I have a good group of friends and a reasonable sized family. I can’t wrap my head around these weddings with 100-300 guests. Am I a loser or are they inviting mostly tertiary characters.

  • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    19 hours ago

    My wife and I invited around 200 to our reception. I guess you could call it mostly “tertiary characters” (ugh, just typing that makes me feel like I’m falling into Main Character Syndrome).

    We probably had around 30 friends (quick tally), then immediate family accounted for a dozen more, then extended relatives pushed us over 200. My mother and my paternal grandfather both came from larger families, so you get lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins that way. +1s definitely inflate that figure, too.

    Am I super close with them all? No, but I was still happy to have them there. I generally like my extended family (fortunate in this day and age, I know!).

    • Andy@slrpnk.net
      4·
      18 hours ago

      The size of families and the expectation of who gets invited varies a lot by culture, too.

      Irish weddings are often big. Same for Mexican weddings, a lot of Arab folks.

      I suspect Protestant Americans are outliers globally in the size of the average family and the degree of contact people maintain with cousins.

      • vrek@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        18 hours ago

        I worked with this Indian guy and a Indian woman. Both great great people and excellent at their jobs. We had a work outing(normally work ended around 5, we went to a restaurant with free food and 2 drink tickets starting at 3 and lasting till 6) and somehow we got talking about weddings, I think another women just got engaged. OH MY GOD, the weddings they talked about were insane. The guy didn’t walk up the aisle, no he wasn’t waiting up there for the bride, they literally rode live elephants down the aisle. Both of them said their weddings went for 3-4 days, plus honeymoon. Multiple performances by professionals including sword juggling, fire breathers, several live bands, etc. I don’t even know what else. Yeah they were engineers and made good salaries and their spouses were also professionals with good salaries but not like actors or ceos or anything. I have no idea how they managed to afford it but they said it was “expected” in their culture.