Bothered by Guests Leaving Early

Where I come, it is common that at dinner and dancing receptions are structured in a way that there is dancing in between courses, meaning that the ‘dinner’ component itself lasts usually a good 2 or more hours. For us this means that even those who leave early, they generally won’t leave until about 9pm/10pm because that’s usually a common time for cake to be cut.

It could be that a number of your guests thought the reception was a short one, or that people were possibly tired from driving that morning or otherwise didn’t want to drive back too late.

In any case, I wouldn’t let it get to you. It sucks when people do this and not stay the whole night but you can’t change what happened and its not worth holding onto the lingering feelings about it because the last thing you want to do is upset yourself when the day was otherwise wonderful and a roaring success!

I kinda feel the same way about this as we had some people leave early as well. We had about 90 guests in attendance, which some of the bigger families who had rsvp'd didn't show which made a couple of our tables look rather empty.
Unfortunately like a husband/wife couple who are really good friends of ours, and my husband was his best man in their wedding, just left without saying anything to us. We took the time to go walking around the room to greet/talk with everyone, since we were not that hungry at the time, and that was maybe 7:30, in which they were already gone. We had booked our venue until 10pm, but decided to stop around 9:15pm since there were about only 20 of us left. It is upsetting, because most of the guests were staying at a hotel 3-4 miles away. But I know my husband, son and I partied it up through the very last dance, it was so much fun and we enjoyed seeing everyone else who had just as fun as we did!

Yeah this was similar for us. 4pm reception start, lotta people started dipping around 7:30-8, I think everyone was gone by 8:30-8:45. I think they stayed for the set my band played around 7 after dinner. IDK, it was sad since we had the venue overnight, but I think people are only ready to party so much these days. Everyone seemed in a good mood excepting my mom who was like, stressed for no reason (IDK) and my aunt/uncle who always complain about everything, but they didn't make a scene at least at this wedding. No one ended up staying nearby overnight except my parents and my brother's family who came cross country and were all together at an AirBnB, I think people wanted to get home. They didn't drink all that much either (we have like 75% of booze left)

We had a lot of people bail last minute and I'm working out how I feel about all of them, it's nuanced (some had crazy legit reasons others were rude AF). But we are married now and we had a good day with those who showed, things were pretty smooth, we didn't spend a million bucks, we are grateful. And TBH since we DIY'd EVERYTHING we were pretty zonked, happy to go to bed early lol

Honestly I love the idea of dancing between courses! Thanks for the advice. Other than that, I still had a blast on the dance floor with the few people we had. A lot of our guests that stayed also sat and chit-chatted with each other because they hadn't seen each other since the pandemic started. So at least they stayed, even if they didn't dance.

That was seriously our mix of people! Older, people with kids they had to get back to, and then a lot of my husband's side like to chit-chat more than dance. I should have known that was going to happen since it happened at his cousin's wedding a few years ago.

Fortunately, everyone stayed to eat and no one left until after the formalities. But yeah, I am kind of sad about the few that left that didn't say bye. I didn't even get to talk with them the whole day! Oh well though.

Aww I'm sorry that happened to you! We had last minute people not show up as well. Though they were legit reasons, it still sucks because it was close family. But yes, looking at the positives is what we have to do!

Yeah, we had a few of our bridal party leave early. One actually went to his cousin's wedding reception and the others (a husband and wife couple) decided not to stay at the hotel and drive home (which sucks a little because we stayed to the very end of their wedding). I agree about the guests at the hotel though. We had 17 rooms booked out and around 40 people staying there and literally only a few of them stayed.