Is it really a challenge to pick who does – and doesn’t – get an invite?

This is our third post in a series about our experiences organizing a micro-wedding. You may want to read the introduction to the series, along with the first and second blog posts to get all caught up. This series is not sponsored.

There’s my anxiety again, nagging at me, as we continued to plan our wedding.

“Who should we put on the guest list?” I ask Jon one night as he’s cooking in the kitchen. I’m freaked out about inviting the right people, the wrong people…you get the idea.

“Well we know family comes first, so let’s focusing on getting close family to the wedding, and then going from there.”

What a sensible guy.

Figuring out who’s invited

Establishing parameters and being firm is key when trying to come up with your guest list for your wedding – and this is the case whether there’s 20 or 200 people attending. Sure, there are some faux pas that will often pop up when you’re narrowing it all down (one common one we saw was “it’s all or nothing when inviting your co-workers to your wedding”) but you and your partner have to keep reminding one another that it’s your wedding day and you can pretty much do whatever you want – within reason.

We had twenty people on the guest list. Everyone who made it was either related to Jon or had known me since I was little. One person declined.

As a cost-cutting and time-saving measure, we chose not to use paper invitations. Jon and I both know paper invitations don’t tend to be a thing people hold onto. One of our other friends who is tying the knot this year made his invitation a little more practical, turning it into a magnet – but we weren’t too keen on doing that.

Instead, we chose to email our guests – which was as easy as texting them for an email to forward the information to. Be careful with your addresses, though: I actually thought I had an updated email address for my godsister – but it turned out I still had her old one in my contacts. Needless to say, she got the invite a little later than everyone else, but she and my godbrother still made it.

Everyone replied fairly quickly, and we only emailed them a few times between the day they received their invite to the day before the wedding.

Telling people you’re getting married…but limiting your guest list

We’re fortunate to have friends who are understanding of our choices, and while some were disappointed, we promised to make it up to them. We were sure to make plans to have lunch or dinner the week following our wedding (we took a week off so we had plenty of time to make arrangements with people).

What made it easier for us was that we only invited family, so it was easier to say, “I’m sorry, but we’re actually keeping the guest list within these parameters.” No one gave us a hard time.

You don’t really have to explain anything to anyone, but in the interest of being honest and upfront with other people in your circle, we strongly recommend it. People will get it and will appreciate it. Plus, you won’t feel as terrible having excluded people from your big day.

On the other hand…

Don’t be afraid to invite people who aren’t family. One of the other questions we asked ourselves was, “who in ten, twenty or thirty years would we have wanted at our wedding?” It allows you to be honest with yourselves and really cut down that list. If you’re getting a gut feeling about leaving a certain person out for reasons that pertain to you, then go ahead and invite them. If someone is chiding you or being overbearing about the whole thing, have an open discussion with them about the situation and proceed from there. Sometimes it becomes a case of reassessing your relationship with that person. We are grateful it didn’t come to that.

There’s just one part left in our micro-wedding series – look for that post to go up on Thursday, July 26^th! Have you subscribed to this blog yet? Make sure you do for hassle-free email notifications! If you prefer following my social channels for notifications, I am also on Instagram and Twitter.

Our beautiful wedding photos, which are featured heavily throughout the series, were shot by Yinan Scott Shi. If you’re in the Metro Vancouver area, Yinan comes with our highest recommendations for professional photography work for any occasion.