The Biggest Day

The wedding guest list! Oh my goodness… I never thought that compiling a simple list of those you wish to celebrate with could cause so many headaches.

My fiancé and I are having a decent sized wedding, with around 120 guests joining us. We’ve actually already compiled our guest list and sent out the invitations – but it turns out that that was only half of the ordeal.

Both his family and my family want to invite certain relatives and family friends, and we’re okay with that. We know that it’s part of the deal at your wedding – you know, celebrating your special day with people you’ve never met! No, I mean, letting your parents celebrate with people that they care about.

As my mother in law has repeatedly told us these last few months, “This wedding is not only about you two, you know…”

So the RSVPs have started flowing in, and there have been some surprises – some people who we thought would absolutely attend are not able to make it, and others that we thought would never make the effort have RSVP’d yes.

The problem we have is, most of the ‘No’ responses have been coming from my groom’s side – and his folks are feeling decidedly under-represented as a result.

We initially invited 150 people, expecting 120 to come. Of those 150 invitations, roughly a third were to my family’s side, a third were to my fiancés family’s side, and a third were to our friends.

Of those guests that can’t make it, the majority are from my fiancés side.

So, we are in ‘pity invitation no mans land’.

To boost his numbers, we have invited his parents’ second-tier list: second cousins, great uncles, and overseas friends.

None of them can make it.

We moved on to the third-tier list: ex-work colleagues, friends they haven’t seen in a dozen years, and children of old friends.

None of them can make it.

Now, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have physically run out of invitations – the paperwork I’m sending out now is from a pre-printed pad of wedding invitations I bought at a craft store. We only printed 160 original wedding invitations, so we were out of stock at the “second cousins” list.

I have finally put my foot down following my mother in law’s latest request: she would like to invite the friend of my fiancés’ sisters’ husband, and his wife. We’ve never met them.

As I scrawled ‘Warren and Tiffany-Lee’ in my neatest writing, I remarked, through gritted teeth, “This is the last one, we’re actually out of invitations now, so we’ll leave it at this…”

“Okay, well, we’ll see, dear,” she responded vaguely.

Thankfully – or not, I’m not sure yet – Warren and Tiffany-Lee promptly RSVP’d, and what do you know? They can make it. I have the sneaking suspicion that they knew they were coming to our wedding before they were even invited.

My mother in law is delighted. I’m exhausted. And we’re not even up to table settings yet…