Guest list rules to help you keep your wedding small

Guest post by Annie
wave your flags everyone

Our biggest wedding planning challenge was the guest list! From the beginning, Kyle and I knew we wanted to have a fairly small wedding. What we didn't know was exactly how difficult that can be to pull off.

When we started making the guest list we realized that we had two options:

  • Give in and invite everyone we know OR
  • Invite only immediate family to avoid hurt feelings

Neither of those options represented what we really wanted for our wedding, so we decided to go with a third option…

Could we exclude people we considered to be some of our best friends just a short time ago but now only see once every six months? What about aunts and uncles that hadn't even met our son?

That third option? Painstakingly pour over a list of everyone we consider to be either family or friends, and decide which ones would make the cut. This was especially hard because, in the two years prior to our wedding, both of us had gone through a huge growing period (which included meeting each other, falling madly in love, getting pregnant after just four months together, moving three times and caring for our most fabulous son) and therefore our social circle had changed dramatically.

Could we exclude people we considered to be some of our best friends just a short time ago but now only see once every six months? What about aunts and uncles that hadn't even met our son? All of these people still mean a lot to us, but if they don't know us as a couple, what's the point of them being at our wedding? It was, after all, a day to celebrate our life together. And if we exclude these people that we have known and loved for years, can we really justify inviting people that have only become good friends in a matter of months? There was so so so much to consider!

We ended up coming up with two rules which more or less answered all of our many queries:

  1. Only people who knew both of us decently well and that one, or both, of us cared about immensely.
  2. Definitely not anyone that one of us had never met before.

This worked well, both in helping us making decisions, and as a reason to give people when they asked us why so and so wasn't invited.

In the end we ended up with about sixty totally wonderful and important people attending our wedding. Were we happy with how everything went and did we love the intimate feeling this short guest list provided? Absolutely!

Do we hope that people know that just because they weren't invited to our wedding it doesn't mean that we don't love them? For sure.

For more guest list advice, check it out…

What rules are YOU using to help you cut down your guest list?

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