Side note: these last few posts on mixed feelings and budgetary blessings mark a changing tone in this personal wedding planning blog, and this pleases me. This is what I need right now, not all the wedding porn. (Not that there's anything wrong with bazillions of photos of wedding details that people love, but there are so many other places one can go to for that.)
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Like the dutiful wedding planning couple we are, Mister and I sat down some time ago to come up with our initial guest list. I knew with my very large extended family that this would be no easy task, but we agreed on a few guidelines:
- Extended family would only go as far as aunts, uncles, and cousins.
- The "no ring, no bring" rule would apply to family members. The only exception we'd allow is my brother's girlfriend (who seems like she could very well become my sister-in-law in the near future).
- Friends may bring a plus-one under the following conditions: they are married/engaged, or we know and like their plus-one enough to want them at our wedding (in which case, they're probably friends already).
- We are not inviting people that neither of us personally know.
- We are not doing "courtesy invites" as the risk of RSVP acceptance is too high.
- We are inviting people that we are willing to spend $100+ per person on.
We were able to cut our list down to our core number of 140 guests, with a "waitlist" of about 30 guests (mostly friends) that we would like to invite but would be okay with not inviting. About 100 of the core guests are family members, so it would be nice to add more friends as family members declined an invite.
So as we're in search of our venue, we've kept the number 140 in mind as our baseline. Of the 8 venues we've seen so far, our favorites were the ones that offered a more intimate setting for 140 and 150 people maximum, respectively. It sure didn't hurt that these were the only two venues to also offer free tastings before signing anything!
But now we're worried because out of the blue, his parents gave us a list of about 60 people they want to include in our guestlist, 20 of which are not already on our list. Mister is angry and upset at this because these 20 extra people are people he doesn't know or barely knows and never talks to, and his mother is insisting that inviting these guests is an absolute must, even as courtesy invites. He's already explained that we already have a waitlist of guests and can add these 20 people to the waitlist, but his mother is continuing to insist that they be on the main list instead.
The repercussions of extending our list from 140 to 160 are stressful. Doing this would mean we would have to give up on both of our 2 favorite venues and either go with our secondary choices or continue our venue search. Additionally, Mister and I are willing to spend more per person for the list of 140 we have. With the 20 extra guests, we're not so willing to spend that kind of money on them, and Mister says that if we had to include this additional list, we should try to reduce our total cost per person. I don't like that the invitation of these 20 people could end up downgrading the total experience of our wedding for our priority guests.
It's such a tricky situation, the guest list. I think we're being pretty reasonable by allowing these people to be in our wait list, but when his mother is making this a non-negotiable item, it's going to make tensions unnecessarily higher.
Time for consultation. Time to google the answer, lol.
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