By: Matthew Hick

Putting together a guest list for your wedding can be chaotic, to say the least. If you thought that planning a wedding would be simple… welcome to the wacky world of the guest list. Here are some tips to help you through.

Putting together a wedding guest list may sound like one of the easiest tasks you will have to do on your wedding agenda. However, as you will soon find out, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Simply writing down your closest friends and family may not be difficult… but wait until your family and your future spouse’s family becomes involved. They may want to invite all 30 of your long lost cousins from the other side of the country! And while this may seem just fine to you, if you are paying for the wedding yourself, it can turn into quite a different story.

Yes, putting together a wedding guest list can be one of the most stressful aspects of planning a wedding. While you don’t want to insult your relatives and your relatives-to-be, it doesn’t always turn out that way. There will usually be at least one person in the group who wants to invite everyone they know. Keep in mind that when it comes to your wedding day, you and your fiancé are going to be the ones who have to go around and meet and thank all of these people for coming. Do you really want to spend your day with people you don’t even know that well? This is why when planning your wedding guest list, try to keep it to the people you really want to have there. This is YOUR day with your future spouse – no one else’s.

Now, on the other hand, if someone else is paying for your wedding or helping to pay for your wedding, you should be respectful towards his or her wishes. For example, traditionally, the bride’s parents pay for the wedding. So if they wish to have a long lost uncle or two there, they should have a say in that. However, if the future mother-in-law hands in a list of 200 of her closest relatives, the bride’s father should not feel obligated to pay for something like that. A boundary must be drawn somewhere. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that all of the bride and groom’s closest friends and family get invited – with no one left out. When it comes to an invitation, the bride’s close friend should come before the mother-in-law’s second cousin. Other than that, everything else is negotiable.

It is the responsibility of the person paying as well as the bride and groom (even if they are not paying) to pick a number by which to cap the guest list at. When doing this, realize that everyone won’t be invited and feelings may get hurt, but that is sometimes a common problem especially when financial issues are involved. Your guests and your pocketbook will certainly understand!