Second time around brides?

[NTave]

I have to admit, Im engaged and excited to be married, but do not want to plan another wedding. I'd rather go away just the two of us and have a great vacation together...the wedding I had once upon a time was perfect, but the marriage was far from it. Anyone else getting married again for the second (or more) time? What are your wedding plans? Are you doing the big wedding with family and friends, or small affair, or just the two of you?

 

[february2003bride]

I was a first time bride when I met DH. but he has a second time groom And he felt the same way you did. He had the big wedding and the marriage crashed and burned 18 months in. So he wanted to keep things on a smaller scale. I'm not a big party person myself so I was fine with a small-mediumish wedding and we had a modest budget, so it worked out well. 8 years later, DH says he owes me a big wedding and a great honeymoon someday becaue he feels I got jipped on the wedding front. I definitely don't feel that way but hey, if it comes with new bling, then I'm allll for it

 

[Mayk]

I just got married in June as a return trip to the alter. It was 50 close friends and family. We did many traditional things but left off a few. My first wedding wasn't nearly as elegant or to my taste...it was like a fairytale... and I made it special without being over the top....

 

[wannaBMrsH]

I was also a first time bride to a second time groom. I wanted the big wedding because I wanted my parents to have that. I didn't want to skulk away and come back married, but DH had already had the wedding in a big dance hall with all the friends.

We decided on a destination wedding and opened it to everyone who wanted to come. We paid for our family to travel and tried to find as reasonable a place as we could that would still be beautiful.

In the end, my dad got to walk me down the aisle, I got to wear a white dress and I had a Catholic wedding. We had about 45 people at our wedding and we still got to go away and have a big party.

I really recommend destination weddings to brides who don't want to have to plan a huge event, but still want to mark the occassion with a beautiful event.

Congratulations on your engagement and upcoming wedding!

 

[tyty333]

When I was getting married for the second time (1st time for my then fiance) I told him that I had already "done"
a big wedding and if he wanted one he would have to plan it. We ended up just the 2 of us getting married in
Hawaii. It was perfect!

 

[blacksand]

Ugh. My FI is a second time groom as well. I worry all the time that he feels as many of you say you do, and that he is hating every second of this.

 

[tammy77]

I just married my DH on June 30th as a 2nd time bride. My first wedding was 13ish years ago, in a church with a big white dress (literally, it was huge!). There were so many things wrong with that wedding, and that marriage. This time I first wanted to just have a small intimate courthouse type wedding but my DH had never been married and I wasn't about to take a "real" wedding experience away from him or his family.

It was *wonderful* and I'm SO glad that we didn't elope. I wore a traditional wedding dress in ivory, my two girls walked with me and we had about 50 people so it was small enough to be intimate still. Do I wish I had the 8k that we spent on that to put towards a house? Well yeah, but I'll have those memories of that literally PERFECT day for the rest of my life and I wouldn't give that up. I look at our wedding pictures almost weekly and it's just so wonderful to relive the day through them.

 

[StoopidMonkey]

When it's time for my wedding to come around it will be my second and my future fiance's first. I do look forward to it, but also know in some areas it's going to be very weird since I've been through all this before. Especially since the first wedding (unlike the marriage) was wonderful and people still talked about it fondly up until the day they heard we were splitting up. Also this time around it will be financed mostly by my GF and I, so any thoughts of out-doing it are out the window, not that I really have a desire to attempt it in the first place. Still, I know enough that my GF deserves a full-on wedding and I won't get in the way of that. I also know well enough that everybody on my side of friends/family knows I gave the first marriage my all and my ex did me all sorts of wrong, so even though there's an air of "we've done this already" they will be just as happy to do it again for somebody who makes me this happy (although I expect some long distance people or not-so-close family to just send their well wishes and not all show up like last time, which is fine). Point is, this happens all the time so we are all in large, good company here. I'm sure by the time it rolls around it will all feel right and work itself out.

 

[monarch64]

Second time bride here, no less interest in the wedding. Different priorities now that I am older, independent of my parents (who paid for everything the first time), but it's a different feeling...to encourage those first time brides engaged to second time grooms I'll say this: there is MORE importance placed on the actual marriage than on the wedding itself.

Case in point: my fiance is a first time groom. He was soooo excited about our engagement (as was I) and just as excited to jump into planning our wedding. We were hit with several things soon after our engagement, such as we wanted to buy a house (check, but it took us almost a year to save and find the right house), a job loss (he was "downsized" after a three phase lay-off right after we finally bought said house), and we felt the effects of this crap economy also. Hello...do we plan a wedding with money we don't necessarily have with the expectation that guests will gift us generously? Or do we do the responsible thing and wait to get married (also putting off getting pregnant) until we've rekindled our funds after his lay off and the home purchase? We chose to do the responsible thing and wait.

We've been engaged for a year + now (since July 2011) and are quite tired of hearing "so when's the wedding?" We've finally decided that we'll plan a short getaway in November and have a nice soiree after the holidays in January. Who the hell is counting, anyway? We're doing this on OUR terms with OUR money, for OUR reasons. Both of us are as excited today as when we first began talking about marrying each other.

OP: I was a pretty laid-back bride the first time around. I had a beautiful wedding, and a very expensive one at that. My top priority this time is not the perfect venue, perfect photographer, etc. Our priority now is to have a lovely time celebrating with close friends and family who actually wouldn't talk behind our backs about whether they had to pay for a few drinks, or that the music wasn't to their liking, etc. And this time, I don't feel like I have to have the perfect wedding album, or food, or whatever. We're just doing what we feel like doing within a realistic budget because that's all we have to work with. Best of luck to you, and I'm open to sharing ideas or stories or whatever with any second time bride.

Sidenote: I hope I didn't come off as bitter/bitchy because I'm not. Sometimes I feel as though people get so wrapped up in the "wedding of our dreams" and forget about the fact that reality sets in the day after you marry and all the things you think you HAVE to have don't really matter after the fact.

 

[StoopidMonkey]

OP: I was a pretty laid-back bride the first time around. I had a beautiful wedding, and a very expensive one at that. My top priority this time is not the perfect venue, perfect photographer, etc. Our priority now is to have a lovely time celebrating with close friends and family who actually wouldn't talk behind our backs about whether they had to pay for a few drinks, or that the music wasn't to their liking, etc. And this time, I don't feel like I have to have the perfect wedding album, or food, or whatever. We're just doing what we feel like doing within a realistic budget because that's all we have to work with. Best of luck to you, and I'm open to sharing ideas or stories or whatever with any second time bride.

Sidenote: I hope I didn't come off as bitter/bitchy because I'm not. Sometimes I feel as though people get so wrapped up in the "wedding of our dreams" and forget about the fact that reality sets in the day after you marry and all the things you think you HAVE to have don't really matter after the fact.

Oh wow did you hit the nail on the head there. Having been married before, I know something that first time brides/grooms-to-be do not want to hear: within 6-12 months much of that "perfect, all important" wedding day is going to be a blur. One great day among the hundreds that will follow. Hell, when you wake up the next morning you'll be amazed at how fast it went by. All that really matters is everybody has a good time, including you two.

The flip side to this is that if one person is on wedding# 2 and the other is on their first, the more experienced spouse has to be gentle in how this message is conveyed. The other person deserves the chance to "live the dream" (within budgetary reason) and find these lessons out first hand. Just because the wedding may not be so special, magicla, or exciting for the person who has already went through one doesn't mean that it isn't for the other person. Ignore this at your own peril. Narrow your priorites down with the following filter: "Six months from now, is anybody going to care if we didn't have [x]". You could save thousands with that philosophy. My advice: make sure the DJ/band/whatever is up to the job of keeping everybody entertained and you'll be set. If everybody has a good time, nobody will miss the ice sculpture you didn't get or the intricate inviations you opted not to blow hundreds on.

 

[Zunibaba]

I guess it's normal for you to feel that way. You want it plain and simple this time thinking it really is not about the big marriage thing. I hope you're able to let go of your fears though. All the best!