Guest list stress!

If a lot of your friends and his side and friends live down south, is it not possible to get married down there, where the majority are? Or do you have your hearts set on Edinburgh? Sorry I am not much help

It's probably best to not invite friends who are far away to the evening do. If they are close friends (enough to travel a long way) then make them wedding guests. Could you scale down the daytime costs so that you could have more full day guests? For example, have a later ceremony start time and then an evening buffet instead of a sit down meal earlier.

Thanks both for your replies!

We both love Edinburgh and have our hearts set on being married there (sounds a bit strange when he isn't from there!). We do have a lot of close friends but it's one of those scenarios where 'if so and so is invited, then we should invite this person too', so difficult!!

i do agree that we shouldn't invite people from far away just for the evening do so will need to look into alternatives like possibly buffet rather than evening meal etc!

thanks :-)

Agree that none of your friends from England can be invited just for the evening do. That would be ridiculous, plus they would read the invitation and see it as a token one that you didn't really mean (ie. knowing that they have to turn it down as they can't travel all the way to Edinburgh to go to a party for a few hours).

Plus, with a lot of people travelling a long way, I'd advise that you do the kind-hearted thing and look into getting a good hotel deal for them as cheap as possible. Many will have to come for 2 nights, as Bham -> Edinburgh is not possible on the morning of a wedding. So think about arranging a deal for them and putting the details in with the invitations, so that it's as easy as possible for them.

^^^ Beware of this ^^^

This is what my OH did. "but so and so are part of that 'group' too, so we have to put them on the list". No you don't. If you have drifted away from a couple of members of an old friendship circle, but are still tight with another couple of them - just invite the ones who you still hang out with and phone regularly. You don't *have* to invite a whole bunch of people, just because they know each other. Yes, there is a chance they might feel like you've left them out, but you weren't hanging out with them before, so you'll continue not to hang out with them after the wedding, and you've not lost anything, eh?!

Honestly, as the wedding day gets closer you'll start to regret that it's those people who are going to be witnessing your marriage vows and not people who you really care about.

I had similar circumstances. I live in Birmingham and my family live in Wales. In the end we had two rules; if we hadn't seen them for two years, we didn't send an invite and if they hadn't met both of us, we didn't send an invite. It worked really well for us this way. We didn't have separate people coming to the evening do as everyone we wanted there was there anyway.

Hope that helps.