Determining your guest list plan

We had a pretty good general idea of who we wanted from the beginning. I knew we’d need to restrict by family relationship, as I have a massive family and we’d have double our preferred invite number from them alone! So we said parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, and first cousins (no living grandparents on either side). That kept it to a reasonable number. We weren’t no-kids, but the relationship restriction kept most of the kids off the list. Then we went through our friends and tried to keep it to roughly the same level of relationship.


For partners, the only real rule is that people who are married, engaged, or living together get an invite with both names. Any other romantic partners are up to personal preference and your local customs. I think most of the established couples on our list met the married/engaged/living together test, so it wasn’t a real issue for us. I can only think of one person who had a newer but looking serious relationship. We invited her with a plus-one so she was free to bring him but didn’t feel pressured since it would be their first official outing in the friend group.

We have good sized close knit families and had to make cut offs somewhere. We invited immediate family, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, first cousins and first cousins of the parents since they were co-hosting, but not their children, ie our second cousins. We invited people who were in committed relationships, but not random +1s. Children were limited to immediate family, nieces nephews, and young first cousins In our case. There were only a handful.

There was also a couple of tables of family friends, and our own friends, of course, but not every acquaintance. We didn't invite people from work.

Right away we knew we wanted to do something small and intimate and didn't want a big traditional reception party. We decided to just invite immediate family (parents, siblings, nieces/nephews, and grandparent), godparents, and a few really close friends and ended up with about 35 on our guest list, including plus ones. We invited everyone's partner (except FH's sister's hubby - but they're divorced now anyways) and gave a plus one to anyone single since everyone has to travel.


Our original plan was to take everyone out for a nice dinner and the restaurant down the street from our ceremony spot - they could fit about 40 people so it would've worked out perfect. Welp, FMIL got excited and invited her entire side of the family and more than doubled our guestlist. Not everyone is coming though, so we're expecting around 50-60 now and got a new venue to fit everyone.
FMIL is planning to host a second reception in our home state and I'm pretty sure the entire town will be invited to that and it'll be a huge family reunion

Originally, we had planned to have a local wedding where we invited all our friends and family. However, I have a massive family (it would have been over 150 people with just my family), and my husband has a very, very small family. So it felt odd to have the majority of the guests in attendance be mine, and so few be his. Plus, we really wanted a small intimate wedding; and inviting all our friends and family was going to be a 250+ person wedding. So instead, we decided to have a small destination wedding. We invited only our parents, siblings (with spouses), and wedding party (with spouses). Absolutely no children. It worked out prefectly. Nearly everyone we invited attended, and everyone had a fun, carefree (child-free) mini-vacation! Several of our guests have already mentioned that we should do a five year anniversary party with everyone there!

We split our guest list down the middle and stopped after first cousins, no children. Both of our sides are used to black tie and adult-only spaces, so there were no issues with child-free other than a couple spouse declines. Our engagement was shorter because we didn't need an arbitrary 1- year notice. We gave our guests 5- months notice and celebrated with those who could make it even through pandemic issues.

My husband has a huge family with lots of cousins, aunts, and uncles so we knew that an intimate guest list wouldn't be an option (even if we wanted it, which we didn't). His parents helped pay for a big chunk of the wedding so they also invited a couple dozen of their friends, which made me roll my eyes at first, but ultimately it wasn't a big deal because we had a lot of declines which kept the guest list smaller than expected. My family and parents' list was very straightforward, just a couple dozen family and friends, a few of whom don't travel so we knew they wouldn't come anyway. My fiancé and I each have a fairly small regular friend group, so those invites were obvious, though we ultimately did decide to cut a few people. We were able to to offer a +1 to basically anyone who wanted it, but the single ones all declined the +1 and came alone. Because of our long engagement, a lot of the potential +1s from when we first got engaged had broken up by the time the actual wedding came around. We ended up with 189 people invited and about 130 came.