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.
I’m from a big family, I have roughly 30 cousins and 10 aunts and uncles, one you include partners we were pretty close to 80, that’s before we add in 20 friends each with their own partners. We had to cull lots of people out of our list just to keep it down to 120
200 might seem like a lot, but I can see it.
I actually got married last Saturday, we had about 120 guests.
Between close friends, family, people that you can’t see as often because they live far and the +1s (and in the case of a guest in a polycule +2s) it goes up pretty quickly.
From the top of my head, we had about 20 family members, 20 friends from work, 25 people from the LARP we organize, another 25 from the LARP we play at, 8 bridesmaid+groomsmen, then a handful of friends from our other social circles.
I guess it depends of your definition of tertiary character: not all people we see every week, but it doesn’t mean we wouldn’t like to if we had the time and it made any kind of sense in the realities of adult life.
You’re completely right, love my family and wanted them to share our moment. We might not see each other as much as we’d like, but we felt like our wedding was a great excuse to get a many together as we could
I can’t imagine anyone can invite 100 active friends. Maybe I’m just too much of a loser to fathom that many, but I mean I do have a pretty broad definition of friend. Still only invited like 25 of my friends from all different times of my life. Add 25 for a spouse and 50 family, done: 100.
However, I could easily see inviting 100 family members in theory for myself, but it didn’t pan out in practice. The generation before me, the weddings of my childhood, had a huge family turnout. They were grand/children of immigrants and still loved close by and gathered often. By time it was my turn though, they spread geographically and had all new close family members from their spouse’s side. I invited 15.
So where do you go from there? Friends of friends. Coworkers. Inviting all your bosses/executives was a thing here. Acquaintances from minor prior interactions. Probably a bigger contributor is inviting all your parents’ friends and coworkers because your parents want to show off. Sounds insane now, but it was just a thing they did. So “tertiary” might not even be disconnected enough. Plus the invite list can be much larger than the attendee list, with some courtesy invitations and possibly some strategic invitations to hope for gifts.
Some people just want to game it to be as big as they can make it. Some people have a list that big out of respect for family.
And if you do end up having a larger wedding and feel like some family member is a bit out of your life, if you don’t dislike them, I recommend inviting them. The next time you see them will be at a funeral. Don’t save it for that. But nothing wrong with keeping it small, either.
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 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.
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
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
I got married at 40. Parents, siblings, 3 friends. We had a blast.
I have about 30 friends, but they’re all over the world. These 3 friends lived where we got married.
I have a large family, but why would I want to waste money (for both them and me) inviting them to a huge event during which I probably won’t get to talk to them because there are so many people?
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
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.
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.
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.
Self righteous, ignorant fucks. That mentality will never change.
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.
