Should we invite the parents?

Okay so both my fiancé and I agreed upon the idea of having an adventure elopement this upcoming February to cut down on costs and have more of an easy, stress free ceremony for ourselves. However, we’re both feeling really torn on the idea on whether to invite anyone or not... especially our immediate family....

Without going too much into it, his side of the family never really cared for me and had treated me (and our relationship) very disrespectfully during the four years that we’ve been dating. Even after I bent over backwards trying to win their approval. Their also hyper controlling and his mom is already showing warning-signs of wanting to run everything less than a week after our engagement.

My family, on the other hand, is it’s own kind of beast... My father is verbally/emotionally abusive and my mother is overly critical of everything that I do. It’s at the point where if my fiancé and I were to have a traditional wedding, I’d willingly walk myself down the isle and my mother wouldn’t be apart of my two-person bridal party. It’d just be me and my best friend of roughly 5-6 years.

Anyway, my fiancé really wants to invite our small circle of close friends to the elopement, and then have everybody else (like our coworkers, mentors, and other friends) come to a dinner party sometime later to celebrate. I’m totally fine with the latter—especially since it keeps me out of the spotlight because I hate being the center of attention—but we both feel like we’re in a weird position.... Our families and close friends would be hurt if they couldn’t come to the elopement because we didn’t invite anyone, but then our families would be TICKED if our friends were invited and they weren’t.... We’ve thought about having everybody come to the location with us and just make it an intimate, destination wedding—however, even then, we’d still have to take precautions with our respective parental figures to keep them from stirring up drama with each other because of some stuff that’s gone down over the course of the last several years...

Personally, I’m really uncomfortable with Option: 3, but neither my fiancé or I know what to do here and we’re feeling really torn about the whole thing. Especially since he has a close relationship with his family and I’m still living with my parents because I want to put as much money as I can away for the wedding and our first apartment.


Does anyone have any suggestions/ideas on stuff that we could do instead? Or maybe just have some advice on what route we should take? Pretty much anything would be helpful, really.😅