ICB: What is a Wedding Guest List REALLY about?
My good friend Christina and I have been participating in NaNoWriMo together for two years now. Next year, we were contemplating choosing a storyline and characters and each writing our novel using the agreed upon plot and setting. I’m not sure how this is going to work out, but it sounds rather interesting. I was also recently inspired by my Twitter-bud, @melissaoyler and her friend (Amy) who are choosing a random topic and then each blogging about it. Christina and I thought this would be an awesome way to test out our ability to write individually on a collective topic.
For the record, Christina and I announced yesterday our collective NaNovel. You can follow our progress on The Table Has Shoes (Christina’s blog) and The Collective NaNovel (my blog for NaNoWriMo).
This week’s topic: Building a Wedding Guest List.
Visit Christina’s blog to read about her thoughts about The Wedding Guest List: here.
Hindsight is always 20/20
I really do love these wedding topics that Christina keeps coming up with. I love them because I think that some of the things that seemed like they were life and death scenarios when I was in the middle of them seem so far removed now that I can’t remember why the world was crashing down on my head when I was dealing with them. They help put the world in perspective for me. I also think that being able to look back on them has helped me strengthen my marriage by learning something new about the experience.
Making the Guest List
I clearly remember that formulating the guest list for our wedding (nearly 5 years ago) was a process that I thought was going to either kill me or make me rethink the whole wedding! Don’t get me wrong, I was (and still am) very much in love with my DH2B (Dear Hubby-To-Be) but the thought of having to limit who was going to attend our beautiful ceremony was going to kill me.
I felt like I had a rather unique situation involving guests. I was the only girl child…. wait, the ONLY child (period) of the only girl child on my mother’s side and the first son on my dad’s side. So that made my wedding the event of the century. Not that grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins valued my wedding over others, but they were particularly excited to share this moment with me and my family. What’s more, we live near Washington, D.C. What better way to show the Nation’s Capital to my little cousins than by extending the wedding trip to include a little vacation as well?!?
Except I was forgetting one thing…
It’s not just my wedding, it was also my DH2B’s wedding too. And he happens to be the baby of his family. So, everyone was super excited for him to get married too! Suddenly, when we had thought that it would be literally impossible to even find 200 people to invite, let alone our maximum of 250 people, we were suddenly feeling really really tight constraints on the guest list.
What the Guest List is REALLY About
Looking back I can safely say that building your wedding guest list is a couple’s first experience in creating a blended family. A skill that will eventually become vastly more important than any other skill you can ever develop as a married couple.
Before you start the guest list everything is all hearts and stars and all about how much in love you are with each other. Suddenly, the minute you take out your address books and sit down with Moms and Dads and Moms-in-Law-To-Be and Dads-in-Law-To-Be and your honeybun, you realize that it’s not just about you and your true love any more! Everyone has important people that they simply must invite! Of course, there are those brides and grooms who pay for everything themselves and they get total control over their guests list (or they elope), but if you’ve got money coming in from all angles suddenly everyone’s guest list is important. And it’s how you and your honeybun deal with it that is your first experience with learning how to blend your two families.
Sure, you may step on some toes, and Great Aunt Edna (not that I had one of those) might not get an invitation and you have to find some way to explain to her how much you love her, but that her invite would put the number over the maximum number of guests before you have to rent that awful Porta-Potty… but these are sacrifices that you might have to make. Cuts have to be made, and eventually everything comes out in the wash.
The best advice that I can offer (having gone through it before) is that you’ve got to make some sacrifices along with your DH2B. Even though the bride is the one in the big white poofy dress who gets all the parties and the showers… who everyone always fusses over, it’s your honeybun’s day too. And you have to remember that he has some fantastic people who have seen him through his life that he will want to share it with too! The decisions you make while building your guest list will set the stage for how your marriage will function when other big family blending issues come up….
Like where will you spend Thanksgiving and Christmas… who gets to keep the baby when you’re out on “Date Night”… who’s parents do you invite over for dinner? The first step is that Wedding Guest List. And it all comes down to COMMUNICATION!!
I’m so grateful Josh and I were in a unique situation with our wedding. His family lives in Texas and mine in New Jersey, so logistics kept our guest list to a minimum. Parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, that’s it. It was small and laid back, so we got to spend a good deal of quality time with everyone who attended.
Yeah… as it turns out we had more out of town relatives that we invited but expected to politely decline show up! I was sort of shocked!!! I was happy that they wanted to make the trek to attend and that they would get to share the happy occasion, but we made a mistake by not paring down the list more in the event that the attrition rate didn’t meet our expectations!
It was an exercise in creative guest-listing! And in the end we decided to forgo the task of a planned seating arrangement. I’m so happy I didn’t try to tackle that mess! Everyone sat wherever the wanted to and I think everyone had a good time!
So true that it’s all about communication! We actually didn’t have any problems with the wedding guest list … it wasn’t until we tried to make the rehearsal dinner invites that we ran into issues. We rented a restaurant that was very small on the mountain where we were getting married, and we could not have more than 45 people. Plenty for a rehearsal dinner. But then somebody wanted to invite aunts and uncles, which wasn’t fair unless we invited all aunts and uncles, which would have put us over the limit. We ended up working it out but it was a tad stressful.
The seating chart for the rehearsal dinner was another story. Try seating the father of the groom with his ex-mother-in-law, simply because they get along and hadn’t seen each other in years. Those two were thrilled, but the father of the groom’s new wife and ex wife were not … Oops …
Yeah, see, I was against all that seating arrangement jazz for that very reason! I didn’t want any fall out. I was more than happy to let people try to squish 12 chairs around an 8 top table if that’s what would make them happy!!
We also had a “singles” table at the rehearsal dinner, for those who were single and/or dateless. They whined at first because we put them in the back, but a couple of hours later, drunk and happy and loud, they were thanking us! We know our friends, that’s for sure!
We did not do a seating chart for the reception. Too much trouble, like you said!