How do you find your cut off point for invites

The guest list is probably the thing we found hardest!

Start off by listing the people you can't imagine getting married without, and go from there.

The general rule is that if you invite one person from a group, you need to invite them all. So it's fine to invite aunts and uncles but no cousins, but if you invite one cousin, you should invite them all. However, I think you can bend this rule if there is a clear distinction between people within those groups. For example, I have aunts and uncles I haven't seen for years and our only communication is the yearly Christmas card. I have other aunts and uncles I see several times a year, so I invited the ones I see regularly and didn't invite the ones I never see.

I know some people advise splitting the invites in half so half go to the bride's family & friends and half to the groom's. In practice, it doesn't always work, especially if there is a big imbalance between the sizes of the two families. As long as you are both happy with the final guest list, that's all that matters.

View quoted message Thank you that's helpful, certainly like the idea of listing who we couldn't get married without. Yes we'll be having a "take a seat not a side" just because of the imbalance but also because I'm hoping to have more friends than family as they are the ones we see more of.


There's me saying I won't stress and already I'm like I don't want to upset people but I also don't want to feel like I'm inviting people for inviting sake

I think it just comes down to who you each really want there rather than who you can/have to "add on". It's your wedding, no one else's. You're job isn't to please everyone, just each other. For us, another really easy aid for deciding was whether we thought the person was worth the £140 per head cost for food and drink lol. Unsurprisingly it turned out we were quite happy for some guests to be invite only after all.

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You are almost certainly going to have people being upset with you unless you have a very unusual family/friendship circle. You need to be prepared for that and stick to your guns. Remember the old fable of the two men & the donkey who tried to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one? I think that could have been written for weddings!

I lost track of the number of 'if she's not invited, I'm not going' or 'you MUST invite a b c d and e to your wedding' I had to deal with!

We had a similar headache! With only 50 spots so a small wedding as well.

Firstly, we wrote a guestlist that didn't cover any etiquette rules, and ordered it as best we could in terms of how crucial those people felt to us personally. What we realised in listing it out was that we'd already filled half the guest list with just the bridal party (and their other halves) and immediate family.

There was a cousin I was quite keen on inviting, and aunts and uncles FH was tempted to include... but after putting some feelers out with our parents, we realised the upset this would cause if FH invited his uncles and I didn't invite mine, etc., because as others have said you need to treat these groups equally. If we invited aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides that was going to fill the rest of our guest list list and the only friends would be those in the wedding. We decided our wedding would be more fun with more friends involved, and we had certain friends that were very close to getting a spot in the bridal party that we'd be gutted not to invite. So we drew our line at immediate family only on both sides.

Also - plus ones as a named invite extended to serious relationships only (engaged, married, living together, or we know the other half well enough and like them enough that they kinda count as our friend too).