite them. We decided to invite them to our livestream of the ceremony as a nice compromise though.

My fiance is in a different boat. His mum is one of 8, the majority still live in the local area, and they often get together. In a normal year there would be Christmas, Easter and Christmas in July events, and other things like baby showers, engagement parties, 50th wedding anniversary celebrations, whatever. So, we do socialise with them fairly often - they are a very involved and supportive family.

I think it is inevitable that this year and next, weddings will be a bit of a family reunion even if that normally wouldn't be the case, because this is the first excuse they've had to get together, but that just is what it is at the moment.