Everyone loves a wedding—and you love everyone—but at some point, you do have to take your wedding guest list from a guesstimate to a definite number. This is when many bridal couples find that tensions rise with tough decisions having to be made about who will receive an invitation to the ceremony and the reception.
The wedding guest list stakes get even higher if your parents or other family members are applying pressure to add long lost relatives, or if you and your fiancé have a hard time saying no to colleagues or acquaintances. However, letting your guest list grow too large can create its own stress in terms of your budget and your enjoyment of a day that is meant to be shared by those close to you.
To help you avoid the stress of an unwieldy wedding guest list, here are some tips to help you trim it gracefully so you can keep everyone happy and your budget on track.
Start with any budgetary and/or location restrictions. Nothing brings a guest list back into reality like the facts. If you can’t afford to pay for an extra 20 meals at your wedding, or you are already at the capacity your venue allows, then clearly you will need to work within these constraints by prioritizing your guests and sticking to the numbers.
Stick to a fair guest list ratio. Your wedding guest list is the first of many compromises you and your significant other will have to make during your life together. Consider how you are going to allocate the total number of guests you can have between each of your families and groups of friends. If you have a lot of mutual friends and relatively small families, a 50-50 split is likely to be possible. If one of you has a much larger extended family and many more friends and colleagues, you may need to shift the ratio in their favor.
Cull the list by category. If you just cannot cut your wedding guest list by compromising, then divvying up your list by categories of guests might allow you to reach a more rapid resolution. For example, you might section off guests under the categories of immediate family, close relatives, extended relatives, family friends, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. See if you can agree on removing an entire category such as co-workers. If you still need to cut down your list more, perhaps reducing a category by half on each side is doable. If this strategy doesn’t work, then you may need to evaluate each possible guest individually giving priority to those closest to you.
Keep your guest list in the present. This is a hard one, but it is often necessary. Ask each other, if you haven't seen a potential guest in over a year or more, then do you really need to invite them to your wedding? Of course, family living far away may be an exception to this rule, but try to extend your wedding invitations only to those who are an active part of your lives right now.
Be upfront with family. If you are receiving financial support from family to pay for your wedding, then you should probably run the guest list by your generous relatives to make sure you haven’t missed anyone they view as an essential guest. If you have and there’s no more room, it’s better to have a frank conversation about the financial implications of expanding your guest list to see if they can help you bridge the financial gap. If you aren’t receiving any help with wedding costs, then simply explain that you are at capacity from a budget standpoint and your guest list must remain firm.
With these tips in hand, you should be able to trim your guest list to a manageable size and feel good about doing so. Once you have your guest list finalized, start creating your seating arrangements by using The Guest Table platform—it will eliminate stress related to wedding seating arrangements. You can even let your guests select their own seats! After all, once you’ve tackled trimming down your wedding guest list, you deserve everything else to be a simple as possible.
Author: The Guest Table