Has your guest list changed since you first started planning your wedding?
For the most part, you hear of people having to downsize their guest list after their budget is taken into consideration, but I had a different experience, and was able to add more guests than I thought I could. Not that I even know what the budget is (though I’m learning about individual costs for most things, my parents refuse to tell me how much they’re actually spending).
At first, we put on a long list of guests of EVERYONE I would like to be there. Then, Karl and I went through it and downsized a LOT. We told my parents the number of guests we would be inviting. We sent out our first batch of save the dates ( some of the “we’re definitely inviting list” got missed by that first batch, since we had to reorder cards, and I just got lazy after the initial excitement, but I got to catch up on them in the last week, yay!). Then I talked to my mom and mentioned how hard it was to invite some of your friends and not other. Her reaction of “so why don’t you invite them? That’s not a problem!” made me relieved! It seemed clear that a couple of dozen more guests would really not make a difference for them.
So now, we re-added all those people that got missed on that first run, and I have finally asked for their addresses today (yay!). Our total number of invitees are WAY over our expectation of 100-130 guests. We’re probably at around 200 people being invited now… (Have I mentioned our small church fits 100 comfortably?) But since our reception venue can accommodate up to 300, a few more people here and there was not the end of the world.
Of course, I am also counting in a lot of those people not being able to make it since the wedding will be all the way in Rio, after all. In an ideal world, everyone would have the time off and money to be there with us to celebrate (as we didn’t invite anyone because we felt obligated to — we truly wish everyone could be there, small church aside). But we know that reality is different. A dear friend just told me last week that he won’t be able to make it, due to both time and money, since his sister is getting hitched just 2 months before us, and her wedding also requires an out of the country trip. It saddened me that he couldn’t be there, not just because he’ll be missing our party, but because I know he would LOVE Rio, but I completely understand.
How have your guest list experience been like?
