One-day wedding versus a full wedding weekend, which team are you on?

What I’ve noticed as a wedding planner…

Weddings used to be simple. A Saturday or even more practical, a weekday 10:00 a.m. at the town hall, cake, a dancing aunt, and if you really went all out, ending the night at 11:00 p.m. with your feet in a bucket of ice water. These days, things look very different.

More and more couples are no longer choosing a single wedding day, but a full wedding weekend. Is that excessive or simply a wonderful way to stretch out the moment? When you consider that getting married is no longer just a box to tick on life’s to-do list, but increasingly seen as a meaningful experience, a true life event, it actually makes a lot of sense. Something you consciously celebrate with the people who genuinely matter to you.

So why squeeze everything into a tightly scheduled eight-hour timeline when you can turn it into three relaxed days instead? A laid-back welcome dinner on Friday with a theme, a heartfelt ceremony and long dinner on Saturday, followed by a party no one quite remembers the next morning. And to top it all off: lingering together over croissants and mimosas at Sunday breakfast.

From tradition to experience

The wedding-weekend trend made its way over from countries like the United States and Australia, where experience has long outweighed tradition. It’s about togetherness and creating memories. Weddings have become more personal. Less “this is how it’s supposed to be” and more “this is what feels right for us.”

And yes, that sometimes means a wedding starts to resemble a mini-festival, where the question of where to book a saxophonist comes up more often than which bridal boutique to visit.

Maybe this is just our generation

And perhaps this shift simply makes sense for our generation. We don’t want stress, rushing around, or “sorry, I’ll talk to you later” moments on our own wedding day. If we’re already planning everything a year in advance, creating Pinterest boards and building Excel spreadsheets that would impress even the most seasoned project manager, then we want to actually experience it all.

Because honestly, what’s the point of a perfect day if you mostly survived it instead of truly living it?

So… which team are you on? 💍🥂