In addition to that, before the engagement party there was a significant amount of money drama. Before we even started planning, my parents had volunteered to throw the party. My family and my fiance's family live about 2 hours away from each other. To make it as easy as possible for everyone we chose to have the party mid-way between us (which happens to be a fairly expensive metropolitan area). This caused a bunch of problems, with my father insisting that either we have it at their house (which is small, at the end of a kuldesac with basically no parking, and obviously far away from everyone) or he would no longer pay. For quite a while my fiance and I had just decided not to have a party at all; his parents can't afford it, and I really don't think its something you're meant to throw yourself. After months of pressuring from my mom (not from me, I had completely given up and was fine with the idea of not having a party), my dad finally agreed to pay for a party in the city, but he had a very strict budget (which was okay), refused to pay for someone else to make a cake (my fiance's parents gifted it to us), elected not to give us an actual gift or even card as 'the party was our present,' then spent most of the party complaining about how there wasn't enough food and the minimal bar tab he paid for ran out too fast. You can probably imagine I'm not really keen on reliving that
so if we have a wedding, we will definitely be funding it independently. On some level I feel like we 'have to' have a wedding for our families and close friends, but its just not something I'm excited about. I like the idea of the decorations, the cake, the dress etc. but it just seems like a big expensive party that I won't be able to run away from if I get overwhelmed. I'm worried that we won't have fun at our own wedding
I'm playing around with the idea of eloping, or potentially having a destination wedding with just our parents and siblings.
I could really use some advice, so if anyone can share their experiences or ideas on weddings/eloping/family problems I would love to hear from you!
I think what made the engagement party difficult was how drawn out it seemed, we couldn't really leave before everyone else and quite a few of his friends wanted to stay back and drink. And I definitely think we will keep the guest list short, neither of us have a really broad social circle anyway, we just have a few very close friends and couple-friends.