I’ve been thinking about wedding dinners lately because Ming got married and another friend of mine is getting married soon. So there’s a lot of busy wedding dinner preparations going on during this time.
Planning wedding dinners can be one of the most stressful experiences for a couple about to get hitched for mainly two reasons:
1) Dealing with expectations you have for your own wedding dinner.
2) Dealing with expectations your parents and in-laws have for your wedding dinner.
You however deal with problem 1) really easily when you realize from the start that your wedding isn’t going to be perfect. There’s ought to be something that wouldn’t go the way you want during the wedding dinner itself.
So you then just have to focus on problem 2) and that’s a tough one. There really isn’t any guide in this because the chemistry between each of our parents and in-laws are unique. So are there expectations. We just have to figure out how to deal with it in our own ways.
I loved my own wedding. I thoroughly enjoyed it and so did my friends. There were however a few things that I did regret not doing. And I’ve listed them here so hopefully you guys won’t have to make the same mistakes I did.
1) Sound wasn’t loud enough
We all do it. Before our wedding dinner we go to our friends’ weddings with a mental notebook so we could take note on the good ideas they had and the things we think they could have done better. One thing i noticed about many of the weddings I attended was that the sound system was often too weak.
Often if you’re sitting near the back you can’t hear the speeches that are going on. To prepare for this we did sound tests on the day before the wedding and even then I felt it wasn’t loud enough. So I paid RM2,000 to insert more speakers so that it could be heard all round. I thought I had it covered but I was wrong.
A sound system can sound strong in an empty ballroom but it’s very very easy to underestimate how 500-800 people at your wedding dinner talking at the same time can really drown out whatever speakers you have.
In my case I underestimated it even though I thought I had prepared for it. The situation was made worse with my next regret.
2) Inviting too many people
The thing about wedding dinners is that it’s often not for you. It’s for your parents and in-laws. Our parents often feel the pressure to invite many of their friends and relatives. It doesn’t even matter if they’re relatives that you hardly see or have never even seen in your life. Because they’re your relatives and because it’s your wedding dinner, culture and tradition has it that you invite them.
Our wedding ended up with over 70 plus tables and the sheer number of people there took a toll on the beautiful atmosphere we imagined. It’s not possible for you and your parents to really know 700 people well. Lets face it. Of the 700 or so people, the people who really really want to be there because they want to see you get married are probably just a handful. The rest go for many other reasons: obligation, free food, opportunities to meet people, opportunities to socialize with other people there and all.
The problem with this is that I personally knew less than half of the people at my wedding. Half of the people there didn’t really care about me or that I was getting married. I know because when my best man or Shorty’s maid of honor was giving their speeches about our union, everybody behind was busy talking. Some tables were even calling yam sengs… during a speech!
The best weddings I’ve seen are the small ones. The ones with 10 tables.. maximum 30 tables. The shortage of seats in small weddings force you to filter out the people who don’t matter and include only the people who do matter. Those weddings have the best atmosphere of all.
Looking back I should have limited the number of tables our wedding was going to have at the very beginning.
3) Food was terrible
The other problem with having big weddings is that the food is more often than not going to be crap. I did what most people do before their wedding dinners. I had a food tasting of the hotel with a group of 10 before we decided on the menu and the food then was great.
It’s easy to cook good food for 10 people. It’s another to do it for 700. The food at my wedding was terrible. So bad I only ate half a dinner and ended up going for supper after.
I do notice though that Chinese restaurants tend to cope better with food quality than hotel ballrooms do.
4) Not taking a family photo
My biggest regret of the night was not setting down a time to take a wedding photo. Throughout the whole dinner I was busy saying hi to all the people at the wedding. Half of them whom I didn’t know. Shorty was busy changing outfits as the bride normally does and my parents were busy entertaining their friends.
By the end of the wedding I realized one thing. That I never took a family photo. We got so overwhelmed with the whole dinner that we just forgot the whole thing. Sure I think our wedding photographer should have reminded us at one point in the night but I think what we should have done at the very beginning was to set a time to take a photo beforehand.
5) Being Strict on Dress Code
Most wedding dinners now have a dress code. You’re expected to wear a suit or at least a blazer. True that some people don’t have the luxury of wearing a blazer or a suit but at my wedding I had people wearing all sorts of things.
One of my guests wore jeans, sneakers and a hoodie. When you look at your wedding photographs at the end of it, you see photos of really well dressed people and then suddenly you see someone there who dresses like he’s going to the mall.
I know that at some wedding dinners, the bride and groom predict who will dress down instead of dress up and plot the seating arrangements accordingly so minimize the impact on the wedding photos. Thats something we didn’t do though.
In spite of these regrets though, I loved our wedding. The one thing about weddings is that no matter what happens or how you do it, it’s going to be the best wedding you’ve ever attended. Because it’s your wedding. Besides the people who matter don’t care about what goes right or wrong in the wedding, they only care about being there and seeing you get married. So relax. Whatever happens, your wedding will be the best ever. The only thing that can go really wrong is that if you don’t attend your own wedding and that’s not going to happen right?
Writing about this brought back memories of my own wedding so I dug up our wedding videos.
Here’s our ROM video.
And this is the full length video, including our wedding dinner.
Credit to my wife who really did most of the work in planning our beautiful wedding.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space