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122 ups - 0 downs = 122 votes
79 comments submitted at 01:06:00 on Nov 3, 2014 by snallygaster
I don't get why people institute a 'no child' policy at their weddings. Weddings are for family, for fuck's sake.
Edit: bridezillas out in force tonight, eh?
> It's MY wedding, and MY special day all about ME. Everyone else is just there to justify my ego!
Edit, the 2nd: you guys, I'm not saying people don't have the right to choose their wedding guests. All saying is that I think it's selfish on the couple's part to think the wedding is about them more than the families they're joining.
> I don't get why people institute a 'no child' policy at their weddings. Weddings are for family, for fuck's sake.
No, weddings are for whoever the bride and groom decide to invite. That's specifically why they have invites. Clearly OP didn't consider the home-wrecker her "family", and didn't invite her.
Not inviting the homewrecker I get, makes sense to me. For the "weddings are for family" thing, I think I've got enough responses here to show where I'm coming from.
It's for whoever the bride and groom invite, who just so happens to usually be all the friends and family.
Consider this - if the bride was abused as a child by her father and specifically doesn't invite him, does he have a right to be there just because he's family?
I doubt you could make a convincing argument. At the end of the day, the bride and groom get to decide who turns up to their wedding. While family might expect invitations, they aren't entitled to them.
> Not inviting the homewrecker I get
What part of that makes you think that I would defend forcing a bride to invite her abuser to the wedding?
> Weddings are for family, for fuck's sake.
That.
Oh, I get it. You think that because I believe weddings to be about family, I believe that the rights of abusers and child rapists should be held above all else. You're deliberately misrepresenting my position.
No, I'm saying that at the end of the day the bride and groom get to choose.
Nobody has a right to be there, family or not. If they aren't invited, they shouldn't turn up. Simple as that.
They might expect to be invited, but if they aren't, they shouldn't turn up.
ffs, my comment said that I don't understand why people would choose to have a no child policy and that weddings are about family. Nowhere, in any of the comments I've made here, have I stated that people don't have the right to invite or disinvite who they choose, just that I sometimes don't understand their choice.
You don't seem to comprehend the fact some people don't want children there.
Children spaz out in crowds. They get tired, they get messy, they get hyped up and they break shit. Their parents get wrung out worrying where their kids are instead of enjoying themselves or participating in the wedding proceedings, and quite often will have to/want to leave the wedding early to take care of their kids.
There are plenty of reasons why someone might not want children at their wedding, particularly if/when the children aren't going to remember it anyway.
And in any event, they aren't entitled to come. The bride and groom don't have to justify who they invite and who they don't. If they don't invite children, that's their right, and the children (or whoever else) shouldn't come.
I can see why, if the couple is childfree or wants it to be an 'everyone gets wasted' sort of wedding. Kids sort of limit what you're able to do.
> if the couple is childfree
I imagine that most weddings involve childfree couples. Even so, not allowing kids a celebration of the creation of a family is kinda baffling to me.
> childfree couples
I'm pretty sure you're deliberately missing the point
No, I just didn't put that together. I was thinking "couple that doesn't have kids" and not "couple that doesn't want kids".
People like alcohol and don't like "he babbled and interrupted the ceremony" part. Makes sense.
You can have both kids and alcohol in the same place; the key is to not put one into the other. Also, the part where a child disrupts a ceremony is never an issue as big as people seem to think it will be, with children running around, screaming, knocking things over, etc. I haven't seen a child be more intrusive than someone sneezing loudly, and crying infants or toddlers can be taken outside for the more solemn moments of the ceremony.
Also, I have been to a few weddings that had someone to look after all the kids under a certain age in a side room for the halfish hour it takes to do the actual ceremony. After that, any noise the kids would make would be lost in the din of the adults making noise.
So? It's their wedding. If they only wanted to invite people's who names start with M that's their right.
>Weddings are for family, for fuck's sake.
No they're not. They are for a couple to get married. Everything on top of that is a party. And a host gets to choose who is invited to their party.
A LOT of people consider weddings for the bride and groom, not family. That's why there's often wedding drama on SRD (okay, it's been a while) about not inviting stubborn family members to weddings on the off chance they'll ruin it for the bride and groom.
If it's just for the bride and groom, why invite all the people to begin with? Seems like you'd need a pretty big ego to think that something as momentous as the joining of two families is not about the families that are being joined.
Many people start their invitations with "please join us in the celebration of the joining of xxxx and yyyy". They invite the family to be a part of their moment of union. Many people hold private ceremonies as well, only inviting their closest family and friends or even no one at all.
Sure. I can see not wanting kids if you have a small, intimate affair and are eschewing the whole "joining of the families" thing. What I don't get are the weddings where people have big, extravagant affairs, inviting lots of friends and family and still put the "no kids" caveat in the invitations. I have no stats to back me up on this, but I think the big, lots of invites weddings are more common.
Lots of people don't want kids. Size of the event doesn't matter. I'm just trying to explain the mind set of a lot of people who feel it's a personal event that they're sharing with their family, and they make the rules
No, I totally get what you're saying. That some people have that kind of mindset. I just don't understand why some people think that way. It was never a part of my culture growing up, and I haven't know couples who have or would, so it's just something I have heard about second hand. Bit of a cultural blind spot for me.
It's a historical thing.
Back in the 1800s, there was a cultural movement away from marriage as a practical arrangement by the head of the family and toward marriage as an expression of love by the couple. This was around the time when arranged marriages became less common and couples began to choose their own spouses. You can actually chart the shift through popular literature of the time, and legal changes that first prevented elopement and later made it easier for children to marry without parental consent.
That's the point, at least in western society, when the marriage (and by extension the wedding) became much less about the joining of families and more about the couple themselves and their own personal choices.
It's actually rather interesting because it paralleled the rise of the industrial revolution and the movement of workers from traditional agricultural roots in which a large family structure is essential, to city-based industrial labor where a nuclear family unit is better.
What's not to understand? Kids are unpredictable and reek havoc. Weddings are already stressful without having little fingerprints in the cake or a temper tantrum during the vows. Some people don't know how to control or discipline their kids, and even worse some feel entitled to let lose their misbehaving children on others.
> wreak
tone: friendly'Reek' could also be appropriate, depending on how advanced the toilet training process is.
I like it better the other way.
I can confirm that kids often reek also.
Haha fair enough.
I'm from east coast United States, it's a fairly common thing here. I know as a kid my family often went to weddings while my sister and I were left with a baby sitter, so it's been a thing here for a while
Same here. I started being invited to family weddings when I was 12 or 13. We've never considered weddings or funerals appropriate for very small children in my family. We wait until they're old enough to understand what the event is, and know how to behave.
The only weddings I've been to on the east coast have been big Indian (Sikh) weddings for family in NJ, so I really don't know much about how you guys do you over there.
Basically, we're very liberal in how people want their weddings to go, with the bride and groom deciding on nearly everything. Of course not everyone adheres to this, many treat their weddings like you describe, as a joining of families. Ha, ironically if me and my girlfriend ever get married I'd be in that camp. She would want it to be all about our families.
and i don't get why people think their openions about what a weeding is and isn't supposed to be about matters so god damn much.
unless someone ask you how about you keep your values to your self and everyone else can do the same?
>Everyone else is just there to justify my ego!
but you wanting you openion validated as an undeniable truth is completly selfless in comparison right?
"Opinion" not "openion"
And: oh yeah, totally. I'm looking for everyone here to stroke my ego with upvote. That's why I deliberately wasn't being antagonistic with my first edit.
This is the internet. I'm expressing my opinion and engaging in discussion with people who disagree.
The biggest reason I see is if there is a lot alcohol involved and it's a more raucous reception than usual. It's hard to get people to unwind if there are children cause almost everyone is checking their behavior around kids.
> cause almost everyone is checking their behavior around kids.
Hasn't seemed to slow people down at the weddings that I have been to.
That or it could be an outdoor wedding or somewhere else where you have to make sure your own kid isn't drowning/ruining something expensive. I would guess a lot of parents are relieved to have to leave their kids in someone else's care and have a night to chill out instead of feeling obligated to bring the herd so distant family members can see how tall they're getting or whatever shit.
I did. Because it was on a riverboat in the Mississippi River, with an open bar, and aside from my husband's toddler nephews, the next youngest person in either family was my brother, who was 21 at the time. The little ones would not have had a good time.
A lot of people consider weddings to be a celebration of the bride and groom and not their extended family.
Personally, I think the best option is to have the wedding itself and a short reception afterward for family, then throw the real party later elsewhere with just your friends. That way Aunt Sally and her squalling brood don't get bent out of shape about not being invited, but you don't have to spend your special day hanging out with them.
Or, it's your day, do what you want?
>It's MY wedding, and MY special day all about ME. Everyone else is just there to justify my ego!
See that's where you're not getting it. Depending on the cultere wedding isn't about family - the wedding is about celebrating the love of two people so it is about the bride and groom. In western culture, weddings moved from being the mercenary and highly calculated arranged marriages used to further a families fortune to being more about the love and choice and weddings followed suit.
> Edit: bridezillas out in force tonight, eh? > > It's MY wedding, and MY special day all about ME. Everyone else is just there to justify my ego!
That's because it kind of is. Your ideal wedding may be a family gathering and you are under every right to make your wedding so and that's fine by me.
But I could make my wedding a fucking anime cosplay party and there's fuck all anyone can do about it if I'm paying for it because it's our wedding, not my parent's nor my in-law's.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
SRDD here we go!
Don't sweat the downvotes, one of reddit's favourite circlejerks is making people with children feel like they've given birth to Satan's love child.
Edit
Good, good... Let the hate flow through you.
Oh yeah. Just look at /r/childfree, Reddit's favourite sub.
Some people don't want kids at their wedding. Why do you care?
I never said a word about children at weddings, I was just reassuring the guy/girl I replied to that the hive mind's opinion doesn't necessarily reflect that of the rest of the world.
Try making the same point over at Mumsnet for comparison.
Obviously people think differently and you could find those people on Reddit. I don't even think that's one of Reddit's circlejerks more than it's up to the Bride and Groom to invite who they want. Some people like kids and some don't. I think the majority of Reddit understands that.