I got married a year ago and our wedding wasn’t great. We are happily married and are so in love, but our families let us down and we’re still feeling it a year after. We wanted a small wedding with pretty much just family (mostly immediate not many aunts and uncles and cousins) we basically wanted a family reunion/potluck type of wedding reception because our families hadn’t really spent much time around each other. Not to mention my husband and I don’t have a lot of money so didn’t want to spend or ask others to spend a lot of money.

His mom was mad because we didn’t pick the venue she offered to pay for. We wanted to have it where we live (which is hours away from family) but she complained. So we had it in our hometown (which everyone disliked because it was so hot). We had our reception at my hubby’s sisters house. We even took a visit 5 hr. drive to her house over the summer to rototill her hard ground, weedy backyard and planted grass. We rented the rototiller ourselves and bought the grass seed and a temporary fence to keep her dogs off the yard until the grass grew. She did the bare minimum of watering her lawn for the summer. It didn’t look great but we tried. She promised us a dance floor (which didn’t entirely happen) her husband didn’t print our final version of our vows, so that got fucked up during our ceremony (I was embarrassed and husband was upset). The ceremony was at a family property which would have been perfect if they weren’t falling trees on the property that week.

The photographer that my dad hired was a woman who photographs kids sports games (and other things like maternity and wedding pics) I don’t like photos that are edited so much that they look unnatural so I asked her to not do that and she said she’d only do a little touching up. However, I had a breakout of one big pimple by my nose that week and she decided to leave that huge red pimple unedited. So it’s in all of my photos. She gave the flash drive to my dad and I didn’t get the pics for like idk a few months? Oh right, and the photographer wasn’t feeling well after the ceremony so she didn’t make it to the reception. And no one in my family took picture of the wedding cake that I baked and the chocolate that my husband made. The desert table looked so nice. And no one talked to anyone at the reception! I expected people to talk to each other, like my mom and his mom and his grandpa and my brothers and so on but no. People hardly talked to us. My husband is upset because neither of my parents took the time to get to know him earlier in our relationship or even now. They don’t talk to him much at all (or me that often, because of the “long distance” making communication less frequent blah blah). Everyone left by 10 or 10:30? Is that normal? Anyway, it just didn’t feel supportive. It was like everyone was scrambling (or not) to put on a wedding that was half assed. We deserved more. And I don’t know how we are supposed to get over it. Anyone else have a bad wedding?