If you had or are planning a small wedding, are you having regrets?

Pre-Covid we had a destination wedding with 15 guests and a local reception with 50 guests. Both were amazing! Small enough to be intimate but still a fun time. It was twice the work (🤪) but also twice the themes and fun.

What do you consider “small”? We’re only inviting 65 guests and I consider that to be a small wedding (however, it’s not an “intimate” sized wedding). I think small is great because only those who are closest to us will be in attendance to celebrate our special day. We have zero desire to host a “come one, come all” block party style wedding. Personally, I’d regret having a bunch of “just because” guests who we KNOW but we don’t regularly interact/communicate with. That just doesn’t feel special to me.

I definitely have mixed feelings about planning a small wedding (we started with a guest list of 100+ and cut it down to 50). Most of my regrets tend to happen when I’m trying to plan something that makes me wish I had more space or when I’m talking to ppl that I wish I could invite. But when I think about the costs & stress of a bigger wedding, I realize that I will probably enjoy my smaller wedding much more.

Our “minimony” last June was 3 people, us, and the officiant and I have absolutely 0 regrets. This June, we are having our wedding “celebration” with 30 guests and I’m equally excited. I think it’s all a matter of what you truly want. Pre-covid, did you want a small or large wedding? For us, we wanted a small, initiate wedding, and we got exactly that last June! LOL

I'm planning a simple small wedding for August in our backyard. And if I have to be honest one thing I that I find a huge relief was this pandemic forcing us to make our wedding small and lose things we didn't actually need. We are not very social people and don't do good around large crowds when we are center of attention. We originally had planned our wedding at a rustic venue with around 150 people. 50 of those people were people we picked to be at our wedding and the other 100 were our parents friends. Now we are having a small casual wedding with only 50 guests in the backyard. It's going to save us a lot of money we can put towards our house, and less people we have to be in front of. I can't wait I'm so excited.

I have no regrets -- I went from planning a 250 person wedding to a 20 person minimony, and it was definitely a blessing in disguise. COVID forced us to greatly reduce our guest list to only immediate family, aunts, uncles and godparents, but I honestly have no regrets and am somewhat grateful that I was forced to have a smaller wedding. We were actually able to enjoy the guests and my day and save a lot of money, but we did not cheat ourselves out of the wedding experience simply because our guest list was smaller -- I wore the dress, had beautiful decor, a tiered wedding cake, etc. While I missed our cousins and friends, we'll celebrate with them by throwing a "watch party" to watch our wedding video later this year. We're super excited about this low key party where there will be good food (probably BBQ or a seafood boil) and dancing -- can't wait.

19 guests (including bridal party), zero regrets.

It allowed us to have amazing food (had we had more people, our budget would have forced us to go much cheaper) and a great venue.

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Small is relative. Some people find 100 to be small, and it’s 50 or 10 for someone else. We consider 75/100 to be on the small side which is where our guest count is.

I was curious because I was reading on another forum that more brides than not who had small weddings (they listed 30 and fewer guests when asked) said that their biggest regret was not inviting more people and I was wondering how common that actually is.

We had a small wedding and have zero regrets. But we planned to have a small wedding (immediate family and a few friends only) from the beginning, so it would be pretty silly to regret our own choices.

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Completely understandable

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Sounds like you had a wonderful time!

I had 63 guests at my wedding and I have no regrets. The 63 guests we had were all
Family members and friends we ACTUALLY talk to. And by keeping the guest count low we were able to provide an amazing rehearsal dinner and wedding were food, alcohol, and transportation was taken care of for our guests and we were able to do a receiving line. We got the venue and wedding of our dreams for the bride we wanted and a wedding done the way we wanted!

*for the price we wanted


Typo!