Who MUST be included in a limited-seats wedding?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Purely hypothetical (though I could potentially encounter this situation in the future):

You’re getting married. Your SO insists on having a wedding but you must pay for it yourselves and have a very limited budget. Your plan is to have an extremely limited-guest ceremony and invite everyone else to a reception at home afterwards. Let’s say the ceremony must be limited to 12-15 people. I made up a list of everyone I would want to invite and easily came up with 3 dozen people, and that was just MY family and friends; my GF’s list would probably be a similar number.

Anyway, the question is who MUST be included in such a wedding? Of course the immediate family must be invited, but what about prioritizing extended family over friends?

(Obviously it’s your party and you can do whatever you want, but in general who is or is not appropriate to exclude?)

2

I don’t understand. The ceremony is the cheapest part and you don’t pay by the head. The party is what costs money.

3

Alright I’ll rephrase the situation.

Limited budget. Money is ALL going to the party you’re having at home. Ceremony to be held at courthouse where there is limited space and only 12-15 guests are allowed.

Who do you invite to the ceremony?

I ask because this situation arose with a friend of mine and there were many people who were genuinely offended they were excluded (close friends of the groom were included while most others of equal closeness were not).

4

When it gets that small, my husband and I couldn’t even have invited our parents and siblings and their spouses. So I’d probably say “nobody” or “parents only” as my response to that situation.

5

Well, I’d say family first, then friends, barring any obvious extenuating circumstances. Beyond that, I’d go by the “everyone of equal status” rule. If you invite one parent, you must invite them all (and step-parents count). If you invite one second-cousin, you must invite them all. And if you can’t include all of a certain group, then you don’t include any. The only possible exception is friends - if you have one or two Very Best Friends, and you, they, and the rest of the world all readily acknowledge that these people are indeed much closer to you than any of your other friends, then you could conceivably invite them and not other friends.

6

If it were me I’d invite parents and siblings and cut it at that. And I’m closer to my friends than I am to my immediate family but “immediate family only” is a rule that most people understand. I’ve always taken it to me “Look, we have to draw the line somewhere and this is the most diplomatic thing we could come up with, please don’t bicker with us over this”.

If I were one of the friends I’d cut them some slack but I can see why inviting some friends but not others opens up a can of worms.

7

With 12-15 people you’d pretty much be stuck with parents, siblings, and siblings’ spouses, assuming you’re both from reasonably small families. My brother’s wedding was like that; his wife is an only child so her best friend was also invited (and neither my sister nor I were married at the time, so the total count was 2 principals + 4 parents (one of whom officiated) + 3 siblings/friends = 9.)

8

The nuclear family and their SO’s only

9

I’d start with my best friend then my parents then people in the order I’d like them to be there. I’m not entirely certain that I would invited my sister and her husband to a large wedding so I’m probably a bit different.

10

Remember, if there’s 12-15 seats it doesn’t mean you have to invite 12-15 people. Invite UP TO 15 people.

Easiest to just cut it off at immediate family and perhaps those you would have had as best man/maid of honor and not hassle with everyone else.

11

It is your wedding the only three people that must be there is the bride, the groom, and the person preforming the wedding.

this is how I would do it. You each make a list of who want there. Then each one takes their list and begins to cross off names until your list is down to 10 names. If you are going to have a Bride’s maid and a Best Man circle that name. Now sit down with the two lists. See if you can come up with an agreement if parents are exempt from elimination, circle their names. Come to the same agreement about brothers and sisters, if exempt from elimination citcle their names, if not do not circle their names.

Now look at the two lists and count the number of circled names. If more than 15 work on an agreement on eliminating names until it is 15.

If the circled names are less then 15: Then you now have two lists totaling 20 names and have to remove 5. The bride gets to remove one name then the groom repeat until only 12 to 15 names are left.

12

Immediate family and closest couple of friends, max. The ceremony isn’t what most people remember about the day anyway, especially if you’re doing a courthouse thing.

13

I’m sorry, I don’t get it.

You invite the people you want to be there.

The ones who don’t get invited may be offended, but obviously you have reasons (that may be personal and deeply private) why you feel closer to some people than others.

You don’t have to explain your reasons, and those not invited should realise that they don’t have a right to know why you feel closer to person X than them, you just do.
“Immediate family only” is the usual get out that avoids this, but it isn’t an etiquette must, just a way of avoiding this kind of thing turning into a friendship ending fight.

This isn’t a kid’s birthday party where you have to invite everyone in the class so no-one feels left out. These are grown ups who should realise that they can’t be best friends with everybody, and that adults need to act appropriately in these situations.

14

My husband and I had six people at our wedding. My parents, his mother, my sister, his brother, one close friend.

Not there: His father and stepmother. His stepfather. My brother in law. My other sister. His sister. Any grandparents, aunts, uncles. Any friends but the one.

We had a party with 150 people.

We were married in chambers. Quite honestly, we’d asked several other people if they wanted to come, explaining the situation, but they were happy to give way for others. We also got married on a Friday afternoon at 3:00 pm. Which made it really easy for people to say no (with the reception at 8:00).

15

There seem to be a lot of rules of wedding etiquette that do not apply in normal situations, if this board is any indication.

Plus, this is in IMHO, so obviously who you would invite in these circumstances is also fair game.

I’d say that my mom, dad, sister and both living grandparents would be a must. If any had to be removed, they’d be removed in reverse order. If any spaces are left, I’d include one best friend each, to fulfill the role of best man and maid of honor. I seriously doubt there’d be room for more than that.

16

I would operate in this situation under the idea of “Who would be really pissed if they weren’t invited?” This can, of course, drive you crazy since everyone thinks differently about these sorts of things, but as for me, there are only very few people who would offend me if I weren’t invited to their wedding to the point where no explanation would honestly placate me. They are: parents, offspring, siblings, and best friends. I have a number of decently close friends whose weddings I would be most interested in attending, but where that isn’t particularly necessary since the reception would more or less be the highlight for me. But for the people on this list, it’s the ceremony that would be the highlight. So I would focus on them, and try to invite as many of them as possible.

I’m guessing that this wedding is to take place in the judge’s chambers, and so the ceremony is likely to be short, on the order of twenty minutes or so. If this is true, I would think that inviting the significant others of the people on the list would not be necessary for the most part. (An exception would be if you have a stepparent that was for you a real parent in all but name.) Anyway, taking random, but plausible, numbers for this gives:

2 groom’s parents*
2 bride’s parents*
3 groom’s siblings
3 bride’s siblings
2 groom’s best friends
2 bride’s best friends

This leaves one spot, which maybe you could save for grandma or something.

Anyway, it seems to me that you want this to be a slightly bigger wedding than you actually planned for. I know that financial considerations might impose themselves, but have you looked into getting a slightly bigger space? I’m assuming that you’re getting married in chambers, but might it be possible to get married in a courtroom? That might cost only a little extra and spare yourself and the future spouse the difficulty of having to limit the number of guests so severely. A bit of a trade off between peace of mind and money, to be sure.

Might it also be possible to have a camera set up, so that people at the reception site can watch on TV? A bit tacky, but I can imagine your semi-close friends with a drink in their hands having a good time, watching and enjoying themselves without having to be on their best behavior. Having some sort of shout-out to them would be nice in this situation, maybe.

*If this is a same-sex wedding, adjust the vocabulary accordingly. Is there a sex-neutral word for a participant in a wedding ceremony? Like matrimoniant or something?

17

My niece did that without telling anybody. Well she did tell everyone about the engangement, then decided not to wait and got married at the courthouse a few days later. AFAIK the only people in the room besides them and the magistrate was a random court worker serving as witness. My sister-in-law didn’t find out until she was on her way to the engangment party, the rest of use found out at the party. Alot of awkward silence followed.

People were very upset about it. Not so much not being invited (though SiL was pretty angry over not even being present at her eldest daughter’s 1st wedding), but about the way she did in secret with no warning. If you go that route please tell people beforehand (if only so they know the engagment party is a wedding reception) and include non-estranged parents unless there’s a very compelling reason not to.

[QUOTE=RadicalPi ]
*If this is a same-sex wedding, adjust the vocabulary accordingly. Is there a sex-neutral word for a participant in a wedding ceremony? Like matrimoniant or something?

[/QUOTE]

The brides’ parents or the grooms’ parents.

18

We did this, and AFAIK no one was upset. Except we didn’t tell anyone that we were even thinking about getting married: we just got up one morning, went down to the courthouse, and did it. We had several reasons:

[ul]
[li]We didn’t want a wedding. Neither my husband nor I like to make a fuss. To this day, we don’t celebrate much of anything. We are homebodies. We just wanted to be married.[/li]
[li]We were dirt poor at the time: we were both in college, living on less than a $1000/month, and as my parents were still paying my tuition I really didn’t see asking them to pay for a wedding just to make other people happy. People say “Oh, you can have a wedding for cheap”, but they mean “for $500-1000”, and we no more had that than we had wings.[/li]
[li]A small wedding would have been impossible. I am one of six kids: my mom is one of twelve. We were living in my home town at the time, so there were any number of people in my social circle that had known me for 10+ years.[/li][/ul]

I really don’t think anyone cared, but there’s a reason we were the sort of people that would do something like that: we came from families that are laid back about that sort of thing.

As far as the OP goes, I think the only people that absolutely MUST be included are minor children of the bride or groom. The change in their lives is as fundamental as it is for the bride and groom, and they should be there.

19

You don’t have to invite anybody (my parents eloped, for example). There were about 30 at my wedding. This included two close friends of each of us, my parents, only one of my father’s brothers and wife (the one I was closest to), my mother’s brother and wife, my wife’s parents and step-parents (it all took place at her stepfather’s house) and four cousins were very close to. It was very pleasant and then we got out of town. If there were recriminations, I didn’t want to hear them. It was our wedding.

20

If my nuclear family came together there would be an explosive reaction.