3 Wedding Guest List Challenges (and How to Overcome them)

Building your guest list can be the toughest and most challenging task in the wedding planning process. In fact, without proper evaluation and negotiation, choosing your guests may cause an epic battle even for the most unified couple.

However, just like preparing your wedding dress, booking your venue, deciding on what food to serve, and a hundred other tasks, making your guest list is also very important. To minimize the madness during this crucial step of wedding planning, here are the common challenges couples encounter when preparing a guest list and how to deal with them.

Who’s invited?

The best way to start is to jot down names of everyone you’d love to have at your wedding. After this initial run through, break down the list into three categories:

1. The A list (Absolutely)

This includes everyone involved - most likely yourself, your fiance, both set of parents, immediate family and very close friends. People included in the entourage are part of this list.

2. The B list (Almost Absolutely)

Friends, colleagues, and friends of the family are part of this category. These are the people you would enjoy having but are not essential.

3. The C list (Would Be Nice)

This category includes distant relatives and old friends.

If many people from the A list declines, start inviting from the B list. If you’re still not overbooked, begin adding from the C list.

How to Cut down the list.

After your first, second, and third review of the “proposed” guest list, the number of heads are still over your target number. How do you further decide who won’t be on the list?

• If you don’t recognize a name, politely ask your parents or future in-laws if that person can be removed.

• Check your coworkers, bosses, and business acquaintances. Do they need to be invited? If not, they would understand that you want to keep it to family and close friends.

• Look at your friends and your partner’s friends. Do you see them often? Just because you attended their wedding years ago doesn’t mean you should invite them to yours.

• Check your cousin’s children, and other guest’s kids. Are you willing to have kids to your wedding? If you can’t see pint-sized guests running around the reception, then opt to cut children out of the list.

Anyone invited to the ceremony should be invited to the reception. Don’t cut costs by cutting people from the reception list.

Finding lost family.

While some couples cringe at the thought of inviting a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle whom they haven’t spoken with or seen in years, others find it sentimental. Since weddings, like christenings and funerals, are family affairs, they believe this is the perfect time to see each other again, re-connect, patch certain differences, and start anew. Before making the decision, ask yourself:

• Are you ready to forgive?

• Are you confident that their presence will not lead to anything bad at the wedding?

• Have you been longing to find this relative ever since?

If your answers are YES, then by all means, go and invite your long lost family member to your wedding. Having a complete family during your special day is worth it. Reach out to them via common friends and relatives. If you don’t have common friends, try using MyLife area codes or visit MyLife’s visit code directory to find the people you seek.

Have you encountered other guest list challenges? Share them here.