Guest List: It keeps growing, and growing, and growing...

Our originial thoughts were to have a medium-ish wedding with 125-150 of our closest friends and family.  We are quickly discovering that this is easier said than done.  We compiled a list of friends, family and friends of our family and that list, with guests, totalled over 300.  Uhh, holy guest overload batman!  As much as I would LOVE to invite anyone and everyone who I've ever said hi to, weddings are crazy expensive, so we had to make some cuts.  A good rule of thumb I heard was that weddings usually cost about $100 per person.  So if there's a person on your list that you wouldn't hand $100 to, then don't invite them.  So we got the guest list cut down to about 200 using this rule.  Pretty good huh?  Yeah, that's what we thought too.

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We're having a "destination wedding."  Not for us, but for pretty much everyone else.  My family is mostly in Pennsylvania and Florida, with a few outliers.  K's family is mostly in Michigan, again with a few outliers.  So Atlanta is quite a distance from most of those places.  So we're very aware that many of our invited guests will not be able to attend.  But as we've been planning and our engagement and subsequent setting of the date was announced in church, on facebook, and via word of mouth, we had a lot of unexpected people expecting invites.  We attend a small church here with maybe 50 attendees on a good Sunday, but we only included the people we're closest with on the guest list.  But how do you explain to someone that you're inviting about half the church and they aren't in that half?  Hmm.. yeah.  I'm not sure how to do it either.  So, needless to say, the guest list has been quickly expanding. 

I'm still really surprised at some of the questions that we've been getting.  I mean, honestly.  I can't ever imagine asking someone these questions. 

"When's the wedding?  We need to know because we have other things going on in October and we'll need to plan around your wedding."

"Send me an invite!"

"When's the wedding?  I'll put it on my calendar right now!" 

"Am I invited?"

"I want to be a bridesmaid!"

And this one didn't happen to me, but to a friend of mine that just got married:

"Can I bring 2 friends to your wedding this Saturday because they're staying over my house on Friday night and it'll be much easier?"

Wow... just... wow. 

But, in any event, I think we're past the whole, "Would I give this person $100?" thing.  We don't want any hurt feelings and we figure that at this point, with our 220 invitees, we might still be under our 150 mark anyway.  But even if we're not, it's just money.  And it's not worth it to us to hurt someone who is relatively close to us by not having them on the list.