tiny wedding? huge wedding?

We thought for a while about having a tiny wedding – just immediate family and our very best and closest friends, similar to our friends’ wedding last summer. They had a very sweet wedding in which we all snuck into a park. Pennsylvania has a form of marriage license which requires no officiant, so my friends married each other under a tree, next to the river, with fewer than ten people watching (our dog also attended the ceremony and behaved himself with aplomb, until he saw ducks in the river). Then we all went out to lunch.

We were tossing around the idea of just getting married in that fashion, but I realized that it would make me really unhappy. I come from a huge family, and I had always just sort of assumed that all my family members would be at my wedding when I got married, with all their personality quirks and insane dramas – otherwise, what fun would a wedding be? Likewise, I care about my friends too much to not invite them to watch me marry Mr. Astrophe, especially since so many of them haven’t had a chance to meet Mr. Astrophe yet. Plus, there is an appealing social-experiment side to a large wedding, in that my friends and family will all be stuck in a room together and forced to interact to some extent. I am excited to see what happens!

Mr. Astrophe is a little bit chagrined at how large our guest list is, I think. He is a much more introverted person than I am, and he comes from a much smaller family. He would have been okay with a smaller ceremony; we had originally planned for having about 50 guests, until we realized that a wedding with 50 guests would lead to insane drama amongst my relatives and bring grist to the Christmas gossip mill for the rest of our lives. I am a little bit worried about the room being totally full of my family and hardly any of his relatives showing up, which is a likely possibility, but he tells me to not worry about it.