Wedding Guests

As I have mentioned in previous blogs I am get married in 7 months time. And who ever said that getting married is the happiest time in your life clearly lied!
Well actually it’s not as bad as that but a wedding is a lot of stress and money. Now I am very lucky both my parents and my fiancés parents have been kind enough to help out with paying for the wedding so that has take a lot of stress of us financially.

Now like most couples we have an idea of what our dream wedding is. I am very lucky Joe and I have very simular tastes in things and when we found our wedding reception we both knew that this was it and that neither one of us had to talk the other into a place we didn’t want. The other big thing is the venue is a great size but realistically it also limits our numbers to about a 100 at the most. So when it came time to sit down and go through who would be there this was a very tough call. I have a very large family and extended family my extended family are family friends who have been in my life since birth and have welcome Joe into their family with welcome arms. Joe on the other hand does not. He has his 5 brothers and sisters 2 of which have partners and his parents and Nanna. (May I say I love Nanna McGloin so much I have never seen such a small woman consume so much champagne but I guess that’s the Irish in her)
So once we put our family down we then had to move onto friends, this is always tricky. You have people that are in your group of friends that you only see when there is an event or your have friends who go through girlfriend or boyfriends faster than I do underwear. So where do you draw the line at people you invite to the wedding.

We made a common rule of no plus ones or no people who we hadn’t seen in 5 years or that each of us hadn’t met. This seems ok in theory but not so? Do we invite bosses? Do we invite work friends? Oh we went to that person wedding but I haven’t seen them in 3 years and only chat occasionally on Facebook. Well as you can imagine when we did the first draft we were at 130 people, this was way too much and we wouldn’t be able to fit. So when we went through the list both Joe and I were saying to each other who is this? And we would then have to decide can we have them or not. It is really hard cutting people off a list as you don’t want to offend anyone but you also need to be realist are they going to be in your life in 5 years time. This is sadly a hard task as you do start thinking about what kind of friendships these are and it sad to think about friends this way too.

I know plenty of people who have invited everyone to their wedding and within 12 months have never seen them again and have paid $150 a head for them to be at the wedding. That’s the last thing we want, weddings and engagements are a very personal thing and I do believe that you have the people you love there. We had the great experience of a girl who Joe and I are not close with and we know has an issue with us show up at our engagement party, as you can imagine it went down really well with me when she comes into your parents home and helps herself to food and alcohol you have paid for. Not cool!

So for anyone who is planning a wedding take the time to think about who you want to invite to your wedding, this day is about you and you fiancé. And sharing it with the people you love. People should understand that weddings are expensive and that sometimes there just isn’t enough space or money to have everyone.