There’s a rather different trend toward wedding receptions these days.
Is it due to people exhibiting good manners? Boredom with a "dress-up" party? The inability to get plastered and drive home unmolested by police?
Whatever the reason, it seems that wedding receptions are not the lengthy celebratory parties they used to be.
Wedding venues haven't changed much in the last fifteen years in our area of northeast Michigan: church or civil ceremony early in the afternoon. Reception following about dinner time, typically at five to six p.m., with dancing until at least eleven p.m. The major difference now though, is there are no hangers on being forced to leave as the lights are all flicked on and the d.j. or band starts to dismantle their equipment to head home.
Because nobody stays until the end of the wedding reception anymore.
No longer are there drunken guests hanging on to the bar or slumped across their dance partners on the dance floor. Well–not that there was a lot of that anyway, but there used to be a lot more boisterous revelry at wedding receptions of all kinds, from the crystal chandelier and linen table cloth variety to the buffet seat-yourself variety.
Imagine my surprise, when at a recent family wedding, I looked up from the table and discovered the reception was void of 75% of the guests by 8:45 p.m. Where had everyone gone? The bride and groom were still in attendance, as were their immediate family and wedding party. But the majority of the guests had left, after the usual "introducing the family" dances.
My sister attended a wedding just this past weekend and noted the same phenomena. "It was just after dinner and the first few dances, and voom–everybody was gone. And this reception was held at a hotel, so if people had too much to drink, it’s not as if they had to drive anywhere to go home–they just had to go upstairs to their rooms." But still the reception was nearly empty of guests.
Are people just bored with the wedding reception? Is it just an excuse to have a free dinner out, and then after a polite amount of time, you leave to go continue your night out elsewhere? Perhaps catch a movie and drinks at the bar before calling it a night?
Are people afraid to have a drink anymore, for fear that one drink will result in a ticket for being considered intoxicated, should the driver be pulled over after leaving the reception?
Or is it now considered polite to leave after the "introductory dances" (you know–the "this is the bride and groom, and their parents and the wedding party" stuff) so the bride and groom can make an early get-away?
While it may have been traditional at one time for the bride and groom to leave early, it seems the newlyweds don’t make an early exit anymore unless they’ve a flight to catch to some exotic honeymoon location. Most new couples stay until the end of the reception.
Weddings and receptions undergo transformations from time to time and each set of circumstances is different. My parents’ wedding was in the morning, because at that time, that’s when weddings were conducted. A meal was provided immediately afterward, and though I don’t know if there was dancing or not, everything was done in the daytime hours–but my father’s family traveled a three-hour distance to attend the festivities, so perhaps this was done more for consideration for travel time than anything else. At that time, people didn’t get hotel rooms at the drop of a hat. Staying over would have been unheard of.
A friend of mine was married early in the afternoon, with a reception immediately following. Because, as he said, "What else are people supposed to do for that four hours between the ceremony and a reception–they’re from out of town. Where will they go?" And it was carried off with elegance and finesse and no one murmured at all about the time frame of everything.
So perhaps the early exit of wedding guests is just another evolution of the wedding reception and an adjustment to our expectations of what a wedding reception should be.
Or are we so jaded that a wedding reception is no longer enough to hold our attention? Are we unable to visit with others without the aid of cell phones in this age of technology? Is simple face-to-face conversation no longer possible?
Perhaps, instead of disposable cameras placed at each table for guests to capture fun candid wedding reception moments, we should opt for video cell phones. Then we could stay longer and visit with each other via cell phone, table to table, guest to guest. Wedding receptions might even last longer than one hour!
