Surprise Wedding Etiquette

The bridal shower and bachelorette parties are thrown in your honor by other people and include people invited to the wedding. If they don’t know they’re invited to the wedding, then they are operating under the assumption that they are not invited and it will come across as gift grabby to be invited to a shower, for instance.


You can reduce the amount of opinions by just planning a wedding with you and your partner and telling people you aren’t sharing specific details or certain things are not up for discussion. If anything, I’d imagine the stress level for planning a secret wedding would be even higher because you need to keep a pretty big secret from your friends and family for quite awhile. Another potential issue with a surprise wedding is that some people may not make the effort to come to a “send off” but would make the effort to come to a wedding. So you may find yourself upset some folks didn’t make it, or folks could be upset they were lied to. For instance, if you have any out of town guests, they may not think it makes sense to spend the money to travel for a send off, but they would absolutely spend the money to attend your wedding.

View Quoted Comment The surprise wedding is set in stone, so that’s happening whether ppl can attend or not. No one knows planning is happening so it’s been fairly calm besides normal questions. No “wedding hysteria”. The pre-wedding events are up in the air as some of my friends are interested in throwing it for me. Just wasn’t sure how to go about it.


Thank you for your feedback.