Weddingbee Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about our guests lately. Since we’re having a semi- destination wedding for a lot of people and it’s a weekend shindig, a lot of our guests are going to be staying at the property for a night or two. There are four different lodges on the property, and part of my job is to figure out where people will be staying. Because it isn’t just a hotel with plenty of available rooms, I really want to get the room assignments figured out just right so that as many guests as possible can stay on the property and not have to worry about driving home after the wedding. But while I was working on this, I started thinking about what I would want if I were a guest at our wedding.

From the weddings I’ve been to, it seems like there are usually two schools of thought when it comes to the way couples handle their guests. One school uses the wedding as a way to get all the guests to mingle with each other and get to know each other. The other school tends to believe that while it’s nice to make sure that people are introduced to each other and can mingle if they want to, their guests usually want to spend time with people they already know, and they make space for that to happen.

I definitely fall into the second camp. Sure, I’d love it if new friendships were made during our wedding weekend, and part of why I wanted a weekend event in the first place was so that people would have more time to get to know each other. But, ultimately, whenever I’m a guest at someone else’s wedding, I’m much more interested in seeing friends I haven’t seen in a long time than striking up a conversation with someone I probably won’t see again.

Now, this issue comes up when we talk about table assignments, but I’m definitely thinking about it more with respect to the lodging decisions. My mom’s family is pretty big, and we haven’t all been together since my grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration a few years ago, so there will definitely be a little mini-reunion going on. So I want to group them together as much as possible. Most of Mr. EB’s and my friends are spread out across the country, and none of us get to see each other as often as we would like, so I’m definitely going to make sure they’re close to each other. I want them to be able to spend time together while Mr. EB and I are running around doing other things (and hopefully spend time with us when we have a couple of minutes to sit down!).

So that’s my plan for the lodges—grouping friends and family together in a way that makes it easy for everyone to enjoy the weekend. Of course, now that I have a handle on where everyone is going to stay, I just have to figure out how all the table arrangements are going to work…