Why We’re Having Two Weddings

London & Ibiza here we come!

I’ve mentioned this in passing a couple of times on here and promised a full post. Here it is.

We are getting married twice. A registry office ceremony in London in May 2027 with our families, and a wedding in Ibiza the same month with our closest friends. Two celebrations & two completely different atmospheres. And the decision to do it this way is one of the most considered things we have done in this entire planning process.

I want to explain why. Not to justify it (we don’t need to justify it) but because the reasons behind it are real and personal and I think they’ll resonate with more people than you might expect.

The reason we couldn’t just do Ibiza

My fiancé’s dad is unwell. He cannot travel. However, we always knew we wanted to get married abroad. That was never in question. But the moment we understood that my fiancé dad wouldn’t be able to make the trip, the question became not whether to change our plans but how to make sure he was part of our wedding in a way that was real and meaningful.

The answer was a wedding at Marylebone Town Hall in London. And once we made that decision, something clicked into place that we hadn’t fully anticipated…the London ceremony stopped feeling like an obligation and started feeling like its own thing entirely…our family wedding. This has been so wonderful as it has removed the noise of a big wedding.

What the London day actually looks like

We are getting married at Marylebone Town Hall. After the ceremony, we’re going for lunch with our families. That’s it. No bridesmaids, no best men, no friends. Family only, which we have kept deliberately tight.

This was a conscious choice and I want to explain the thinking behind it. The smaller you keep something, the more it belongs to the people in the room. We didn’t want a blurred middle ground where some friends were invited and others weren’t. A clear line makes the day more special for every single person there. Including us.

There is something about a registry office wedding followed by a long lunch that I find genuinely beautiful. No BIG production. Or BIG seating plan for 150 people. Just the people we love most and celebrating our love.

The hard part

My mum died when I was very young. I’ve written about this on here before. I normally hate talking about this but it’s relevant here because it was part of the conversation we had when we were working out what kind of wedding we wanted.

A traditional British wedding (the church, the big reception, the father of the bride speech, the famil and friends combined all in one room) is a format that was designed around a version of a family that mine doesn’t fit. I knew that doing it that way would make her absence loud.

Getting married in a way that doesn’t follow that template means I’m not spending the day navigating around a gap. I’m just getting married, in my own way, in two places that feel right to us, surrounded by the specific people we want around us at each moment.

I think this is something more people feel than say. The traditional wedding format can be genuinely painful for people whose families don’t fit the mould it was built for… through loss, through estrangement, through all the complicated ways families can be. Doing something unconventional isn’t always about being contrarian. Sometimes it’s about protecting yourself. And I think that’s completely fine.

Ibiza (The friends wedding)

The Ibiza celebration is a long weekend in May 2027 with around 35 of our closest friends. My sister will be there, she’s the only family crossing over between the two celebrations which feels right as she is part of our friendship group too.

This is the part of the wedding that will be more ‘fun’. The destination, the sun, the long weekend, the people we have chosen to build our adult lives alongside. There will be no children. There will be no obligation guests. Everyone in that would have made a deliberate effort to be there. All of those things will be soooo special and I cannot wait.

Ibiza is not a random choice. My family has a place on the quieter side of the island and it has been a place that has meant something to us for years. We have talked about wanting all of our friends together there since long before we were engaged. The wedding is not us taking our friends to a holiday destination. It is us bringing our friends to a place that already meant something to us, and having our favourite people enjoy it with us.

The question everyone asks

People hear ‘two weddings’ and they immediately want to know which one is the real one. The answer is both (without hierarchy). The London ceremony is where we become legally married in front of our families. The Ibiza weekend is where we celebrate that with the friends who are our chosen family. Neither is more real than the other.

We had a lot of conversations before we landed on this. We talked about whether it was fair, whether people would feel excluded, whether we were overcomplicating something that didn’t need to be complicated. And every time we came back to the same answer…this is the version that lets us be fully present and do what we wanted too do. for our wedding and celebrate with everyone that is important to us. Every person who matters to us gets a day that was designed with them in mind.

Have you done something unconventional with your wedding format, or are you thinking about it? I’d love to know. Drop it in the comments.

Cloudie x