Open seating

Thank you for sharing this, my husband and I were thinking about doing open seating with a few reserved tables for our upcoming reception. Glad it worked out for you!

View Quoted Comment You're welcome. Hopefully if you do it, it works for you guys as well.

How large was your guest list? I wanted to do this to try to get the families intermingling but Im worried people will end up pulling chairs together and have people feel left out... I have a large guest list too so I'm not sure how it would work

View Quoted Comment We had 70 people attending our wedding

Thanks for posting. Honestly, I've only been to one wedding in my life that had assigned seats and I thought it was rude lol. But I grew up rather country and informal. We're expecting about 125 at my wedding and I was considering table assignments. My FH is adamantly against it. I thought it could at least get people seated efficiently and then they could move around when the dancing starts. FH wants to let people sit where they want and get to know each other on their own.

View Quoted Comment I've been to at least 12 wedding and 7 of them been open seating. As a guest I never had an issue or seen any issues with open seating. Then with my wedding everything went really smoothly with open seats. I'm with your FH my husband and I are against assigned tables/seats.

Thank you for posting this! I wanted to do open seating all along but started to second guess myself after reading other brides on here. I was going off of personal experience because since being with my FH, I have been to multiple weddings were he was in the wedding party and I wasn't. For one of those, there was assigned seating and he was at the head table with everyone else while I was awkwardly sitting with his family who I wasn't very close with at the time. The 2nd one, it was open seating and I was able to sit with his best friend which made me immediately more comfortable

View Quoted Comment You're welcome. I want to post my experience with open seating because I see so many brides on here knocking it. My husband and I are against assigned tables/seats. We feel when we go to weddings that have assigned tables/seats like the bride and groom is treating us like we are children back in school. We also haven't had good experience with assigned tables/seats. The problem is that the bride and groom either assume they know best or they just don't care because they figure you'll only be sitting there for dinner service. We actually left a wedding before dinner was served once because the bride and groom sat us next to this couple that kept talking politics and you can tell they were trying to bait people into arguments. My husband politely told them that it wasn't appropriate talk for their friends wedding, but the guy kept going through cocktail hour, so we just left. However all the wedding we been to that had open seating we had a blast.

I would prefer open seating because it's what I'm used to being from Nebraska. However, my FH's circles here in NJ are NOT used to that and I think it would cause more confusion and chaos than I'd like, so we're doing assigned tables. I've always enjoyed open seating. I've attended several where I was assigned seats and for the most part it's been fine or fun still, but there were a couple that I was seated with people I didn't know, despite there being plenty of people I did know at the wedding, and it was awkward, I didn't stay at my assigned table much past the meal.

The first wedding I went to, it was assigned seating. It was a destination wedding where I knew FH and a few of the cousins at the table.
The second wedding I attended was open seating and incredibly awkward, all of the tables were full but ours. No one knew or wanted to sit with us. We're both introverts.
We're doing assigned cause dinner is plated, and open searing is not our thing.

View Quoted Comment See now I'd love that, if I went to a wedding where nobody knew us and it was just me and my husband sitting at a table by ourselves.

View Quoted Comment It sounds nice in theory. But people made weird faces at us like "who are you". It was super uncomfortable.

View Quoted Comment I still would prefer that to sitting with strangers. It would be more uncomfortable and awkward for me to sit at a table full of strangers who may know each other but me than to sit with my husband at our own table. Ive been to weddings where we were assigned to sit with people we didn't know and it was extremely awkward and uncomfortable. But for us if we were to end up sitting by ourselves we have a better time even with people looking. Their going to do it regardless at least I won't be sitting at the same table with them. Plus me and my husband find that at cocktail hour we can meet people and if we have good conversations with them then we might end up sitting with them or they might sit down with us. We met a couple at one wedding during cocktail hour and we had such a great time with them, that when it came to us finding a table they invited us to sit with them.