Cultural Diplomacy, Part 1: Wedding Budget and Cost

My fiance and I are very different people. He is a WASP who grew up in Connecticut, and I am a Chinese girl who grew up in Taiwan, and then immigrated to California as a teenager. Personality and political differences aside (and there are many), we also have cultural differences that are more than just east meets west. It gets a lot more specific than that, and one discovers them even more once engaged.

First, there is a difference in wedding traditions that has to do with cold hard reality of: money. Who pays has always been a touchy issue when it comes to weddings, but when it comes to two different cultures, it becomes touchy. I guarantee you that you will not find a wedding website that will answer the question when you are merging two different cultures on top of two different families.

In Chinese weddings, the groom's family pays. It is also customary (yes, even today) for the groom's family to visit bride's family to ask for the bride's hand. Gifts are usually exchanged from groom's family to the bride's. For more information on modern Chinese wedding tradition, read: http://weddings.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Chinese_Wedding_Traditions

How did my Future Husband and I handle this? Well, for one, we had both of our family come to visit us where we lived to meet. Since both my FH and I have been living independently away from the family for about 10 years, it made sense that we make our plans here where we live instead of where our families live. This solution certainly made more work for both families, but was much easier on us, the engaged couple. The meeting went well as well, and our parents got a long quite well and the time spent together was very enjoyable.

We were also very lucky on the issue of the wedding budget. Our parents understood the cultural differences and both are going to contribute equally to our parent matching fund, where my parents match what his parents contribute toward our wedding. My FH's family is accustomed to larger weddings, so they volunteered to pay for the wedding reception cost, which accounted for a large part of the budget. The good will and generosity on both sides means that we can have a reasonable wedding that will accomodate both families and our friends without going into debt. Very lucky indeed.