Small Wedding- Cutting guest count due to covid

If fiancé doesn’t care and his parents aren’t paying, draw the line and hold it!

Instead of "immediate family" (because for some, that means a best friend gets cut while others don't have that many relatives they are close to) make a list of the most important people you can't imagine the day without. No one else gets to judge who you pick and if they do, I would reconsider the relationship due to them being petty and jealous.

Based on everything you said, I’d go ahead and invite who you really want there, not who you feel the need to invite. It’s a bit childish of his mum to play the numbers game IMO.

Invite who you both want there! That way no regrets...

I think it should be 15 guests your side and 15 guests his side.

Sigh FMIL. Had the same fight with my FMIL about my minimony. FH and I drew a hard line at immediate family. It doesn't matter that my mom had more children than FMIL. It was OUR wedding and WE felt that drawing the line at immediate family was the right thing to do.


Stick to your guns here.
Also FH needs to be the one to tell this to FMIL and say it is a decision you two made together and are fully committed to

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I agree! 15 your side 15 his side

We did something similar — downsized to 35 from 120. The rough guidelines were immediate, local family + wedding party and their SOS/kids.


But my husband is also an only child, and didn’t want to invite any actual family besides his dad (and an aunt who couldn’t come). With that in mind, and to keep things a little less lopsided, he invited a couple that is like a second set of parents, a very close family friend, and one of his mentors. They’re basically his chosen family.
I don’t think it has to be an even 15/15 split, the most important thing is that the people you each want there the most to support you are. FMIL doesn’t get to dictate that list.

Girl I totally get it. We are getting married on our original date 4/22/21 (destination) but we had to cut our guest list from 100 to 40 and I feel so much less stressed about everything. Basically we just cut out ALL aunts and uncles except for our godparents to be fair. My fiancé has soooo much extended family and we were not willing to pick/choose because we find it incredibly rude so we had to do ALL or NONE. This worked out really well because all our aunts and uncles were so understanding and I still invited them to the bridal showers to be inclusive. We will celebrate with all of them individually this year. Whatever you guys decide — don’t feel bad, this is such a hard situation and for the most part people are understanding ❤️

My fiancé and I also had to cut our list from the initial 80 to 46, luckily no one was invited to anything it was just a mock-up list that we had to trim, but we decided the only way to make it fair who would come and who wouldn’t would be to invite guests that fell under one specific category: does this person know the both of us? Have we spent time together? And by selecting from those questions we got 46 and it also happens that 23 are from my fiancé and 23 are from me. We just figured out last weekend that it worked out that way. So if people ask we can just say we settled on a number and split it. The funny thing is my fiancé’s guest count for his side never changed. It was mine that dropped by 40 or so because I come from a huge family. But the people I had to cut never met my fiancé or even know his name. (We’ve been together 8 years). By doing this we make sure that the ppl in attendance are our nearest loved ones who have shared great memories with the both of us over the years and that’s really important to us. It has also been the most liberating thing for us to do because the constant waiting to the last second to know if you’d have to cut guests was weighing heavy on my heart and I really wanted to make a cut before I sent out save the dates which we may have had to revoke later on. We chose a number under 50 since 50 was the highest capacity our city was allowed. And in the case they decide to count vendors in this number we have some wiggle room.

We are doing something similar and I can really relate to the issues cutting down the guest list, especially when one side has a bigger family. On a related note, what are you all doing about your original bridal party, if you had already asked them? With just about 30 guests my mind is to just cut it at this point since it would be 1/3 of the total guests and we hadn’t purchased their clothes or anything yet. I don’t know if they all will be able to attend, either. But I’m not sure how to communicate this without offending anyone!?