Invitations - Large Family but limited amount of seats

The best way to do this is start with inner circles. If all aunts/uncles make you hit your limit then no cousins (unless they’re in your wedding party). You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings!

We are having a small ceremony and reception with close family and friends only... unfortunately that means 250 is the cap. Inviting extended family would have been a nightmare.
We just tried to make sure close family was invited. And tried to make things evenish. Then started a list of friends we couldn't imagine our day without.

Definitely in the same boat. If I invite my whole family I can’t invite my friends and honestly some of my friends are more family that they will ever be so I get to pick who I cut. It’s not fun though and I don’t even want to ask what my parents think because of course they will say invite everyone.

Hi Alexandria!

This is such a common problem for couples planning their weddings. Of course, you would want to invite everyone that is close to you, but often the budget doesn’t allow for it. And that’s completely understandable.

As the PP’s mentioned, the best way to do this fairly and to avoid any hurt feelings is to start your family guest list in circles. Start with the immediate family of both you and your FH and work outwards.

People totally understand that you can’t invite everyone and won’t hold any hard feelings, but if it comes to all of your cousins being invited, except for 2 that’s where the trouble starts!

My FH has a large family and I have a small family. He wants to invite more of his extended family to the wedding, but we are already planning on inviting 200 people (this is adults and children). My dad has a large extended family and we talked about it when I was getting ready to send out save the dates. We are close with some of my dads cousins (we have seen them in the last year) and some that don't bother with us. My dad thought that some of the cousins would be angry if they weren't invited, but I told him that I was only going to invite the people that we see and talk to a few times a year. My dad seems to be happy with that. I have also taken a few friends off my list. I have one friend that moved away a number of years ago, but is moving back to the area this summer. She never invited me to see her (she did invite other friends) and ignored my messages to meet up when I was in the area where she lives. I can't invite people that have no interest in my life.

My FH comments to me once in a while that he wants to invite this cousin or that cousin and I say "have to seen or talked to this person in the last year?" and "has this person made an effort to talk to you in the last 1.5 years (that's when his mom passed away)?" Usually after that he will keep them in his mind to add at a later date if we have people that can't come.

I'm with you. I have a huge family and FH family is very small. Only 2 are local and the other 8 are spread all over in different states. To make sure that he felt like he had people there, he invited all of his family, his co-workers and some friends and I got the rest of the invites for family and a few friends. There will and already have been comments about people that won't be invited but we wanted to keep it as intimate as possible and will be inviting around 85 people. We are expecting between 50-75 since we know that his 8 out of town members are all really elderly and probably won't be able to make the trip but if they can, we definitely want them there. I've just let people know that we wanted more of a intimate wedding and that our venue has a capacity that we have already reached but we are so thankful that they wish they could be there to celebrate with us.

I was in the same situation. I made a sharp cutoff at 2nd cousins.

I am in a similar situation. My mothers has about 100 cousins (this is not including their kids). My Grandmother has seven siblings so my moms side is huge. Fortunately, my dads side is much smaller, maybe 25 tops. However, we have a lot of friends that we want to come. We do not have the money to invite all of these people, nor do I want all of these people there. I would not be able to enjoy myself. So we decided to go with the people we have the deepest connection with. If we have not talk to that person within the past year, they do not get an invite. We got our list down to under 150 guests, and it is all people we have a close relationship with.

My advice is to keep it to people you will enjoy your day with. It is your day, not everyone else's. It is difficult at first, but once you realize how much fun you will have with the people you invite, it gets easier.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Remember, not everyone you invite will be able to come But this is extremely hard to factor into your math early on.

We are an older couple and need to save for our retirement so we decided to limit our wedding to only 50 people. Unfortunately, we are both from fairly large families. We decided to make it easier, we limited our family to our immediate families (parents, siblings, their significant others, their kids, his daughter and granddaughter). This accounts for 24 people by itself. Our number includes our vendors so some of our friends volunteered like our officiant, our ceremony music, our cake creator, our DJ, our photographer and our day of coordinator. After this we had 30 people accounted for and we wanted to invite our roommates which accounts for another 5 people. The last 15 were close friends. In this way, we could explain that due to numbers we had to stick with immediate family.

Some of our friends were upset that they couldn't be there on the official day so some friends volunteered their small club to have an unofficial wedding later in the summer where everything is going to be pot luck and casual. In this way, our friends who we couldn't invite to the official ceremony could still be part of our union without us costing more money. If you don't want to do a ceremony, you could have a pot luck party to celebrate the nuptials with those who you couldn't fit in the official list.

Is it just the cost of the invitations at this point? Some people are using digital ones now. But then there's also the reception...