Trying to Trim the Guest List

During the first stages of planning our wedding, all those involved sat down and created a massive guest list. We came up with every person that might possibly be invited. Needless to say, this list was hundreds and hundreds of people long.

And then came the cuts.

Cutting people off a guest list is an agonizing process. Ideally we’d like to invite everyone, but of course we don’t have the money for that, so here’s how we started trimming:

1. We cut kids.
We wanted to be inclusive initially, but we’re also the last of our set of friends to marry and start a family, so a huge portion of our initial list consisted of toddlers. (A handful of kids will still be coming, but that’s it.)

2. We cut the “reciprocal wedding invitation” folks.
By this I mean we took off those we felt we had to send an invite to only because they had invited us to their wedding. We just don’t have the funding to be polite like that.

3. We cut co-workers.
We have too many family members and friends to accommodate as it is, so nearly all co-workers have to be sacrificed, unfortunately.

…And now we’re down to the tough choices. Which friends mean the most to us? Which do we want to be there, and which do we need to be there?

One of the criteria I’m using to decide is the Engagement Question. No, not the “will you marry me” bit — the “when did you tell this person you were engaged?” one. Did you tell them that day, the next day, the next week… or did you just figure they’d hear about your engagement through the grapevine? The answers to this question are really helpful when it comes to “ranking” one’s friends (as awful as that sounds).

If that doesn’t get us down to the number we’re aiming for, our last resort will be to eliminate some of the “guest” spots we’ve been reserving for single friends. Again, not the most polite thing to do, but I think most of our single friends would understand if we explained the situation to them. (Besides, they’ll all probably come as a big group anyway.)

I think we’ve still got about 20 more people to cut, so wish us luck…