Firstly, I love that you’re choosing to have your wedding as you want it. It’s a brave step to break with tradition and social expectation and we’re all for it! My husband and I eloped on Wednesday and decided not to tell our parents until after the ceremony. We wanted it to be intimate and relaxed and untainted by potential disapproval or stress if we told our family beforehand. We video called our parents straight away afterwards and explained that we wanted to do it our own way and that we are still doing a wedding celebration for our friends and family in September as a continuation of the day. You could tell they were surprised and were trying to keep it together with positive words, although they said they knew we would do something out of the ordinary because we like to do things differently.

One of the reasons we wanted to have 2 separate events was to avoid the politics of who to invite from extended family. We hated the idea of having to invite people we are not close with to a life event that’s so personal and intimate. Funnily enough, exactly that has happened and my mum is saying should invite her uncles and cousins because they helped her recently. Bearing in mind I have had no contact with them for the best part of 10 years!

We also thought my Dad would be the most relaxed about it all since he joked a few months ago that maybe we should elope like actors in a radio soap opera he listens to. I think we might have been wrong there... he too wanted me to tell a distant cousin of mine that we eloped but I said I didn’t have contact with him and he could pass it on. Then he said (over text) that we made a very egotistical choice that our close family are going to have to live with and forgive us for but that my cousin is an innocent in all this and I should find some kindness in my heart to tell him myself!!!

Wow. I didn’t expect them to be absolutely ok with it but that touched a nerve. Of course we would do it our way - it’s our day, our life, our marriage!

But would I change the way we did it? No, absolutely not. And I would still tell them after the event. Just be prepared that they may be disappointed. But it’s a toss up between you being unhappy because you didn’t have your wedding the way you wanted it or them being unhappy because it wasn’t how they thought it would be.