Hi everyone! I’m hoping for a little advice.
My FH and I have only been engaged for about a month. In that month we have had a lot of family issues regarding our grandparents health. His grandmother was diagnosed with stage 4 Pancreatic cancer and her health has quickly deteriorated & it is estimated that she has about 3 months to live and my 93yr old grandpa had to have emergency surgery, luckily he is in rehab and doing well so far. We are both very close to our grandparents so this has caused a lot of panic/anxiety.
We have begun “planning” our wedding and are set to tour 2 venues this weekend, but keep playing with the idea of eloping due to a variety of reasons. 1) We have family across the Country, him in PA and northern CA, me in southern CA, and we live with all our friends in AZ. 2) We’re not very extravagant people and want a very small, very non-traditional wedding. No bridal party, no long ceremony, no speeches at the reception, etc. 3) Cost, we don’t want to ask for help from our families due to all the issues that have happened medically with our grandparents, we want to buy a house in a few months, as that is cheaper than renting, and while we could wait a few years to get married to afford it, we’d rather just “get it over with/out of the way” (for lack of a better term). The most important thing to us is that we’re married, not all the details (although I’d still like a dress 😉)
We thought about possibly traveling to where each of our families are located to celebrate with them after the fact and do a small get together brunch/bbq/etc, but are unsure how to do this (do we text/send formal invites/Facebook group??), we also don’t want anyone to feel obligated to gift us anything after the fact if we do invite them to celebrate with us, as we feel it’s not fair to them to spend the money. We also figured that eloping and then celebrating within the next few months would hopefully ensure that we can celebrate with our grandparents, as so much can happen in a few months to a year (as we’ve seen this month)
My question is, have any of you eloped? Did you regret it? How did you handle telling your families (we don’t want to be dishonest/hide it, we want them to know) And did you have a “party” after to celebrate or maybe have a larger wedding-like vow renewal a few years later where you invited everyone to be present?
No one we know has eloped so we’re not sure on etiquette on informing family or for what you do after you elope? Any help, advice, tips/tricks, etc is appreciated!!
