Cutting Back Guest List

I am 100% in agreement! Good for you guys. That being said, my FH and I went the other direction and started with a guest list of 50 people that then grew to 80 people (total RSVP count is about 50 anyway 😁). The late additions were mostly old family friends who my FH and I socialize with, in addition to the fact they have known me my whole life. The other late additions were 4 of my FH coworkers who now play D&D with us every week. He hadn't even started that job before we got engaged so they were not on the initial list. It seemed silly not to invite the people we spend the most time hanging out with.

100000 percent agree. I have started cutting my list down dramatically. Determining who are really my friends and who wants to authentically be there because they love us and who just wants to come and party. I decided any previous friend or coworker who hasn’t kept in contact with me over the last year is eliminated.

Understood, I think we have done this once we first got engaged, but I think another cut is due.

View Quoted Comment That makes perfect sense to me! It can be so hard when you start planning a wedding months in advance and your social circles evolve so much in that time! Definitely invite the people you see frequently ☺️

View Quoted Comment Good idea! 👏🏼 I have always wanted a small wedding. And then someone I know came back from an old friend’s wedding and was making fun of the decorations, the couple, everything. I realized then and there I don’t want anyone there who I don’t have a present relationship with and just comes out of obligations

View Quoted Comment Yep that’s how we felt

Absolutely. So many couples invite people they don’t want in attendance just to please others and that is the wrong reason. Never ever do anything out of obligation, no matter what it is. If it doesn’t make you happy and it’s not required (most isn’t), then skip it. The common misconception is that this is the only party you will host in your lifetime and that is not true. Relatives can easily get together at an annual family reunion picnic at a local park. Start a tradition and it will take care of itself. Parents’ friends and associates don’t care if they miss your wedding.


Make a list of those people who you cannot imagine the day without. Anyone else is not invited, period. However, you can’t separate significant others and you can’t ask someone to celebrate your relationship while discounting theirs as valid. That applies to guests who feel serious after 4-5 months. Tinder dates don’t last longer than a week in most cases so that argument is out.

View Quoted Comment Yes to all of this! We are inviting all serious significant others and I would be hurt if someone invited me to a wedding and not FH! However one of my close family friends said something about bringing someone so it wouldn’t be awkward and I’m like heck no you’re not bringing a random tinder date to a tiny wedding 😂

This is actually what me and my husband ended up doing in 2020 before our June 2021 wedding. We knew we needed to start accepting that covid would most likely be around by our wedding and should scale back our 80 headcount before save the dates and things went out. So we each picked 20 people who were absolute must invites. Funny thing was my husbands side of the list was already just 23 people. He has a very small family and 1-2 good friends. My family is like 100+ so getting it down to 60 in the first place was impressive. But we ended up have 22-24 guests from both sides of our family and had a beautiful micro wedding.

That's why save the dates are so tricky, and I'm not sure they're a good idea. Priorities change over time, and once you've sent the save the dates out you're committed.

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I agree with Michelle:
" you can’t separate significant others and you can’t ask someone to celebrate your relationship while discounting theirs as valid. That applies to guests who feel serious after 4-5 months." But we opted for 6 months ANDDDDDD because we know most SOs but not all of them,
we are telling our folks that they'll have to introduce those we don't already know to BOTH of us before the rsvp deadline. It doesn't mean they have to invite us to dinner but we want to see their face, even Facetime for 2 mins via the internet. It may sound rude but NOT being introduced to anyone on our big day is very important to both of us.

We are not going through this because our guest count was "90-95%" ready before we started touring venues. Those we haven't seen in 1+ year (before we got engaged) and those we don't see on the regular weren't on the initial list. His mom wants us to invite some random friends of hers we haven't met (or barely know) because they invited her to their kids' weddings, so she felt we "should" add them: "no" because it's NOT our problem, we didn't ask them to invite her; and my dad wanted us to invite some of his coworkers I don't even know.All requests have been met with a firm NO and this face 😐. LOL! We said our wedding WON'T be a family or corporate party. My future sister in-law was forced to invite them coz FH's parents covered 50% of the bill, so it didn't help but this is also why we knew we decided to foot the bill ourselves in the first place and to decline all offers from parents to help (both financially and with the planning), otherwise our guest count would be 200-220, more than half of whom would be people we don't (or barely) know or care about.

We're NOT adding people that don't care about us and only want to party with friends or family.

View Quoted Comment That sounds lovely! My FH was the exact same way. By picking 20, it only eliminated like 5 people and a lot more for me 😅

View Quoted Comment True! I never thought I would buy save the dates but they had magnets on a huge sale so I went for it. Hopefully I don’t regret sending any of them 😂 Honestly more as a memento for me personally. 😊

View Quoted Comment Makes sense to me! I haven’t even met one of my FH’s groomsman though much less his gf 😭 Hopefully I will before the wedding! Well I guess I have met him via phone call if that counts.

Yes it would be awful to have a wedding with mostly your parents’ friends! 😂 Luckily my parents haven’t asked me to invite anyone. My sister had it rough though because she can be a pushover and added friends of her MIL to the list even though my parents paid for it! My parents didn’t realize until invitations were already sent and were pretty upset they were paying for people my sister didn’t want there while not even inviting their own family/friends to the list.

View Quoted Comment Your sister's MIL is so entitled! A very manerless person!
I don't understand why your sister added the MIL's friends if she didn't want them: Is she scared of her? Is her husband a total mama's boy so he can't say "NO" to her? Or he is scared of her? I'm not even joking.
This woman wouldn't have behaved this way if she was my mom or FH's.Plus: Your parents were paying, I don't understand why they didn't take a look at the guest list so they would have noticed their daughter added these random friends and would have put their foot down?? Everytime I read this kind of post/reply on WW, I can't help but be angry at the parents or in-laws.

I second this because I went through the same; we wanted smaller but as we kept planning and it all got bigger and bigger with more and more people it started to really give me anxiety and stress me out to the point where I told him I wasn't sure I wanted to even show up to my own wedding lolol...

View Quoted Comment They thought the guest list was finalized so I don’t think they noticed. Not really sure how it all happened tbh. My sister is very much a people pleaser, which always comes back to bite her. Frustrating but they still had a beautiful wedding!