Creating your guest list is very important to do in the early stages of planning your wedding. Not only is this one of the questions you will get asked by every single one of your vendors, but it also will determine where you can have your wedding. 

 

So, how do you go about creating your guest list? Who should you have on it? And how do you know if you should invite someone or not? 

 

Well, from personal experience, I’ve got to start off by saying that absolutely no one can tell you who you should invite to your wedding or who you should not invite. It’s up to you, but it might be a good idea to ask some of the more important people in your and your fiance’s lives when creating your wedding guest list. 

Create Wedding Guest List Infographic

Ask close family members and friends

 

Why should you ask? Because they might remember people that you forgot! I think the best way of creating a list is to get everyone you may want to invite on a list and then start eliminating people from it. It’s how my now-husband and I started creating our list. 

 

We both asked our parents to come up with a list of people that they think we should invite. We did tell them beforehand that we would consider their input but asked for them not to tell anyone as we would have to take into consideration things like cost per person and how many people our venue could fit. Since I personally have a HUGE tight-knit family and know many of my second and third  cousins as well as great-great aunts and uncles and the like, we knew we wouldn’t be able to invite our entire families as well as friends. 

 

Once we got the list from our families, we went to our best friends and said the same thing. They provided us with a list of people (or random names sent through text message) and we wrote down the names for our wedding guest list. I think we came up with an entire possible guest list of around 300. We knew we definitely didn’t want that many guests at our wedding. 

 

Invite those you have seen in the past year.

 

Once we curated our wedding guest list list, we went through and starred the people that we had hung out with within the past year as well as our family members. We double starred anyone that we had seen within the past week and immediate family members. Then we circled people who we hadn’t seen within the past year but who have made a serious impact upon our lives. For instance, my cousins who now live in California. Sure, I hadn’t seen them in a while since we are all adults and live far away, however, growing up they were a crucial part of my life and helped shape who I am today. 

 

Don’t Invite people you don’t like.

 

After we starred, double starred and circled people’s names. We went through the list and scratched out anyone we didn’t like. This included any abusive family members, friends of friends that we hung out with that we knew didn’t like us back, and anyone that might have made us feel weird about ourselves. 

 

I think that creating a wedding guest list is an important part of your relationship going forward. It’s in this process that my now-husband and I were able to talk about the feelings that perhaps we hadn’t been able to express before. For instance, he had a coworker at the time that I knew liked him. He was going to invite her, since they were friends at work, and I told him that I was not comfortable having her there. 

 

This could have easily lead to a fight. However, thankfully we both approached creating the list with the goal that everyone invited to our wedding would be people that we BOTH enjoyed hanging out with.  

 

I hadn’t previously brought up the fact that I was not comfortable with his coworker because I was confident that he held no feelings towards her and because there is very little I can do about them hanging out with each other since they worked together. So, when I brought it up that I was uncomfortable with inviting her to the wedding, naturally he was shocked. Having this discussion allowed for me to be honest with my feelings about how the girl intentionally flirted with him in front of me, had been rude to me behind his back and other petty things that I was not happy with. 

 

You don’t have to invite Co-Workers

 

I’ll tell you, I was nervous about telling him. I was worried that he would think I was being ridiculous or that I was just jealous or something. And perhaps I was, but he accepted the fact that I wasn’t comfortable having her there and said it was ok that we didn’t invite her. Since we couldn’t invite her, and because he didn’t want to be rude to her, we decided not to invite our coworkers. Except for two, one of his best friends and one of mine. We told them not to let anyone else know, they were the exceptions to the rule. Hey- it’s our wedding we can have whomever we want there! Right?! 

 

Create an A list and B guest list, if you want

 

After figuring out who we wanted with stars and circles and scratching people we didn’t like off the list, we were down to about 150 guests we definitely wanted there. Around 50 of the original 300 were people we definitely didn’t want and the other 100 were in the “take it or leave it” category of people. Meaning, we probably hadn’t talked with them in a while, were too distant of family, or were random friends of our parents or friends. 

 

We thought about having an A and B wedding guest list. We (cough cough, I) had relatives that were important to us that were in the “take it or leave it” category and I thought it would be nice to invite them but since we didn’t want more than 150 guests, we thought that saving their invite until someone RSVP’d “No” was a good way around it. Ultimately, we decided against this since we decided it was more hassle than it was worth.

 

In the end, we invited all 150 guests to our wedding. I knew from experience that about 20-30% of those guests weren’t going to attend, so I figured we would probably be at about 120 guests. Which was pretty close. We had 110 people RSVP and on wedding day around 100 guests arrived. I had gotten a lot of calls that morning and apparently we had a very unlucky day because those 10 guests who had RSVP’d but didn’t come were all in the hospital. One of them was one of our groomsmen and one was my closest cousins (her husband, mom and sister weren’t able to come too since they had to take her to the hospital). 

 

I’m telling you the end number because sometimes there is nothing you can do when estimating your guest count. There may be people that show up without RSVP’ing and others who won’t show up who have RSVP’d to your wedding. It has nothing to do with the amount of planning you have done, so don’t worry about it. 

 

Choose your guest list based on people you love and who you want to celebrate your love with. Understand that there are going to be people in your life you enjoy being with but maybe your fiance doesn’t like. Approach it respectfully without judgement as you are planning an event that ends with you and your partner being joined together forever. 

 

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