Weddingbee Blog

One of things in wedding planning that took Mr. D and I the longest was figuring out the guest list. We have always wanted a smaller wedding because we want our wedding to be intimate. So we decided that the guest list would include 150 guests at maximum (believe me, that was as intimate as we could get it). So first we looked at our family portion of the guest list. Let me just say that we both come from larger families. Well okay, not this large:

Image via The Duggar Family Official Website / Photographer Scott Enlow via Studio E Nashville

But I do have one mom, one dad, one step-dad, one grandmother, one step-grandfather, one step-grandmother, 4 aunts and 5 uncles (plus their spouses…so double it), one step-aunt, 6 brothers and sisters (plus a pregnant sister-in-law), 16 cousins (plus some spouses and children of cousins). This alone is 55 people on my family list. Mr. D has 38 on his. That’s 93 people if we invite ONLY family. Out of our families invited, most have already said that they would be attending (and invites haven’t even gone out yet), and we also know of 15 that will not be attending due to health, distance, or financial reasons.

So then we looked to our friends portion of the list and were kind of stuck. Who do we invite?

How do we keep our list under 150? We knew that in order to do this, we would not be able to invite every single one of our friends. Sure have around 60 spots left, but when you think about it, that really only leaves about 30 invites if you allow people to bring their significant others. It was then time to whittle down the friends list. We each wrote our own lists that held “must haves,” and “would like to haves.” Then we came together to see how many we had. There was about 77 people on the list.

When we add the family list and the 77 person friend list (and their +1s), Mr. D and I realized that we were looking at 247 people on the guest list. This was almost a hundred over our highest number. It was simply way, way too high. I was worried that my small(ish) wedding was turning into something like this:

Image via The British Monarchy

Okay, that is obviously an exaggeration, but I’m sure you get what I am saying. I want to spend my day with my nearest and dearest. I want to make sure that I not only have time to say hello to everyone, but that I have time to actually celebrate the reason everyone is in that one place and time without worrying that I missed spending time with someone. The only solution was to start cutting.

Cutting family was not an option for us. We are both very close to our families, therefore, all 93 members on the list would be invited, no if’s, and’s, or but’s. Cutting friends was definitely hard, but we made it work. We started by cutting everyone from the list that we had not actually talked to in over a year. That right there let us lop off about 32 people from the list. Which brought us down to about 45 invites. We then cut those who we knew we were only inviting due to social pressures (for example, they invited us to their wedding), and not because we felt particularly strongly about them being there. This allow us to take another 10 invites off, which left us with about 35. After that, there was not one person that we really wanted to remove from the list.

The final guest list holds a number of 163. We know that not every single person will come. Like we said we already know of about 15 family members who will not be there. We also have to take into consideration that typically about 20% of the guest list decline. Which means that we should only have about 131 people RSVP yes. Even if every single one of our friends RSVP yes, we will still be under 150 due to the 15 family members that are not coming.

This process from start to finish took us about two months. It was very stressful because we wanted to make sure that everyone that is important to us was invited. Mr. D and I both feel that we managed to accomplish that with our guest list. It took some careful, and brutally honest evaluations of our friendships, and some diplomacy on both of our parts, but we got there. Now I just need to start designing the save the dates and invites to send out to said guest list and we will be golden!

Did you have a difficult time coming up with your guest list? Was it a large battle? How did you decide who to include and who not to?