Your friends are wedding guests. Really.
15 Mar
Thanks so much to Bernadette Smith, the wedding planner behind 14 Stories for putting this article together. As a wedding planner for years who mostly does LGBT weddings, Bernadette is an invaluable resource and planner for the community. She does wedding all over the USA but is based in Boston, MA.
Your friends are guests at your wedding. Guests! They should be treated like guests! They will probably be giving you a gift. They’ll probably be giving you emotional support through your stressful months of planning! No matter how bridezilla or groomzilla you get, no matter how crafty and Do It Yourself you are, and no matter how low your budget, your friends should not be working at your wedding.
That means: no moving of chairs, no post-wedding clean up or breakdown, no food or bar service, no pseudo-professional photography, no gathering of groups for formal photos and no DJing.
You do have my permission, however, to use your friends in the following ways, and with some exceptions:
· Officiate your wedding ceremony
· Sing or perform music in your wedding ceremony
· Make announcements (as long as there aren’t too many announcements, and as long as only one friend is in charge)
· Make your wedding cake (prior to the wedding day)
· Drop off setup and décor materials
· Some setup assistance (only if you don’t have a wedding planner, and only if those friends are not in the wedding party)
· Videography (only if you have a friend who really enjoys being behind the camera – we all have one of those)
Remember, in most cases, your friends aren’t professionals. If the video or the cake, for example, doesn’t come out perfect, you can’t resent them for it. If they are in charge of wedding setup and oversleep, have a family emergency or a flat tire, you can’t blame them – you’re not paying them.
Are you planning to use your friends’ help on your wedding day?
I have to say, I disagree. Although, of course, none of us want to impose on our friends and none of our friends want to be taken advantage of, I just don’t think that there are absolutes when it comes to weddings. There are definitely ways to have your friends do some of the things on the “no” list that won’t impose on your friends and won’t make them feel like you’re taking advantage of them.
Although most friends wouldn’t enjoy moving chairs or serving food — some might. And for a lot of couples, the budget just isn’t there to hire pros to do it. I don’t think that folks who hare having a $30,000 wedding should probably ask their friends to do those things. But there are lots of weddings on smaller budgets and I think your closest friends would understand if you need a little bit of their help.
Gratitude is key. I say, use your friends as they would like to be used and then thank them profusely by making them nice things and returning their kindness.
Yea, I’m going to have to disagree as well. Brides have enough to worry about without a list of things they can’t ask friends to help with. You know your friends, and you know the kind of wedding you are having, so let that decide what you ask guests to help with. Maybe your friends would much rather help with the wedding in a tangible way than buy you something off your registry. Maybe your Dj is your IPOD, and you have a friend who would love to control the playlist for you. I’ve seem some pretty kick ass looking self-catered weddings around the blogosphere, and there’s nothing wrong with letting your community help create your wedding.
Having said all that, we are only asking our friends to do stuff on the “approved” list. That’s because a lot of our friends (as well as us) are coming from out of town (just flying in for a day or two) and we have the resources to hire wedding vendors to take care of most things. But there are no hard and fast rules. Do what works for your wedding and your friends!
Me three. My best friend’s husband will be our DJ/sound guy, which is fantastic since a)he’s awesome at it, b) he knows we can’t afford to hire one and c) his wife will surely be occupied most of the evening.
If guests feel inclined to help, I’m not going to turn them down. Although asking them to wash dishes is surely a bit much, I will feel absolutely no compunction about asking guests to help bring in chairs if it starts to rain, and I imagine that many of them will stick around till the end and ask if they can help clean up just because they’re nice, helpful people. I’ve read many articles in which the guests all chipped in on some small task and how it created a sense of community that made the event even more enjoyable.
I think the key here lies in not ASSUMING what friends want (or can) do. If you have a need for help and you ask a friend in advance if they’re willing to step in, 9 times out of 10 they’re excited to help you… but except in cases of dire need I think it would be extremely rude to press tasks on people as they arrive, when they thought their only task was to get a little buzz going.
The other important factor is not to overburden people. Don’t have one person setting up the decorations, manning the guestbook, handing out programs, AND corralling children. One small, willingly accepted task can help people feel involved in your wedding day… but much more than that can indeed ruin their experience and offend them.
(But yeah, don’t make them wash dishes. That’s just not cool.)
I must disagree as well. Looking at Ms. Smith’s website, it is obvious she works with weddings with high budgets, like $20K+. I can see how working on such weddings one may not understand that those of us with small budgets rely heavily on family and friends who WANT to help with our weddings in any way they can. Our weddings wouldn’t happen without the assistance of friends. I don’t see any valuable insight in this post, just lecturing.
This post leaves a bad taste in my mouth. One of the things I enjoy about SYE is that it’s not about following rules or creating a perfect wedding. All the bloggers have great, insightful posts from personal experience and this one just reminds me too much of something I would see on the Knot. Let us make our own decisions about our friends and our weddings.
I have to say that due to my personal experiences I agree with the original post. I was in a wedding and was asked to make announcements at the last minute because they didn’t want to hire a DJ and realized that day that someone needed to make announcements. Myself along with our other friends (one who was on crutches) had to stay around after the wedding to help with breakdown and clean up (even though we had all been partying for six hours and were dressed up). Another friend was asked to be the videographer and then was criticized when the video wasn’t “good enough”. My friends and I could understand if this was a low budget wedding that they had difficulty putting together, but this was on the water in a metropolitan area on a holiday weekend and I know that more than $80,000 was spent on clothes, food, and the location. We would not have minded helping with DYI projects prior to the wedding or even earlier that day, but the fact that my friends and I were asked to be workhorses during the wedding created a great deal of resentment between ourselves and the couple, especially because we know they could have hired a wedding planner that would have taken care of everything and let us all do what we should have been doing, and that is celebrating their union. This is just a warning that your wedding day should be joyful for everyone there and that your guests should be allowed to be that, a guest and not staff.
I think it depends a lot on the circumstances behind the guests working. We had a wedding in which EVERY person who helped at the reception was a friend. Some were friends who were also vendors. For example, we rented a club from the owner, who was a friend. All of the staff on duty were friends. The people who prepared and served food were friends. All of these people were paid, and all had agreed in advance to their duties.
Others were people who volunteered to help as their wedding gift to us. These included people who helped with set-up and take-down, the musician, and the photographer for the DIY “photobooth.”
I think the problem comes when you invite people to be your guests, and then spring duties on them that they haven’t volunteered for. It is one thing if a friend volunteers to be your iPod DJ for you. It is quite another to invite someone as a guest, then ask them on the spot to give the announcements.
Totally agree 2dbride. It has to be done graciously and politely. But it can work!
I think this a great, well-written post. I both agree and disagree. I’ve worked a ton of weddings where my clients had friends do stuff and I’ve seen it go really well, and IMHO, sometimes I think the friend approach makes everything feel more personal. but I’ve also witnessed disasters. And I’ve also been the friend many times who gets to do the service for free and that too has gone both ways (I only have a few friends I’m no longer speaking too after I felt they were jerks about their wedding…)
The key is just to remember that if you are getting something for free you can’t complain or be too picky about it.