Wedding Wednesday: Guest List

Since we're now well into the holiday season with all of its parties and entertaining and friends and family, I thought we could talk about the guest list for today's post.  Every wedding professional agrees that creating (and especially cutting) the guest list is one of the most stressful parts of the planning process - you can find a few articles about it here, here, here, and here.  There are so many opportunities for politics and drama to rear their ugly heads; even if you get along famously with each other's friends, there's a lot to navigate.  From family dynamics to dating histories to childhood cliques and beyond, the guest list conversation is studded with relationship landmines.

When Jon and I started discussing the feel of our wedding, we knew we wanted to invite a manageable number of guests.  It's all relative, of course, so the size of our list may seem huge or tiny to some of you, but we decided that we'd like to have 120-140 friends and family members with us for our celebration, which we thought was a reasonable window in which to include everyone we wanted without making us feel like we'd be spending the whole night on five-minute hellos.  After we had the budget talk with my parents, secured the venue (which can fit up to 140), and signed on with our caterer, we had a better idea of how many people we could afford to host.

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Jon and I started off by compiling our dream guest list - we included everyone we wanted to invite, price and practicality be damned.  Neither one of us has a huge periphery of acquaintances we felt obliged to add, so we actually came up with a pretty reasonable 156 in total.  Based on my calculations, though, we had to get that number down to 120.  It wasn't unbearably painful to whittle it to 138 together, but then we got stuck.  So, after a day of sitting on the list, I opened it up on my own and cut another ten.  Then I sent it to Jon, asking him to pick eight more to remove.

Now, Jon and I have had our disagreements as we've embarked on wedding planning, and I will absolutely admit that, when I lose, I often do so with very bad grace.  (Sorry, Jon.  You may possibly be a saint!)  But Jon's argument in this instance was perfectly simple and true, and I quickly accepted his point: I had gotten so caught up in the planning that I had become too rigid and was forgetting why we were having a wedding in the first place.  With his permission, I'm pasting some of his email here...

But just as important for me is that this wedding represents us, our lives, and the people who have shaped us. I don't see that in the heavily edited version of the invite list that we're working with now - we only get one shot at this, and I want to share it with as many people who are important to us as we can. Of course the most important thing about our wedding for me is you, and I want our vision for us to come true. All the elements are there for something beautiful to happen. For me though, the thing that will make our wedding magical is the people we share it with, and I want ours to be a wedding of inclusion. I know you want that too and I know we have to make tough decisions, but I think in a rush to plan we've been to quick to chop down the numbers.

Yeah, he's great - and, more often than I give him credit for in this process, he's right.  Jon accepted my apology very gallantly, and we agreed to keep the 138 guests.  After all, what's a wedding without our loved ones to share it with?

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Obviously, there are tons of considerations that go into your final guest list: budgets, priorities, family sizes, location, and timing, among others.  Here are the top three guidelines that we decided to use to keep us straight:

→ immediate family only (though we did make one exception to this for a very good friend who happens to be more distantly related)
→ we must have seen/spoken to the guest in the past six months

→ guests get a plus one if they're married, engaged, or have been dating their significant other since December 2011 (even if we've never met the partner)

We also felt strongly that we didn't want a B list, which most wedding professionals recommend couples have.  Our attitude was that if someone wasn't important enough to us to be on the A list, we didn't want to include them just to fill space.  This is a crude way of looking at things, but you're spending a certain amount of money per person at your wedding - would you want to spend that much on them otherwise?  For the 138 people we sent our Save the Dates to, the answer was a resounding yes!

linking up with something charming for #weddingwednesday today!