Miss Bicycle, Tallahassee, FL/Savannah, GAAge and Occupation: 30, Staff Director for Florida LegislatureFiance's Age and Occupation: 46, Government AffairsEngagement Date: August 16, 2012Wedding Date: October 2013Venue: Trinity United Methodist Church/GaribaldiAbout Me: I'm a Northerner by birth and a Southerner at heart, rooting for the New York Yankees all summer and the New Orleans Saints in the fall. Mr. Bicycle is a born-and-raised Floridian who lives for Gator football. We are political junkies and triathletes who love to travel and enjoy good food and wine. We have 16 years between us, and I am excited about becoming a step-mom to two great children. Our fleur de lis-filled wedding will be held one magical October evening in Savannah, Georgia, and we cannot wait!
The guest list has probably been the biggest point of contention throughout this process. And maybe contention isn’t even the right word. It has just been really difficult to narrow down the people in our lives to those who would be invited to our wedding.
Here are some facts:
“They say” to invite 20% more than you want to have.
We are having a destination wedding but in a city that is within driving distance of where we live.
Our venue seats 120 at the very maximum.
If we have 120 guests, we will have to move tables to make room for dancing after dinner.
If we have 120 guests, they will get to know each other very (very) well.
For a while I was going with the 20% rule, which meant we aimed to invite 150. The more I thought about it and talked to people, though, the more I realized this wasn’t going to work for us. Combine destination wedding with being forced to invite family I haven’t seen since I was a toddler, and we decided we should plan on a 30% decline rate.
Miss Bicycle, Tallahassee, FL/Savannah, GAAge and Occupation: 30, Staff Director for Florida LegislatureFiance's Age and Occupation: 46, Government AffairsEngagement Date: August 16, 2012Wedding Date: October 2013Venue: Trinity United Methodist Church/GaribaldiAbout Me: I'm a Northerner by birth and a Southerner at heart, rooting for the New York Yankees all summer and the New Orleans Saints in the fall. Mr. Bicycle is a born-and-raised Floridian who lives for Gator football. We are political junkies and triathletes who love to travel and enjoy good food and wine. We have 16 years between us, and I am excited about becoming a step-mom to two great children. Our fleur de lis-filled wedding will be held one magical October evening in Savannah, Georgia, and we cannot wait!
This seems to be a pretty common debate in the wedding world—to invite kids or not? As you will learn, I have the world’s smallest family. This means I don’t have any little cousins our nieces or any other children I need to invite. We do, however, have two very special kids on the guest list—Mr. B’s son (M) and daughter (A). That was pretty much where we decided to end the list of underage guests. Pretty much…
At one point we thought about inviting the children of some of our guests who are friends with A & M. With the guest list tight as it was, though, we didn’t want to have to remove certain friends to make room for children. No kids of friends—decision made. We then thought about Mr. B’s sisters’ children. There are only three of them in total and they are Mr. B’s family—we easily figured out a way to make room for them on the list.
Mrs. Otter, Indianapolis, INAge and Occupation: 22, Freelance Social Media ConsultantFiance's Age and Occupation: 23, CVS Shift SupervisorEngagement Date: November 11, 2011Wedding Date: April 2013Venue: Mustard Seed GardensAbout Me: I'm a born and raised Hoosier girl, but a diehard Michigan Wolverines fan. I have a tendency to take too many photos and spend full days having TV marathons. Mr. Otter and I met in high school, started dating a couple years later, and moved in after a month of being official. He is easygoing and makes plans on a whim, while I'm color coordinating my planner and organizing everything in sight. He hates glitter, but it's my favorite thing. I have tattoos and he still won't get one, despite my attempts to convince him. We're planning a small, rustic, and (hopefully!) peony-filled wedding to get our married life started. (And yes, there will be glitter involved!)
Oh, weddings. While intended to be days full of love and celebration, weddings bring out the crazy in people. It seems that even the most sane of people go totally off the rails in the months leading up to a wedding. While I’ve touched on the crazy before (and no, I’m not linking—I want to pretend these things never happened!), today I’m talking about those things. Yes, the RSVPs.
Let me tell you something about RSVPs—I never knew they were so complicated! I thought you receive an invitation, you look at your calendar, perhaps take a few other steps like talking to your place of employment and family members, and then you respond if you will or will not be attending. Oh, hive, let’s all laugh together at how wrong I was!
Personal photo / You see! I was excited to send these!
Miss Jackrabbit, Brighton, UKAge and Occupation: 26, Office ManagerFiance's Age and Occupation: 25, SongwriterEngagement Date: October 5, 2012Wedding Date: September 2013Venue: Fabrica Gallery, BrightonAbout Me: I honestly thought I'd go all Monica Geller when I started planning our wedding, but in truth, things couldn't have gone much differently. I am working my way through this venture, figuring things out as I go, and adopting a 'Que Sera, Sera,' approach to making decisions. When I'm not organising the biggest day of my life, I can usually be found drinking a glass of wine, crafting up one thing or another, or stopping my cat from head-butting me in the face.
I have one of the smallest families I have ever known. There are six of us. Mum, Dad, brother, sister, Grandma, and me. Six.
Jack has two of the biggest families I have ever known. He’s half Sicilian—so you can expect a large family on that side. Except it’s not his Sicilian family that’s the big one—it’s his English family. And these people see each other all the time.
Every single year a fireworks party is held at his Grandma’s house, and her five siblings arrive, each with their own children and grandchildren, and in some cases great-grandchildren! His mother is one of four, and one of her sisters has six kids of her own…that’s a lot of people!
So what do you do when you have a family this big? You have to put them into groups. The Immediate Family, the Close Family, and the Extended Family.
The Immediate Family. Mum, Dad, brother, sister, two grandmas, and grandad. Not bad.
Mrs. Gray Wolf, Washington DCAge and Occupation: 26, Business Development ExecutiveFiance's Age and Occupation: 30, Research ScientistEngagement Date: November 11, 2011Wedding Date: February 2013Venue: Whittemore HouseAbout Me: I'm an ultra-organized, pun-loving, list-making, cheese-enthusiast bride-to-be. Although my day job is in cubicle land, I'm happiest in the modern art wing of a museum, having recently earned my Masters in Museum Studies. Shortly after a chance meeting five years ago, I moved in with Wolfman and haven't looked back since. We love music, movies, TV, and all things pop culture; we have an unspoken competition to be the first to share the latest YouTube sensation or indie song. Together, we've filled quite a few pages in our passports, but also love quiet nights in with a Game of Thrones marathon and our French Bulldog, Tonks (Harry Potter, anyone?). I'm planning a small, cozy winter wedding---think mercury glass and candle light---in the heart of DC. Our venue is a historic home with a lot of political charm, but needs a bit of work to be wedding-ready.
I always love these posts from other bees, so I figured I’d give you a glimpse into our guest list and RSVP breakdown.
For the ceremony, our venue holds 100 at the absolute maximum. We knew we would get some declines, but we didn’t want to risk too much. Save some of my side of the family, we didn’t invite any “peripherals”—you know, the second cousins you never see, or old college classmates—and there’s not much else going on in February, so we were fairly confident that most people would be able to make it. We ended up inviting 108:
Whoops. I didn’t realize how skewed this was until I looked at it in a nice chart fashion.
Mrs. Lyre, PhiladelphiaAge and Occupation: 31, LibrarianFiance's Age and Occupation: 29, Government EmployeeEngagement Date: November 11, 2011Wedding Date: January 2013Venue: Atrium at the Curtis CenterAbout Me: I’m a book loving, photography obsessed, artsy/crafty bride to be, who was dating all the wrong men, until I met the right one, and where one story ended - our new life together began. He’s a video game loving, quirky t-shirt wearing, movie quoting geek who stole my heart, and welcomed me into his. Together we are a happily co-habitating couple, who live in South Jersey, and are planning a wedding in Philadelphia in January 2013. We love to cook, share a bottle of wine, and watch way too much TV; we laugh all the time, don’t sleep nearly enough, and cannot wait to begin our lives as husband and wife!
With three weeks until the wedding, our numbers are in, we are working on all the fun logistics like seating charts and who will sit where, but there is a deep nagging feeling of disappointment when I look at our list.
Warning: slightly ranty pity party for one ahead.
Now, I knew ahead of time that you typically get 20% declines of all the invitations you send, and that is exactly what we got. We sent out 124 invitations, and we got 25 “declines with regret” or just plain old “no” from those who couldn’t be bothered to mail back the response card that has a self-addressed stamped envelope included, and we had to spend hours tracking them down—seriously rude. How hard is it to check a box and put it in the mail? Or even better the ones who respond yes, and then text that they can’t make it. GRRR. (/rant) Sorry. I really do get that life happens and unexpected things occur, and our wedding isn’t nearly as big a deal to anyone else as it is to us, but it just stings.
Miss Mongoose, New Haven, CTAge and Occupation: 28, Digital AdvertisingFiance's Age and Occupation: 30, Business DevelopmentEngagement Date: November 19th, 2011Wedding Date: May 2013Venue: Hotel Nelligan in Montreal, CAAbout Me:
I was born and raised in Queens, NY (though you would never know due to my lack of a "real" New York accent) but currently live in Connecticut with my fiance. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a crazy obsession for planning and organizing things, so it comes as no surprise that I'm currently obsessed with planning our wedding. I love dancing, music, traveling, reading fiction novels, cooking, the color blue, cupcakes, all things space science-related and TV shows created by Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams. My fiance and I have been together for seven years and are so excited to finally get married next year. We are planning a peacock-themed destination wedding in Montreal, one of our favorite cities in the world, with 100 or so of our closest family and friends. While we may look very different on the outside, we have eerily similar personalities (probably due to the fact that we share the exact same birthday) and share very similar passions. But above all else, we love each other and love to have FUN!!!
The guest list was the bane of my existence for quite some time. FH has a pretty small family, so even though we invited nearly all of his immediate and extended family, they still barely made a dent in the list. As for our friends, they made up about 30% of the list. My family on the other hand is enormous, so figuring out who to invite (without hurting feelings) was a monumental task to undertake.
Mrs. Potion, Herndon, VAAge and Occupation: 23, ITFiance's Age and Occupation: 24, SalesEngagement Date: November 26, 2011Wedding Date: November 2012Venue: St. John’s Catholic Church / SpringHouse, Alexander City, ALAbout Me: We are two complete and total geeks that met at engineering camp, of all places, and after several years of being in love long-distance, we’re finally at the beginning of a lifetime together. We’re working with a modest budget to plan a long-distance wedding full of handmade details, Harry Potter references, and, most importantly, lots of love. I could spend an entire afternoon watching Food Network while shopping for shoes online, while he’d prefer to pwn some n00bs on Halo while blasting Deadmau5 on his stereo. I taught him how to swing dance and he taught me to appreciate Tolkien; he introduced me to LOST and I introduced him to the BBC’s Sherlock. I’m a Gryffindor, he’s a Ravenclaw, and we can spend hours discussing and debating the finer points of Rowling’s masterpiece. We’re so excited to be setting out on this adventure and I can’t wait to share all the details with you!
So, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not, but we’re getting married this Saturday. Holy crap, you guys.
Now that we’ve established that…
Let’s take a look at the RSVP breakdown!
The guest list for this wedding was MASSIVE. Originally, Mr. Potion and I had imagined inviting 100, maaaaybe 150 people, with about 50 people actually showing up because of the rather inconvenient location (Middle-of-Nowhere, Alabama, though it’s Middle-of-Somewhere to us).
And then the church told us that, technically, they could sit 300 people.
And then my mom checked out reception venues, and the winner told her they could accommodate 200, or maybe even 250 people—or, if we utilized the outside space, as many as we want!
This is a dangerous thing to promise someone like my mom.
Miss Panda, Boston, MAAge and Occupation: 26, Graduate StudentFiance's Age and Occupation: 23, Graduate StudentEngagement Date: June 27, 2011Wedding Date: June 2013About Me: I love window shopping, cute animals, crafting, baking, and most forms of procrastination. I tend to be overly meticulous with choices to a point of complete and total indecision. Mr. PBear and I met and live in the amazing city of Boston. We are big nerds who love trying new foods, playing video games, and cuddling with our adorable hamster. After 5 years together, we are planning an intimate, DIY-heavy, vintage garden themed, nonreligious wedding in the city where we fell in love.
I have a confession to make—We not only have an A guest list, but also a B list, and maybe, possibly a C list.
I know some of you must be absolutely horrified at that notion, but hear me out. I think it’s the most realistic way of creating a guest list. Let’s be honest, even if you only have one list, there are different categories of guests:
1) Family Members: immediate, extended, and remind-me-how-we’re-related-again extended family.
2) Your friends: the close ones, the ones you wish were closer, the ones who were close but have moved away and you haven’t spoken to in years.
3) Your courtesy invites: like your boss, those coworkers you’ve worked with for five years but you don’t really know anything about, and those neighbors that your parents insist you “have” to invite, but “they won’t come anyways.”
Miss Panda, Boston, MAAge and Occupation: 26, Graduate StudentFiance's Age and Occupation: 23, Graduate StudentEngagement Date: June 27, 2011Wedding Date: June 2013About Me: I love window shopping, cute animals, crafting, baking, and most forms of procrastination. I tend to be overly meticulous with choices to a point of complete and total indecision. Mr. PBear and I met and live in the amazing city of Boston. We are big nerds who love trying new foods, playing video games, and cuddling with our adorable hamster. After 5 years together, we are planning an intimate, DIY-heavy, vintage garden themed, nonreligious wedding in the city where we fell in love.
Something about getting married makes people just ooze out of the woodwork. Friends you haven’t seen since you had braces, former coworkers that you have never talked to outside of work, that estranged third cousin once removed, and though you not interesting enough to talk to on an even semi regular yearly more-than-half-a-dozen-times-in-your-entire-life basis, they suddenly decide your wedding is the. place. to. be.
This is a phenomenon I like to call the guest-list creep. The guest list creep is the strange monster that wiggles into your guest list to make it seem to grow bigger and bigger every time you turn around. It’s the trickle of people that seem to appear over time, even though you’ve theoretically had a fairly set list for about a year. Even when you seem to manage it well, over time and before you realize it, your Aunt Polly’s nephew’s cousin’s best friend has somehow managed to make his way onto your list.
I don’t know why, but I always picture the guest-list creep as the Futurama brain slug. (source: Futurama Wiki)
Because PBear and I have had a fairly long engagement of two years minus a few days, this creep has happened fairly slowly so that I didn’t even realize it had happened until we realized that the people on our list would no way be able to fit into our venue. Our venue has a very strict fire code limit of 60 people.
Mrs. Coach, DallasAge and Occupation: 21, Undergraduate StudentFiance's Age and Occupation: 23, Retail Sales/ManagementEngagement Date: October 14, 2011Wedding Date: October 2012Venue: Piazza in the VillageAbout Me: I was born and raised in the piney woods of East Texas, but Dallas has recently stolen my heart (along with Mr. Coach, of course!) I love classic rock, suspense novels, and my sweet Mini Aussie puppy, Memphis. My fiancé and I are planning a traditional wedding filled with romance, and we can’t wait to combine our own personal touches with a timeless affair. We’re young in years, but are also old souls that love good food and great music, and enjoy many things that are well before our time. We’re planning this wedding together, learning lots, and relying on good wine and reruns of Seinfeld to keep us sane along the way!
When I initially started working on our guest list, one of the big questions that came up was, “How many people that we invite will actually show up to this shindig?” Of course, when I turned to my trusted friend, Google, I found many contradicting answers. Some websites said to expect 10-20% guests to respond with a “no” while others insisted that your declined list would be closer to 40% of those that had been invited. However, something that I noticed as I jumped from page to page was that the number of total invited was significantly different for each of these statistics. If you are inviting 500 of your “closest” friends to your wedding, I’m sure you can expect the decline rate to look a little different than a guest list that includes only you, immediate family, and your BFFs.
So, while our number of guests that responded “no” actually fell somewhere in the middle of the numbers I found, I think it’s important to share our RSVP breakdown with you guys, because it could be similar to your experience, especially if your list of people to invite looks similar to ours. Or, our numbers could be the exact opposite of yours, and my stats would be totally irrelevant. Either way, the graphs are fun to look at
So, here’s the breakdown:
We invited a total of 135 people to our wedding, including the bride and groom.
Our maximum occupancy in the reception ballroom was 120, meaning I was praying to receive some “no’s”
Of those that were invited, 53% fell into the Bride’s family or friends categories.
Miss Panda, Boston, MAAge and Occupation: 26, Graduate StudentFiance's Age and Occupation: 23, Graduate StudentEngagement Date: June 27, 2011Wedding Date: June 2013About Me: I love window shopping, cute animals, crafting, baking, and most forms of procrastination. I tend to be overly meticulous with choices to a point of complete and total indecision. Mr. PBear and I met and live in the amazing city of Boston. We are big nerds who love trying new foods, playing video games, and cuddling with our adorable hamster. After 5 years together, we are planning an intimate, DIY-heavy, vintage garden themed, nonreligious wedding in the city where we fell in love.
I love data. When I was in kindergarten, I remember, one of my first experiments I tried to do involved determining exactly when in the winter the leaves degrade and disappear. (I don’t think I was ever really good at figuring this out.)
Me, age four
I might be the only person in the world who writes the date on the bottom of her tissue boxes, just so she can keep track of how fast she’s going through them.
It’s very clear to me that I was always meant to grow up to be a scientist/engineer. I crunch a lot of numbers and deal with lots and lots of statistics in my day job. However, there it’s a tedious and boring task that, I must admit, I procrastinate on a lot.
Thus, when PBear saw me staring intently at Excel and cussing slightly, he assumed I was working on my research. He laughed so hard at me when he saw these figures, but I know he was curious too. =P
This is our initial guest list, to be updated when we get closer to the wedding:
Mrs. Buffalo, San Diego, CAAge and Occupation: 26, Treasury Services RepresentativeFiance's Age and Occupation: 27, Manufacturing EngineerEngagement Date: July 28, 2011Wedding Date: September 2012Venue: Bailey's Palomar ResortAbout Me: I’m a So Cal girl who doesn’t like the ocean (or sand) and would much rather be out in the country. I’m a Gleek and a Twi-hard, I enjoy baking, reading, watching old movies, and listening to country music. We both love football season, and thankfully our two favorite teams are in different conferences (and therefore rarely play each other). He’s a die-hard Indianapolis Colts fan, and I love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (and YES, we’re both born and raised San Diegans). He’s my best friend, and I can’t wait to begin the journey of our lifetime together.
I think that getting married, in general, is stressful enough. But throw a HUGE party into the mix, you know, like a WEDDING, and things just get complicated. A wedding is meant to celebrate a marriage, which is meant to be a lifelong celebration of your love and commitment to each other. It’s not just a “party.” It’s also not a family reunion or a way for your parents to show off to all their friends. But geez, sometimes in the planning stages you can’t tell the difference!
At my last wedding, the guest list, at first, seemed effortless: my friends, my family, his friends, his family. But then, all of a sudden, the sides on the list were uneven! Oh no! I didn’t care but all of a sudden the ex did. Plus, it didn’t help I was given a strict guest-list cap by my dad who was so lovingly paying for the party, and therefore had to invite work people he didn’t want to invite but, you know, “had” to. Chaos ensued and thankfully the wedding went by somewhat smoothly—the marriage, er, not so much.
Mrs. Toadstool, Obregon, MexicoAge and Occupation: 23, Research AssistantFiance's Age and Occupation: 25, Sales ManagerEngagement Date: October 1, 2011Wedding Date: December 2012Venue: Hacienda los AgavesAbout Me: I’m a born and bred Mexican girl with a severe coffee addiction, an obsession for books and an aversion for exercise. I like to plan things, so this wedding’s my dream project---I just need to remind myself from time to time that I’m the bride and not just the planner. I recently realized brown’s my favorite color as I was trying to incorporate it in every aspect of our wedding and I'm dreaming of an autumn vibe since we don’t have that around here. I’m marrying my best friend and partner in crime on the day of our nine-year anniversary! He’s an awesome, smart, fun guy who is patient, and crazy enough to spend the rest of his life with me. We’re planning our not-so-dreamy dream wedding in December in a non-traditional way and making it our own.
We’re wrapping up our guest list in the next couple of weeks; yep, we’re still working on this. Someone posted a fun flow chart on Mr. Toadstool’s Facebook wall a few months ago. It was titled “How to decide whom to invite to your wedding.”
The guest list was THE first thing we did after getting engaged (even before the ring), and our policy was simple: family and people we can’t live without.
Mrs. Gloves, Columbus, OhioAge and Occupation: 25, Executive AssistantFiance's Age and Occupation: 25, FirefighterEngagement Date: December 29, 2011Wedding Date: January 2013Venue: Cathedral ceremony, reception in a converted hardware warehouseAbout Me: I’m a blond-haired, blue-eyed Midwestern girl, who had grand plans of an international career, before the economy came crashing down right as I graduated college. I love travel, exploring other cultures, cooking for friends and family, and relaxing in a pedicure chair. My fiancé is the perfect, level-headed and logical counterpart for my impulsive tendencies, and the nicest person I’ve ever met. Lately, we like to spend our time renovating our new home, planning our wedding, and fitting in date night with friends. We are so looking forward to a wedding weekend jam-packed with all of our favorite people, plenty of food, and flowing champagne!
So, I already mentioned that our guess list was a little subjective in its creation—we have a limited space and seemingly unlimited people who could be invited. Rather than inviting people who seemed like obligations because of the way we were connected to them, McGlovin and I chose to really focus on filling our 120 seats with people who we wanted to be there, and people who really would want to be there. I know full well that the tradition in my family is to invite everyone you’re related to but, frankly, why the hell should I have to invite people to my wedding who aren’t important to me? Well, I decided not to—and that’s where the trouble arises.
