How to Cope With Meeting the Whole Family on Your Wedding Day

Your wedding day; one of the biggest and happiest days of your life. The build-up to it, however, can be one of the most stressful and overwhelming processes. For a lot of couples, their wedding day will be the first time meeting a lot of their partner’s extended family, along with their closest members too. Your wedding day is all about bringing your two families together in a unity that will last forever, but sometimes a few family members may make that more difficult than others. Whether it’s overcontrolling aunties or competitive cousins, you and your partner need to embrace the day and each others’ families to enjoy your big day to the max.

Respect People’s Feelings

Although your wedding day should be all about you, your partner and the love you have for each other – it’s important to acknowledge and understand that there may be pre-existing rifts in each others’ families or even divorces amongst them that may cause drama or tension. If there are guests you know who may be uncomfortable sharing a space with others, take the time to have an open conversation with them about it to see how they feel and try to make reasonable adjustments to ensure their comfort too. Simple adjustments such as not sitting divorced couples together on your seating plan can go a long way to ensure the comfort of your guests and reduce potential drama during your big day.

Communication Skills Are Key

Keeping lines of communication open amongst guests, vendors and your wedding party can also aid a lot in avoiding family tensions. Take the time to fill in your wedding photographer of family situations or politics along with your master of ceremonies and your celebrant or registrar.

A good wedding photographer will endeavour to arrange family photos to keep certain people apart without causing any upset.

Communicate your concerns with your partner too, chances are they share the same thoughts as you and you can come up with how to combat difficult behaviour together.

Get People Involved

A wonderful way to ensure family members feel included and appreciated is to get them involved in your wedding day in any way you can. In the lead up to your big day, there will plenty of smaller tasks that need completing that could be delegated to family members. Printing save the dates or invites, creating wedding favours, designing centre pieces and creating table names are all tasks that you could ask members of your family, or friends, to complete for you. Not only does this take the pressure of these tasks out of your hands but it also helps to placate difficult family members who are then less likely to cause any sort of scene on your big day.