If you’ve ever been to a wedding or planned a wedding, you’d know the dilemmas involved in trying to sort out the perfect seating plan. Today, Mamamia reader Kate* writes…
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This weekend we travelled a huge distance – flights, hire cars, dogs in boarding kennels, stopped the papers, etc, etc – to attend a family wedding. Why oh why then did the bride and groom think it was a great idea to put extended family at tables with complete strangers?
Yes, some people might like to avoid their extended family, but we were looking forward to catching up – especially with lovely cousins, aunts and uncles. Instead, we were seated with a selection of the bride and groom’s ex-neighbours, graphic designers, work colleagues… Sure, they were nice enough people but we will never see them again. Ever. And we have come home feeling like we have spent a strange weekend with little connection to those we actually wanted to see.
Earlier this year we were at another cousin’s wedding. They placed us on a table with some of the extended family of the bride, who were visiting from England. They looked horrified to be broken up from their familiar family so we all agreed to some moving of places so that we could sit with our own family and they with theirs.
What possesses people to think that at their wedding we would suddenly want to become acquainted with the extended family of someone we don’t really know? While dissecting the wedding this past weekend, my husband and I smugly reminded ourselves how brilliant our seating plan had been at our own wedding. International guests were seated with fellow international guests who they knew, family was seated with their own family, friends were seated with friends they knew, work colleagues were seated together. It seemed to work really well. It is one of the many stresses of getting married – the seating plan – but how do people come to decide on who sits where?
What experiences have you had with seating plans at weddings, or any other event for that matter?
