Being brutal with the wedding list?

We decided any non-immediate family or not so close friends who hadn't bothered to get in touch with us since the engagement up to the time we send out invites will be relegated to evening only.

Order in which I prioritised people: immediate family (parents, grandparents, siblings, niece), the friends. Then aunties/uncles (not all, only those I'm close to). Then cousins (maybe a third of the cohort, again only those I like and am close to, if that meant one of a family of three, so be it).

Same here. I am inviting a cousin and his wife cos we are close, but not any of the same cousins family, as I dont see them much or feel close to them.

We are doing the same - OH has an aunt with 6 kids, but we are only going to invite one of them and her husband, the other 5 and partners will be invited in the evening.

Have you already booked somewhere or are you cutting down to make the budget smaller?

We made a list of everyone we wanted to invite, including our families, and then chose the venue to fit our guestlist size. If you haven't chosen a venue yet there are plenty out there which can cater for 130 or more.

As above for mine. Immediate family and very close family friends for the church (51 total) and evening 47. That is including kids too. I've been strict with it and decided that if i havent seen orspoken to them in the last 3 months then they're not coming. If they don't like it, tuff. We're not made of money. If they want to come then they can pay for themselves.

With things like this, you have to be hard because it'll only cause more stress than is what is needed

We haven't settled on a venue yet, but it looks like we won't be able to invite everyone we want.

Our list has a traffic light system - green people are the ones we definitely want to be there; my entire family (four people, woop!) and my OH's aunts/uncles/cousins, along with half a dozen school and uni friends each, plus mutual friends. They will be invited to the entire shindig; ceremony, meal & dodgy dad-dancing disco. This also includes anyone who would be on the amber list but would have to travel a long way to be there.

Amber are less certain; some are people we just feel obliged to invite or people our parents would want to be there.We've managed to shuffle some local friends who won't be offended at not being invited to the ceremony into this category too.

Red for people we would invite if space/money were no issue; people we haven't seen for a long time, & one or two who would just be courtesy invites i.e. returning previous invitations. There aren't that many people on the red list so we may just forget them altogether.

We found that inviting plus-ones was making the numbers ridiculous so we're only having them for people who don't know any other guests and therefore might not come if they couldn't bring a guest; one of my friends from uni who I was in an orchestra with but didn't know my housemates, for instance, and a friend of my OH who he knew as a small child before moving to Wales, where he went to school. We had to be pretty brutal on that front, but hopefully nobody will be offended!