Is Your Reception Really For You or Your Guests?

There is an old saying that you cannot please all of the people all of the time, and this is certainly true of weddings. Everyone has their own idea of what makes a wedding special, and even within the same family, their can be a wide range of opinions. If the bride and groom live a lifestyle that is fairly different than the one led by their parents and grandparents, conflict can easily arise.

The question is, if you have a lifestyle that is different from the rest of your family’s, how much of it can you include in the wedding before they feel uncomfortable? Does there come a point where imposing your beliefs can go too far? If you are making many of your guests feel uncomfortable, the answer may be yes.

Let me give you a true life example to ponder. At one wedding for 200 guests, the bride and groom were vegan, and had a couple of transgender friends that were coming to the wedding. They asked that the reception venue create a vegan cake, and remove the signs on the restrooms that say “men” or “women” and replace them with signs saying “unisex”. How much of this is reasonable, and how much may be putting the comfort of a few above the comfort and enjoyment of the majority of the guests?

Picture your grandmother, dressed in her best dress and wedding jewelry, heading into the restroom, only to see a man coming out of a stall. How do you think this would make her, and many of the other guests feel? Probably very, very uncomfortable. This is a case where trying to see to the comfort of a few surpassed the comfort of the majority of the guests, which is never what a host should do.

There are often happy mediums to be found. For instance, it is very easy to serve a delicious vegetarian menu that anyone would enjoy, even the steak and potato guys. If your religious beliefs forbid you to drink alcohol, your guests will understand if the reception is dry (although there might be a fair amount of grumbling about it!). If your mother wants you to wear her pearls for the wedding, and you want to wear the special wedding jewelry that your fiance gave you, you can always wear them for the rehearsal dinner as a compromise.

Although you can never make everyone happy, as hosts, the bride and groom do have an obligation to try to make their reception as fun and inviting for as many of their guests as possible. Years after your wedding, you want your family to remember how beautiful it was and how much fun they had – not how nobody knew which restroom to use!

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