How to Seat Divorced Parents During Your Wedding Ceremony

We’ve talked about reserving seats at your reception and how important that is. But should you also reserve seats at your ceremony? Most of the time the first few rows at a minimum are reserved for family and/or wedding party if they’re going to be sitting during the ceremony. And those are marked off with flowers or sometimes “Reserved” signs can hang on the pews. Often the ushers help get everybody to those seats. Help is a loose word for ushers do, if I’m being honest, but we love them. ( :

Let’s be honest though, there are many situations in modern day life where seating for ceremony and who’s going to walk down the aisle in terms of the parents can be very difficult. And I have some tips to offer to you if you’re in a situation where you have divorced parents, divorced grandparents, or even non-divorced family members but ones in an uncomfortable family situation. Where everyone is going to sit and who is going to walk down the aisle with whom can be a really challenging situation.

I never like to say I’ve seen it all over the years, but I’ve seen a lot: Parents who’ve been divorced for most of the bride and groom’s lifetime, parents who just recently got divorced, stepparents who’ve been very involved in their lives, stepparents who are new to their lives, stepparents who were once illicit affair of the parents and then became parents afterwards, where one set of the parents is remarried and the other one isn’t, etc. As you can imagine, all of these are very tricky situations emotionally and can carry a lot of emotional baggage. And you really should think through who’s going to walk down with whom and where they’re going to sit at your ceremony. Obviously as the bride and groom, it is your day and it is your decision, but I do feel like the feelings of the parents and, maybe just because I’m a mother myself, should be taken into account in these situations.

The best thing you can do, first and foremost, is to ask your parents how they feel about whom they are walking with and where they are going to sit. And if there is a stressful family situation, it doesn’t hurt to make little “Reserved” signs with names for each seat for the ceremony itself. These are really simple. I make them in the nice fonts and print them on 4×6 photo paper from my own home printer, and we have it designated ahead of time who sits where.

If you don’t assign seats and your parents are divorced and really can’t sit by each other, if you just leave it to happenstance and you just let them figure out where to sit on the day of the ceremony, I have seen that go awry many times and cause a lot of problems. Can dad and mom sit by each other? Can dad sit by the new stepdad? Do there need to be buffer people in between? If there are buffer people, how does that other family member, mom or dad, feel being halfway down the aisle? I know these things seem silly and you may “Who cares? It’s my wedding. I should be able to decide this.” You know, in theory, that would be great, but I have found just talking to your parents really does help this situation and saying, “What’s going to make you the most comfortable?” and making these little Reserved signs with names per seat costs such little money and alleviates a lot of that stress. When the parents get to the ceremony and, especially if you have a Planner involved who has these Reserved signs ready at Rehearsal, the parents think, “Oh, these seats are already designated, and this has already really been thought through,” there is less contentious behavior that happens.

Now, your question might become, do stepparents get to walk down the aisle as part of the processional, and do they get to sit in the front row at a ceremony? There’s not a right or wrong answer here. I will say that if the stepparent has been in your life for a very long time, has been involved in your upbringing then, yes, I do personally feel they should be involved in walking down the aisle. Whether they sit in the front row is the same question. How involved have they been in your life? Some stepparents are going to be super offended if they have to sit in the second row. Some are totally okay with it. At a minimum, it’s nice to get a boutonniere or corsage for them. Again, sometimes just that act alone can make them feel special enough to stop hurt feelings on the day of the wedding between parents and stepparents. It shouldn’t be something that comes up, but it does.

Of course, it’s an emotionally challenging situation for divorced parents to be at a wedding of their children with the situation maybe reminding them that their own marriage did not work out. As the bride or groom, you know the problems that have arisen in those situations, so it just really is nice to talk with your parents about their feelings. I always say to default to the person the parent who is going to have the hardest time in this situation and see what’s going to make them most comfortable. Also, if you have a great Wedding Planning team, they’ll really make sure to make all members of the family feel important, special, and valued for that the entire day.

Again, a little thing you can do to alleviate a lot of that stress is to reserve seats by name for your wedding ceremony. Just remember, if you do these signs for one side, you have to do it for the other side. If the bride’s family is full of divorces and the grooms isn’t, you can’t just do the signs for the bride’s family, making it look like they’re the problem children and the groom’s family’s “normal.” You have to do it for both sides. It helps alleviate so much drama. I highly recommend it!

by Meredith Commender