I have a good group of friends and a reasonable sized family. I can’t wrap my head around these weddings with 100-300 guests. Am I a loser or are they inviting mostly tertiary characters.
My dad was a general contractor. The plumber he used was Italian, the woman he married was Italian. They had around 800 people at their wedding. The wedding cost about $150,000. And they walked away with about $20,000 extra in gifted money. They had 8 groomsmen and 8 bridesmaids.
No, you’re not a loser, just some people have life on easy mode.
This was about 25 years ago too.
My wife and I invited around 200 to our reception. I guess you could call it mostly “tertiary characters” (ugh, just typing that makes me feel like I’m falling into Main Character Syndrome).
We probably had around 30 friends (quick tally), then immediate family accounted for a dozen more, then extended relatives pushed us over 200. My mother and my paternal grandfather both came from larger families, so you get lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins that way. +1s definitely inflate that figure, too.
Am I super close with them all? No, but I was still happy to have them there. I generally like my extended family (fortunate in this day and age, I know!).
The size of families and the expectation of who gets invited varies a lot by culture, too.
Irish weddings are often big. Same for Mexican weddings, a lot of Arab folks.
I suspect Protestant Americans are outliers globally in the size of the average family and the degree of contact people maintain with cousins.
My wife and I did a quick courthouse thing because I got a new job and she needed health insurance. The plan was to do an actual wedding of some kind a year or two later but COVID and a bunch of other stuff happened so it’s been on the back burner. I think we’re looking at a 10 year thing now, which is nice because it’s given us a lot of time to think about guest lists and such.
We have a pretty decent amount of friends we want to invite, I think we’re in the ballpark of around 30
Some of those are gonna have +1s, so that gets us up to around 50 or 60
Then we have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. and some of them have +1s, depending on the size and relationship you have with your family, that can make things balloon really quickly.
And if you’re able to budget for it, it can be advantageous to invite as many people as you can, money and other wedding gifts can add up pretty substantially. That’s not a major factor in our guest list, but for a young couple, maybe looking to buy a house and have kids or whatever, that can be huge.
At least in my case, family. My family is really big and loves parties, his family is really big and loves parties. That quickly becomes a 250-300 person guest list.
That makes sense
100 is pretty easy to get to. I have 60 people on one side of my family alone. But for an average person, let’s do a count. You’ve got say 8 immediate family members, including their partners. Your partner does too. Your dad’s side has 10 people you want to invite. That’s only two families of 5, so that’s a low estimate for a lot of people. Your mom’s side has two families of 5 you want to invite. Now your partner has the same. Lets keep it small and invite only 10 of your friends, so 20 with their partners. Your partner wants 10 friends as well. You are now at 96 people.
That’s your immediate families, 10 relatives from each side, and 10 friends for you and 10 friends for your partner only.
Say you get married young, early 20s, you may have less accumulated friends.
By the time you are early 30s you will have probably accumulated more.
Friends from uni / college, work places, hobbies etc.
How many of these people invited you to their weddings? Usually fair that you reciprocate.
That’s how you end up with long guest lists.
I’m the opposite. Lots and lots of friends in my early 20s, almost none now
Yeah if id gotten married around 28-34 like most people who’s weddings I either attended or was in then I could easily get 200 when including family friends.
My mom got jokingly mad at me for not getting married at the time because the unwritten understanding is that wedding gifts are a kind of a communal form of mutual aid. Everybody in the community gives gifts wedding gifts so the couple has a leg up to start out, she paid in to that but until my brother got married wasn’t getting anything back lol
Self righteous, ignorant fucks. That mentality will never change.
I got lucky in a sense: planned for 50, number kept ballooning, but then oh no, covid restrictions, we get exactly 12 people in the room! Goodbye 3rd cousin by marriage who’d be all pissy if they weren’t invited.
The moms know a lot of people who they want to invite, and sometimes the aunts as well… The size of your wedding doesn’t make you a loser or not, ofc, and if it had been up to my wife (to a certain extent, ofc, she’s also a girly girl who wants what she wants, lol) we might’ve just planned a 20-30 people small and cheap get-together but who can deny the MIL’s requests. 🤷
it’s about bragging and showing off.
