And we're back onto weddings...
I may have said this before, but if I don't remember then what's the likelihood anyone else does? Actually, it's probable that someone else would remember better than me because my memory is terrible at the moment.
The smallest wedding that you can legally have in the UK (and probably anywhere, but I'm just writing what I know) is the two partners, two witnesses and then your celebrant(s), registrars or religious leader(s) which works out to five people at the very bare minimum, and the very easiest that you can do that is at a registry office, but even then you have to give notice and wait for twenty nine days (the day you give notice and twenty eight days afterwards) before you are actually able to get married. I will admit that I would have appreciated a wedding like that, partly because it's not having to talk in front of a bunch of people or having to have too many people involved or too many people's opinions and inevitably it's one of the cheapest ways to get married. I don't think it was ever something that we entertained though, because my partner wants his family with them and I do, too, and there are some people it would just be more hassle to not have there than it is to have them.
Thinking a little bit bigger would have been just including both sets of our parents, which for us would have meant the two of us, four parents and assuming that two of them could be witnesses (it's actually not a given) and then the registrars which would make for a room of eight people, or if we could have done something we did consider, at least for a minute, seven people by being married on a cruise ship and having the ceremony done by the captain. The problem with that being that my partners parents are raising one of their grandchildren, so we would have needed to include them, and then both sets of parents would likely have wanted us to include our siblings, which would have been another three, plus one sibling's partner, so four. Once you're including that number of people there are other family that we would need to include which then started to tick the numbers up even further, and as we went through it our small wedding seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
This is one of the reasons, and there are a few on a list, but this is one of the bigger reasons why we weren't allowing plus ones for the wedding. To me, plus ones are just adding random people you need to pay for and accommodate and also tolerate to your wedding day, but they are likely people you don't know, have never met and will never see again, so unless necessary - like they are the spouse of someone who knows no one else at the event - they were something we definitely wanted to avoid. When other people have wanted to invite people to our wedding, it's been hard to say no, but for the majority of times it has been a no, because we didn't want some sort of massive event (and only partly because we didn't want a massive bill for it).
By the end of it, we could have added probably another fifty people onto the evening do if we had really wanted to, but the most important thing to us was that it would be an event of people we are close to, who are close to us and it be something we can both enjoy and that our son can enjoy without being surrounded by hundreds of people we or he don't know, or have to spend the entire wedding introducing each other to half of the room. How big is our small wedding? Maybe a little bigger than we quite wanted it to be, but still small enough for comfort, I think.
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