Your Guest List: Who To Invite (And Why It's Completely Up To You)

When you're planning a wedding, one of the first things you'll look at with any venue is capacity. Ceremony capacity, dinner capacity, party capacity. And capacity really comes down to one question: who do you invite?

Are you having a small, intimate wedding with just immediate family and close friends? A bigger gathering that stretches to extended family and all your different groups of friends? Or are you going all out, Taylor Swift style, and inviting everyone you've ever known for the party of a lifetime?

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The size of your list shapes the feel of your day

With an intimate wedding, you get proper one-to-one time with everyone there. There's space and luxury in that. You can really dedicate time to each guest and to your partner, without feeling pulled in ten directions.

With a medium-sized wedding, a lot of couples go table to table during the wedding breakfast. You eat first, then once you're finished you stand up and go round with your partner, saying hello to everyone. Some people still do a receiving line before the meal, though it's less popular now as it eats into photo time and delays getting food out.

With a big wedding, hundreds of guests, it's honestly unlikely you'll get to greet everybody properly. There just isn't the time in a day.

So the guest list matters. It shapes what kind of day you actually have.

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Cost is part of it too

You're paying for every person on that list. Are you happy spending £80–£90 a head on someone you might not even buy a birthday card for? It's worth sitting with that.

And then there's the question of who's influencing your list. Do you feel like you should invite certain people, because they were part of your life once? That's worth questioning too.

My take: invite people for your future, not your past

My honest opinion is this: your wedding is about your future. The people you invite should be people you can picture being part of that future, not just people who mattered five or ten years ago. It's completely natural for people to grow apart. That doesn't mean you owe them a seat at your wedding.

It's also completely okay if you don't want to invite your mum, your dad, or your siblings. It's okay if a cousin twice removed doesn't make the list. It's your day. You get to celebrate it your way.

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Guest list first, then venue

Once you've got a rough guest list, you can start looking at venues, because your numbers will decide what's actually available to you, from small minimum-number spaces up to full capacity venues.

Both ends of the scale are lovely in their own way. Intimate weddings give you that quiet, one-to-one time you'll never get back. Big weddings, with hundreds of people celebrating you, are beautiful in a completely different way.

It usually comes down to the couple. People who don't love being the centre of attention often lean towards a smaller day. If you're close to a big family or have a huge circle of friends and colleagues, you might want the bigger bash, because it means everyone you care about gets to be there.

There's no right or wrong answer. It just has to be right for the two of you.

Venue: Tissington Hall

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