Wednesday, November 28, 2012

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.


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?


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!

20 comments:

  1. I didn't actually find making the guest list that hard - we were pretty set on keeping it small (100 attending was the number we wanted) and it wasn't too hard to come to that. I think we invited close to 120 and we had 85 or so attend - which was perfect, in my opinion. I think the hardest part was after the invites were sent out and then fielding questions about the wedding to those who weren't on the list. I was confident in who we had chosen but that didn't mean I didn't feel guilty later on!

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  2. Ugh the guest list! That was a nightmare for me! Before I even moved here, Alex and his family wrote up a guest list that was all just first names and when I started to organize it I had no idea who like 75% of the people were!!! And it didn't even include my family yet!! Finally I sat him down and was like right, I need surnames and we need to chop some people off this list because right now this is a big clusterf*** of people/family/third cousins twice removed's sister's best friends!

    It was especially hard because we kind of had to cater to my family being a priority, not because they were MY family but because they'd be flying in from all over America to be there, we couldn't just be like oh by the way our guest list is full, sorry!

    such a relief now that the invites are out!!

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  3. oof you have identified my #1 problem - which I'll be talking about next week :) I'm sure we'll feel guilty at times, but just because someone wasn't invited to a wedding doesn't mean you can't celebrate with them somehow after, right? or is that just a comforting lie...

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  4. ooooh boy. yes. yes to all of this. Jon was actually fine with limiting the list to more immediate family in part because he has a pretty big clan - I was the slightly grumpy one because I haven't met half of his aunts/uncles/cousins. of course we couldn't leave them off, but I feel like it's sort of weird that our introduction will literally be "hello and welcome to the family."

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  5. What a great way to do it, and Jon is right, it is about inclusion, so I am happy you guys settled on a happy number - our number was around that and it was a perfect amount!

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  6. oh yay! next week I'll be talking about acceptance rates for destination weddings (among other topics) - any advice on how to prepare for this?

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  7. We used the immediate family/close friends criteria and still ended up with over 100 invites for our destination wedding - but we discovered that a destination wedding guest list is kind of self pruning! As we got closer to the RSVP date, as folks looked at getting time off or the expense of the trip, and some of our older relatives weren't able to travel so far, that number dropped down to about 70 folks, which was about where we wanted it. If you're worried about a difference of only about 10-15 people, that will probably take care of itself :)

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  8. We had a similar debate (although keeping our list to near 100) in our home and thankfully we came to a similar agreement about sharing our day with those people who are important to us, regardless if we're 4 or 12 or 20 people "over our limit".
    Like I mentioned, we were aiming for 100, ended up inviting 112 and it's looking like we'll have around 95. We were under the impression based on inital conversations with people that most people would come, but there's always a few who can't make it that will bring your final number down too.

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  9. oh good! I know it's sort of a crap shoot with destination weddings, which is part of the reason we're sending everything out so far in advance! thank you :)

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  10. yeah - we already have a few NOs from people who can't come, which is helping to give us an idea. but you're so right that "over the limit" isn't what it's about. so four more people come than you expected... so you don't buy designer shoes (or whatever). it's all about priorities!

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  11. those are great ideas to narrow down the list. I've always wondered how people keep their list small!

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  12. haha well I think that small is relative! I have a friend who had a wonderful wedding with 60 guests, and have read about weddings with 400. (Not sure I even KNOW 400 people. Maybe all my Twitter followers would want to come? hehe)

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  13. We did major chopping down for our guest list, and there really was no way around it. Unless people had money to donate to the wedding, it just wasn't feasible for us. Funny enough, I had two people who were sore about not being invited, even thought it had been YEARS since we saw each other. That's not fair.

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  14. This is the best post I've ever seen about a guest list. I'm not just saying that because you're awesome, either. When we were looking for venues, we told the places 125 but we ended up with closer to 150. We were very much of the same mindset as Jon. I'm so glad that we did! (I'm sure you know this too, but keep in mind that everyone may not come, even if they RSVP. We had 147 RSVP and that two empty tables at the reception! That's 16 people!)

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  15. Oy- this was easily my least favorite part of wedding planning! I like the rules that you came up with, and I totally agree with what John said in his email. In retrospect, I wish I wouldn't have stressed about it so much and just kept some people on there if it was going to bother me. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess! :)

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  16. maybe this is naive, but I'd hope that the real friends would understand if/why they were left off - money, space, etc. seems like it's the not-so-real friends who give you a hard time about it :(

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  17. why thank you! but I don't understand how you can RSVP and then just now show up... how does that happen!?!?

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  18. that's why I have all of you - to be my hindsight before I get there :)

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  19. betsy, this is so honest and i believe it happens much more than people care to admit! since we're having two celebrations, we need to make sure the essential guests are included in italy and america. there was a group of about ten not super close people that i thought manu wanted to invite "just to" if you know what i mean, and he gave me the same speech as jon did to you! haha! (great minds think alike?) and think in the long run 10 or 20 extra isn't a big deal at all. phew. i admit, this wedding stuff is stressful at times.

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  20. Good luck to you! :)

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