The Delicate Nature of Planning a Wedding When Your Parents Are Divorced

by Jennifer Roberts

Weddings always seem to be fraught with tension on every side, whether you’re the one planning it, paying for it, or attending it. I doubt most people plan on becoming a rampaging bride- or groom-zilla, but the intersection of idiosyncratic families, money issues, and dreamy expectations can bring out the crazy in the best of us.

I got married the summer after I graduated from college to the man I’d been dating since high school. I’d never given any thought to the problems surrounding the wedding industrial complex, and I was also not the type of person who had dreamed about her ideal wedding since childhood. This meant we did everything pretty traditionally with what I hoped would be a minimum amount of fuss.

I assumed my parents would pay for most, if not all, of the wedding-related expenses, and his family would handle the rehearsal dinner. I was right, for the most part, but things got complicated once I started trying to talk to my parents about how the budget was going to go down.

My guy and I got engaged almost two years before we planned to get married, so we had loads of time to plan the event. My mother gave me a wedding planning book right away. One of the first things I needed, according to its lovely pages of lists, was a budget. It sounded simple enough, and is generally sound advice, but if you’ve ever been even tangentially involved in planning a wedding, you know that very little ever ends up being simple.

My family doesn’t talk about money — at least not in explicit terms. Despite the fact that I had a very nice, financially-stable childhood, my mother’s implicit messages about our family finances were always that financial ruin was just around the corner, and my father was the spendthrift who had never cared if we had a penny to our name for those emergencies that inevitably come up with kids.

My parents had already been divorced for several years when I approached them with the question about how we’d pay for the wedding, but tensions between them were still quite high. I think the events surrounding my wedding allowed them to be in the same room and be civil to each other for the first time since the divorce. But this also meant I couldn’t get answers on anything, because neither of them wanted to be the one stuck with the larger portion of the bills, so neither would commit to an actual dollar figure.

Through oblique methods, I discovered the vague boundaries of my budget. My mother made sure to tell me that the children of an acquaintance of hers had spent almost $30,000 on their wedding, and we commiserated about how silly that was: Wouldn’t that money have been better spent on a car or a down payment on a house? (My budget is less than $30,000.) Female relatives confided in me about the mistakes they made at their weddings in the wishful but misguided hope that I could avoid the same pitfalls. My mother made snide comments about how much money my father’s parents had given them for their wedding expenses. (My budget is more than $500.)

I had no realistic idea of how much I could or could not spend, so I wound up trying to keep most things as cheap as possible, while also having no idea if I was even successful at that as I had nothing to measure against. Not having an official budget worked out to me being incessantly worried about spending too much on anything and everything. If I were honest with myself, I didn’t really want to have a huge wedding along the lines of those I saw in wedding magazines, but those bastions of discontent still made me think I was missing out by not having the orchid boutonnieres and tied chair covers. I settled for bridesmaids’ bouquets as small as I could make them and a wedding venue/reception hall/DJ in one.

In the end, we all ended up taking part. I paid for the photographer; my parents took turns paying for the venue. My husband’s parents paid for an extravagant rehearsal dinner. My mom bought my dress, and her family pitched in to cater the food. We ended up having everything you really need for a wedding, and probably many more things you don’t, like the string duo I insisted on having at the ceremony but didn’t even hear. Little incidental things also continued to add up, so when I try to estimate now how much was spent on just the wedding, I can never settle on a number. I’d guess it was in the ballpark of $5,000.

Despite the awkwardness of trying to discuss money with my parents at a point in their lives when any interaction they had was already a battle, we still put together an amazing event. The day of, I was so overwhelmed by all the activity and demands for my time and attention that I really don’t remember much of it. I remember dancing, and laughing, and being surrounded by friends and family. I didn’t have time to eat, but people raved about the food. My friends still tell me it was one of the most fun weddings they’ve ever attended. Later on I thought of things I regretted, of course (like not finding time to visit each individual table and greet everyone, and not having any pictures of my husband and me together with our families), and perhaps I’d handle it totally differently if I were planning it now. But I suppose it’s true that all’s well that ends well. My husband and I are celebrating our 7th wedding anniversary this month.

This story is part of our Wedding Season series.

Jennifer Roberts lives in Missouri with her high school sweetheart/husband and two cats. She spends most of her time at home with stacks of books and video games, and you can find a few more of her feeble attempts at writing at Gamervescent.com.

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