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The Great Guest List Debate
Less than a month to go before my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, and I happen to be the sister that gets to be the wedding coordinator (surprise! surprise!). As I rush into detail planning and in between meetings and exchanges with wedding vendors, I can't help but recall the most emotional part of planning a wedding... MAKING THE GUEST LIST--over and over again.
My fiancé and I both wanted an intimate wedding, where a shared memory or private joke with our guest would be a gift by itself, where we could, despite the meticulous planning, goof up on a detail and just laugh it off as our guests laugh with us instead of at us. When we were making our wedding guest list, we had, at the most, 75 friends and family in mind.
Exactly how much is too many? (Photo taken from bestweddingproducts.com)
Now, by Filipino family standards, 75 guests is intimate. We come from a very clannish culture where each set of parents feel compelled to invite the bride's mother's relatives and the bride's father's relatives. The same goes for relatives of the groom's father's and mother's sides.
Unfortunately, I have the social life of a snail. I may have a thousand people on my Facebook from varying stages of my career and academic life, I only want to share personal moments with a few close friends and an even closer group of relatives. So, you can only imagine how stressful making the guest list was for me and my fiancé, especially when we had to run it through with my mother.
"Where's your Tita this and Tito that?" (Filipinos are fond of referring to people older than ourselves "Tito" (Uncle) and "Tita" (Aunt) even if we're not exactly related.)
"Oh you mean you're not inviting my friend from work?" (FYI: My mother has been retired for over a decade when I got married.)
"That's right, that's how it is with young people nowadays. They're elders don't have a say in their weddings. Because it's THEIR wedding." (Oh no! The emotional blackmail!)
SO WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR WEDDING GUEST LIST UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL AND STILL HONOR BOTH YOUR PARENTS?
PRACTICE THE ART OF COMPROMISE. My fiancé and I had a heart-to-heart talk with each of our families before finalizing our guest list. We explained as respectfully as we could that we wanted to give first priority to people that have played very important roles in our lives as individuals and as a couple. Then, we laid down our budget and expressed that as much as we would want to accommodate everyone down to the friendly attendant at the laundromat, we can make adjustments up to this much only. Then, we specified a number of seats for each of our family and let them decide which relatives who are not yet in our guest list that they feel should be there (By this time, they were already very considerate of our sentiments, and so they chose those that were at least familiar faces to both of us).
CONSIDER A POST-WEDDING PARTY. If you have the money to spend and only limited your guest list for sentimental reasons, you may consider hosting a post-wedding party for relatives and family friends within the same month as your wedding. Personally, I find this inefficient, but if it appeases the elders...
FOLLOW-UP ON YOUR RSVPs. Although most people nowadays do know how RSVPs work, you'd be surprised that there are still quite a number of them that don't. For some, instead of sending their regrets, they don't send back a reply assuming that you'd get the message that they won't be able to make it. If you follow up on your RSVPs early on, you could consider replacing them with guests from your alternative list. Now, some of the etiquette guides that I've read say that this is a no-no, because you could offend people if they find out that they are like your rebound guest. However, if you're discreet, and your alternate lists contain acquaintances who themselves think that they won't get invited to your wedding (like my mother's former coworkers who do not know me personally--because I did include in my priority
list those coworkers of hers who were also close to me), it could work.
In the end, we had about 150 guests at our wedding, twice as much as we had initially hoped for. Yet, surprisingly, it still felt very personal and meaningful, and we did goof up really good by forgetting to bring out the bottles of champagne (that were supposed to be served during photo ops cocktails) up until my sister, the maid of honor, was about to make her toast . So, it became a good thing that our guest list had doubled; still many people got to stay behind and enjoy the champagne late into the evening.