Parent Involvement

Our families are pretty minimally involved. My mom wanted to pay for the cake and cake accessories but, other than that, we're paying for everything (about $17k in all, with added expenses for postponement to next year and an elopement this year). And we're not doing any other "pre-wedding events", so there's nothing else to involve them in.

Both families gave us the same amount of money towards our wedding. Neither of our families have requested anything from us. The great thing is our original wedding was going to cost much more than our current plans. We are actually making money from our wedding!

My mom and in-laws were only as involved as we wanted them to be, which wasn't a whole lot. I went with my mom to find her MOB dress (she did not come dress shopping with me because she lives in a different state and I ended up ordering my dress online anyway). I'd chat with my mom about wedding things, and she ended up buying me my wedding shoes, finding a vintage lace tablecloth for our sweetheart table, and was planning to do flower arrangements for the reception (she's really good at arranging flowers, and we did a combo bulk flower order from our florist where we'd get pre-made bouquets, boutonnieres, and swag for the arbor but bulk flowers for DIY centerpieces).

We ended up having a Covid elopement with our big event postponed to next year so some of those things haven't actually come to fruition yet. For the most part my husband and I have done the planning and hands on work by ourselves. Both my mom and his parents contributed funds towards our wedding, but neither live locally either, so I could see them potentially being a bit more involved if logistically it was easier for them to be. Everyone has been super respectful about it being our wedding and honoring our choices.

I think this depend on how your relationship is with them, my husband and I paid for our entire wedding. I'm very close with my mom and sister and h's very close with his mother, step-dad and sister. When we toured venues we did it by ourselves, we didn't want anyone hearing to pricing or any of that stuff. When we did the tasting they told us the amount of food we'd taste would fully feed 4 adults so we could take 2 people other than ourselves. To add in some more get to know each other time we invited each of our mothers and it went fabulously. I invited my mil and sil to my dress shopping experience that I had planned with my mom and sister but picked my dress with my mom and sister only on a separate day. Other than that we did everything else ourselves, the less you involve people the less opinions there are to deal with. Plus we wanted our guests whether or not our parents to be surprised by all of the hardwork we put into planning our day. My sister was my Maid of Honor and my hubby's sister was his Best Wo-man, neither one of them were involved with the planning part.

We toured a few venues with my parents one day. The first venue we toured I fell in love with so after that it was booked. The only other thing my mom came to was when I picked out my dress and when I went for a dress fitting. I have asked for my parents/in laws opinions on some things but it was always me and my fiancé’s ultimate decision. Money wise between my parents and my fiancé’s parents they covered 90% of the venue fees (which includes the food/catering and cake). My FH and I covered everything else (DJ, dress/tuxes, photographer,videographer, extras like the guest book etc). My FH parents are also paying for the rehearsal dinner but they didn’t care where we did it as long as it was within the budget they gave us. Honestly besides covid (which is of course a nightmare) we had it easy with planning in terms of parents.