Why do the British book weddings so far in advance?

British people are renound for waiting huge lengths of time i guess!!!!

Hahhah!

I notice that here too... Us Brits will happily queue at the bus stop, at a market stall, at a hotel reception etc etc... But everyone else (especially the French) have no hesitation to push in front.

I agree - I think it's strange too! I can't understand booking in to 2014 - I think all that build up would send me crazy and how can one single day ever live up to all that anticipation??

I think some of it is people needing to save up - but then you don't need to have booked stuff to be able to do that I suppose.

There will be 8 months between when we got engaged and when we get married - plenty long enough for me!

So really - in answer to your question - I have no idea!

Hi melissa - I went to a friends wedding in geneva in july many moons ago and it was gorgeous!

You can get married in 3 months...... but it all depends on situations..... lots of people don't live near family, getting time of work at short notice is hard, travelling, etc etc

Also the people who do get married quickly in the uk probably won't join a forum to do wedding planning as they are just doing wedding organising! I know friends who got married in 4 months so it can be done! I wanted to get married in under a year but waiting on FIL2b ordination which has added on a few months

Also do people in switzerland save for the wedding then get engaged and then get married whereas here it is get enegaged, save save save some more then get married?

We booked our venue 2.5 yrs in advance - and still didnt get the date we wanted!

I think their is a tradition in the UK of large lavish wedding, big ballgowns, castles etc....and this requires planning , lots of money etc..

For us the gap was to let us get our new build home in some kind of order & then save up for a wedding....

I think that, as others have said, people want bigger and bigger weddings and they need several years to save up for it. Waiting that long with nothing to do makes people impatient so they start booking stuff up. Also I've noticed that friends of mine as well as some people on this forum saying 'I've just got engaged but I don't want to get married the year after next because that seems far too soon, so I'm going to wait til the year after that.' I just think...if you want to get married then do it! I think its only the different laws in other countries - like the one the OP mentioned - which stops the rest of Europe from doing this too.

My sister in law organised their wedding in Hungary in just 6 months or so. I remember taking her to the National wedding Show with my Mum in Oct 08 and she was clueless - didn't know colour schemes or anything. They'd been engaged for 18 months by this point and had decided on the date in May 08, and we were like "doesn't she realise she's only got 7 months to organise this?!"

But that was normal of Hungary, she didn't book most things till just before and wouldn't take me BM dress shopping till 2 months before so I was so stressed!!

I think it's madness booking weddings 2+ years in advance - I'd be sick of the thought of it by the time it came round! Maybe some people do need that time to save?

There's about a year between us getting engaged and getting married which suits me perfectly - it takes up so much of my time as it is! Though when we looked round our venue back in August they only had one Saturday left for this September. Made choosing the date easy!

That's how I feel too - we got engaged because we wanted to get married - I'd have done it sooner if we'd had any cash!

I think it stems from some of the venues as some do book up 3 years in advance and that in turn will give people a bit of a panic, most of the weddings i am now booking are for 2012

but in reality as long as you are willing to compromise on certain aspects you can book a saturday wedding 3 months before the day if not sooner. - look at that dont tell the bride program, do they only get a week or 2

I wonder if it is anything to do with supply and demand. I struggled to find the right venue and shortlisted 2, if the majority of people marry on a Saturday and the venue can only do 1 wedding at a time it gets more difficult to find anywhere in your area to marry or hold a reception. Photographers can only be in 1 place and I presume florists have a limit to how many arrangements they can cater to. Each time we tried to book a date for 2012 we only had 2 in each month to choose from, if we left it until this year we would have not got in so I presume its cycle we have created and it will continue. I couldn't imagine booking for 2014 so soon, but I know as soon as I got that ring on my finger I went into wedding overdrive so easily!

I never wanted a long engagement, we got engaged in October and get married in August, which is 10 months. As far as Im concerned that's plenty of time. I think the hype about venues and other wedding services means that people think that they have to book these things with lots of time, as others said they've booked their venues 2.5 + years in advance and still cant get the date they want.

This may throw the spanner in the works slightly but Im actually enjoying being engaged and not "needing" to get married within 6 months or so as we have together for 5 years anyway, by the time we get married we will have been engaged for 20 months and I think thats a nice period of time to organise the wedding and also enjoy being engaged to each other, yes being engaged means that you are getting married but im not sure that it means you have to get married right now!

I disagree with the comment made that waiting 2 years + means bigger and bigger weddings, it doesnt mean that at all, it may mean for some couples that they need to save for that amount of time, it may mean that they dont need to rush in and get married or it may mean that they do want a big wedding, but all of the above is fine as its their wedding.

I have booked the venue, cars and TOG as the venue we want is already booked up for all the Saturdays in August 2013 so we knew that we would have to book it well in advance to get the venue and the date we wanted.

Personally, and this is very much just my view, I don't see the point in getting engaged if you've got no intention of getting married in the near future. My OH and I both knew that the point he proposed would be the point that we booked the wedding, and we booked our venue within weeks of him asking me. We had a year then til we got married, but we would have loved to have done it sooner - unfortunately we couldn't due to our best man and another close friend both getting married over the summer / autumn. We had no problem booking all our first choice suppliers but maybe that's because we had a winter wedding.

I would have gone INSANE planning for three years!

Hi - hopefully the weather will be good to us!

In Geneva canton itself, you cannot set a date to get legally married unless it's in the next three months - end of. Hence a lot of people plan to get legally married, and have a church wedding the day or week after.

We struggled at first to find a wedding venue that we could book in advance to have a civil ceremony in, before finding a chateau in the neighbouring canton which we could book in advance. Although a popular wedding venue, there were plenty of dates left.

Regarding "saving for the wedding" - this might sound arrogant, but many working in Geneva don't have to worry too much about money... Wages are high here, so even for a professional couple in their mid-twenties, saving up isn't too difficult (this may not be true for Swiss families in other parts of the country). A school teacher would earn around 100K CHF (around 70K GBP), a supermarket checkout worker would earn around 40K CHF (~27K GBP). I think our wedding is going to cost around 6 weeks wages (after tax) for comparison... If H2B and I had been working in the UK and only had 6 weeks UK salary to spend, this would buy a fairly basic celebration.

Marriage is very important here, and the Swiss tax system is set up for one spouse working and the other looking after the children.. People tend to get engaged, and then save for the wedding as far as I can make out (we are doing this).

We got engaged in Nov 2009 - two months after we met! - but decided to wait until summer 2011 to get married as it all seemed a bit too soon to do in summer 2010

I think everyone's point that this is a self-selecting group is a very good one.

That's my personal view too. Hence why it took us "so long" to get engaged (we'd been together 7 years when we got engaged).

I never wanted a long engagement, and luckily Mr GB agreed so there was no proposal until we (he) knew we were going to get married within the year. From proposal date to wedding date was 3 days off 9 months. He proposed a week before we went to Bali so we didn't actually start thinking about it for the first month, venue was booked 8 months before.

It is actually a bug bear of mine that the view is you have to book way in advance to be able to get what you want. We were lucky, we knew the venue we wanted, decided on May and they had 2 dates available for us to choose. Job done! I didn't have a single problem about not getting something cos I didn't book years in advance. In can be done!

I don't think waiting a couple of years to get married is a hugely long time. A lot of people I know do that, and we have. It meant we got to pick the venue that we wanted, the exact date that we wanted and negotiate on the price. Plus we need the time to save up for it all. If we had the money to do it sooner, then we probably would have, but not if we weren't able to get the date (OH is a teacher so makes things a bit more complicated date wise).

What if you got engaged, because H2B wanted to marry you so asked, and you were all set in your mind to marry the next year, but then you found out you were pregnant? Or someone was ill? Etc etc... Sometimes life doesn't go according to plan. Priorities change and sometimes weddings have to be put back a bit.

I wasnt meaning everyone who waits a couple of years has massive weddings - the question was about uk wedding trends & traditions - and the majority of real life wedding programmes will say things like ' classic English church wedding, fairytale gown, fancy venue, 6 course set down meal ' and highlight lavishness etc. (This is what Ive noticed since I started watching these kind of programmes anyway!)

And, in my humble opinion, generally speaking, these kind of events would take more time and money to plan than a simpler styled wedding.

I can only speak about my own experience - we got engaged christmas 2008, starting house hunting, got our keys in May 2009 & wanted a year to sort out our house (as it was a shell) and that gave us a year then to get stuck into wedding planning.

Straight after getting engaged we booked / sorted what we felt were the most important aspects - bridal party, church, venue & photographer. Then we got stuck in this middle of this year with everything else. I wouldnt say we are having a lavish wedding - we are just having what we both want.

I blame Queen Victoria. Well Victorian society anyway. It was they who invented the Big White Dress - as a expression of 'I'm so rich I can afford a completely impractical dress that will only get worn once'. They also promoted the huge wedding cake - one of Queen Victoria's daughters had a cake 8 feet high and they had to get a structural engineer to design the support system. At least that's what high society enjoyed - paupers had to wear their sunday best and settle for scones and tea afterwards.

But these days the venues do get booked up way in advance - my venue co-ordinator said she's got booking for 2013 and enquiries for 2014.

But there are 3 reasons we booked 2 years in advance: We wanted to set a date soon after our engagment or we would turn into a couple who just stayed engaged forever, we wanted a specific date to tie in with the moon so we'd stand the best chance of seeing the northern lights on our honeymoon, and we were waiting for my Nan's estate to be settled so my inhertiance would pay for the wedding. But we did virtually nothing for the first year except some virtual shopping and start a diet.

I absolutely agree, we got engaged in November (officially) but had started planning slightly earlier than that, maybe a few months... as I said we did book the venue as this is what we defnately wanted and on a specific date so when you have that in mind sometimes you do have to book in advance plus we are saving up for the wedding and unfortunately do not have the disposal funds at our hands right now so have the save for things.

What I'm saying though, and each to their own, but my personal views is sometimes as soon as a couple get engaged they start to plan their wedding for 6/8/10 months time and have no time to enjoy each other and the engagement as they are too busy planning but again thats to everyones choices and I absolutely appreciate that people do things differently.

This is very similar to me and my OH. We got engaged on 11th November 2010 and within 4 weeks we had the venue booked, my dress, the cake idea sorted, TOG, invite template, table decorations and registrar booked. We both felt that for us, we would only get engaged when we were ready to get married (we have already been together for 8 years now so ive waited a long time!) Anyway, its all happening now and we will be getting married this December. If it wasn't for the money situation and one of my bridesmaids being in australia until June, i would have pretty much all of it planned now. Im actually having to step back for the planning so that i dont get it all done to soon because other wise i'll have a nothing to do over the summer!

On the flip side though we have friends who got enaged after 10 years together and that was 5 years ago now so she says that they will probably get married when they have been together for 20years... It's such an individual thing!

All i know, is that for me, I need to plan and do, im not very good at waiting!

My Oh and I planned on a quick wedding, 3 months or so, and we had a small budget ready to get everything done. But then the arse fell out of the housing market and my dad suggested that we try to buy a house with our savings rather than spend it ("waste it" were his actual words!!) on a wedding then try to buy a house when the market was gathering momentum.

So we've booked almost 20 months in advance in an attempt to re coop the money. I didn't really want to be waiting this long!! It's doing my head in already and i'm only 2 weeks in!!

I don't mean to shatter any illusions, but I've had two couples meet me months before their possible Wedding as they were auditioning for Don't Tell The Bride, with one B2B saying she didn't want him to balls it up!

I've worked a "Four Weddings" wedding too and that was more than hard work!...

did the groom in question book you though??? that is the real question surely!

Going a bit O/T but does anyone else think its weird that the grooms in DTTB always pick colours, styles of dresses, etc that their brides don't like. if you knew you were going on the show wouldn't you discuss this stuff beforehand? Or do the brides just pretend to dislike this stuff on the show to cover up the fact its all been planned before?

No, BOTH couples got turned down for the show... As I understand it, they've not got married yet either!

On the "Four Weddings" Wedding, it seemed really strange being followed by a film crew all day, you couldn't do a thing without their approval!

I also think this is mad, my SIL booked hers 2 1/2 years in advance, they had planned on having a long engagement to save up, and once they found the venue they booked it.

We booked our reg office, venue and band a year ahead, but that was because we really wanted the band they get booked up playing all kinds of gigs (50s rock n roll), they would only take our booking after we had a venue, and so we just booked all three on the same day. We haven't got caterers yet though!

Some dress shops are rather snooty, I just wouldn't bother with any rude shops, you want to feek comfortable there trying on the dresses!

I understand that some things can't be planned for (pregnancies, redundancies, that sort of thing!) and my brother has postponed his own wedding for a year because SIL is expecting. My point is more that OH and I knew we were going to get married and be together forever, but didn't see the point of being formally engaged until we were actually going to do it. We'd saved in advance, and done all the moving / house stuff before we committed to it - it just seemed the most sensible way round to us.