If you don’t want a long engagement and you already feel little resentful that you had to wait six months before even getting “officially engaged” so as not to upstage the SIL and you don’t want a big wedding – just a casual brunch thing – and you can’t afford a honeymoon on top of going to a destination wedding a few weeks later, and you’re 35 and want to get the show on the road and start having babies, why wait until next year (next spring, I think?) to get married? Is getting married on your grandparents’ anniversary *that* big of a deal? Why not get married in, like, late September or October or November of this year, which I’m assuming would be like seven to nine months before your SIL’s wedding, would keep your engagement short (although you’ve been “sort of” engaged for what sounds like several months already?), and would space out the $$ you and others would spend on these occasions. Just an idea. You really don’t need months and months to plan a wedding, especially a casual one with a casual honeymoon. We planned our Manhattan wedding and our two-week European honeymoon in less than five months, and would have done it even quicker except we had to wait for my parents’ to have time off to make the trip from Germany, where they lived at the time.

PS — Wendy beat me to it with a host of other excellent points.

Oh jeez. Family would have to choose between weddings *two months* apart? Huh!? There’s literally been nothing said to conclude that. My family managed just fine in a similar situation where many of us had to travel to both.

That said, I do agree that if you guys just wanna be married, the date is less important.

Yes. In my family, and in many other families, people would have to choose. Why? Not everybody can afford to fly across america every couple of months. Nor would they necessarily want to.
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Apart from that — it’s a classic dick upstaging move. “Yay! Remember how You’re getting married? Well, I am doing it first! Hah!”
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PS — I suspect any wedding planner or wedding magazine advice columnist would agree that this is especially true among siblings.

WTF BGM ?

How is a marriage happening 2 months before the SIL’s wedding raining on her parade ?

And Veritek’s is a low key local wedding as opposed to SIL’s destination wedding with all bells and whistles.

If the SIL wrote to complain, you would have blasted her for being a bridezilla. You just have to find something to criticize a poster. Even if she is doing nothing wrong and everything right.

Veritek, just go for it. Whatever works for you is good.
Your SIL is not a princess that everyone has to bow down and change their schedules (and these days that is not even happening to real princesses). Is she going to throw a tantrum every time another cousin or friend gets married in the next year ?

Right. It’s a smallish, brunch wedding. Hardly a big extravagant wedding affair that would outshine another wedding. (I think it sounds lovely @veritek). The only people overlapping are three guests.

I mean, when is the acceptable amount of time you should not “upstage” someone and put your life on hold? 3 months? 6 months? A year?

I actually remember that my ex-fiance’s older sister got engaged a few weeks after the ex-fiance and I did. She was going to plan her wedding for a couple of months after ours. I couldn’t have cared less! In the grand scheme of things, is what comes after, the marriage, the most important part?

EDT: When you think about it, they already put their engagement on hold to give his sister some “look at me” time. Now they have to put the wedding on hold? Or get married ASAP? And what’s next? If the future SIL gets pregnant first, do they have to wait a certain amount of time until after her baby is born to get pregnant? If this were a week or two, I’d probably advise differently. 8 weeks is plenty.