Who to invite to wedding?

I don't think the 50/50 thing always works out fairly, just depends on your situation. I think you need to think in circles first - like deciding you are going to invite family out to aunts and uncles, siblings + families. Here is how that part would have worked for us:

Me: 1 sibling (not married), 2 nephews (not married or attached), no parents, no grandparents, no aunts/uncles living. Total of 3 people

Husband: 1 father, 6 siblings + spouses, 14 nieces, and nephews, 16 aunts and uncles, total of 43.

Same circle of people for both of us, he just comes from a MUCH more prolific family than I do.

If we would have been aiming for 150 we would have split the remaining 104 places on our guest list. While lopsided, not unfair to either of us.

Heck, if I would have insisted on a 50/50 split I would have been including the mail man and his second cousin on my list.

Definitely not 50/50, but we've also been together for 9 years so my family is his family and his is mine already. And any friends are mutual friends. So...we made a list together. Technically about 70% of it belongs to "my family" because I have a huge family...but again it's all the people we both want there and couldn't imagine our day without.

Here was our final guest list breakdown:

My family - 12 guests

His family - 15 guests

My family friends (plus my parents' friends) - 59 guests

His family friends (plus his parents' friends) - 46 guests

My friends - 53 guests

His friends - 71 guests

Things felt fairly even to us, and the great news was that everyone (except for my mother) was able to invite everyone they really wanted to! My mom needed some restrictions... her 59 invites included 14 people I have never met in life. 👎 My parents invited more family friends but they were almost all a plane flight away from the wedding so they had a much higher decline rate. My husband and I agreed on both of our friend lists - but we've definitely been to more weddings for his friends and we were getting married in his hometown so that affected things!

We both lucked out big time on the guest list with having tiny families!!

My family - 1

His family - 14

My friends - 11

His friends - 5

I feel like we did pretty good on the division. He has more blood relatives. I have more friends that are "non-biological" family. FH and I are paying for the wedding, so there was no input from my mother or his father on who to add to the guest list. Only minor dissagreement that FH and I have had about the guest list is that I didn't invite my brother, his wife and their son or any of my in state blood relatives. I'm not speaking to my brother, so that doesn't bother me. Had I invited all my local family it would have added 11 more people that we couldn't afford to pay for.

My family is much smaller than my FH. Between my mom, dad and step dad, I think it's about 30 people. Whereas, my FH's mom and dad has like 80+ for invites. We didn't divide the number to see who would come. We just assumed to invite all my family that were necessary, then his. For friends, we have a mix group together then I have friends from work. Our invite is actual RIGHT at the max for our venue (150) so it worked out nicely. We are thinking that about 110-120 will come based on family who will travel.

We never really discussed it. Both sets of parents are contributing, and we are also contributing. So, I asked both of our mothers for lists and then I created a list of all of our friends, making sure to ask FH if I missed anyone... the combination of the three lists was right around the amount of people we were planning for. I guess we had it easy. We also kind of knew what to expect in terms of family lists because each of us had a sibling get married within the past few years. To break it down, this is how many we're having:

2 - Bride and Groom

51 - Grooms Family

47 - Brides Family

11 - Groom Family Friends

10 - Bride Family Friends

7 - Groom's Friends

5 - Brides Friends