The Invite Dilemma

I don't know about you all, but the guest list was probably the hardest part of planning our wedding thus far. Honestly, aside from that (well, and the venue change), wedding planning has been pretty fun. I couldn't really understand why people found themselves so stressed.

Ha. And then HA again when I think about how I'll probably feel in 3ish months.

Anyhow, back to the guest list. Today I'm going to talk about one particular issue we debated when making our list and checking it twice. That is, the issue of inviting people to your wedding after they've invited you to theirs.

I've mentioned we've attended a lot of weddings together. You might vaguely remember that I once posted about that and think, hmm...was it really that many?

A snapshot of some of the weddings we've attended together
Only 4 of these dresses featured have been re-worn (I have a problem)

In 3 years together, Mr. Turkey and I have attended 32 weddings. That means, if we invited each and every one of these couples, they would account for 64 of our 200ish guests.

Granted, a number of these couples are family and so would have been in attendance no matter what. There were also those who are part of our wedding party, others we see on a regular basis and many are longtime friends. Easy peasy - they were on the list, no issue.

That wasn't the case for everyone, though. I don't know about you all, but some of these married couples fell off the face of the earth. Some fell so dramatically that we literally haven't heard from them since their wedding day (as in no thank you card, no contact in several years). Some didn't respond when we told them about our engagement.

Don't get me wrong - these couples didn't fail to get an invite because they didn't send us an engagement card. It's not like that at all. It was about the relationship. Instead of visits and / or phone calls, we were now receiving (inconsistent) Facebook messages for birthdays. It wasn't hard to say no to unmarried friends who fell in the latter category, but it was harder with these married couples. Isn't there an unspoken "reciprocal" rule?

In the end, it was about inviting the people that we most wanted to have with us on our wedding day and, since we were unable to have 500 guests, we needed to be "picky". I realize there's a strong possibility that we made some wrong choices and that, for some of our guests, we might "get the cut" when they are faced with a similar predicament. But, at least for now, we feel good about our decisions. To use one of my beloved idioms, we've made our bed and now must lie in it.

Ok, I'm opening the floodgates...what do you all think about this invite dilemma? Have you been in a similar situation?

Note: I did not specifically call out the number of couples (out of the 32) that will not be invited to our wedding because, in the end, it really wasn't that many. However, I still thought it was a valid topic to bring up to the Hive.