50 person wedding

You need to talk to your FH and narrow it down. Who can you see having to absolutely be a part of the day? If you can get married without cousin sally or joey coming then they get cut. If they get mad, oh well.

Build up instead of down. FH and I have families like yours but wanted to keep it small (around 20 people) so we started listing people we could not imagine the day without and when we got to our number we stopped. We ended up with immediate family and wedding party members only.

We are having a DW for that reason. We wanted a small, intimate wedding but have huge families. We invited aunts and uncles and only the cousins that FH grew up with and were like siblings with. I am not super close with my cousins and am not even inviting 2 of my brothers (one lives hella far away, the other is my half brother and I am not close with him.) We have about 4 sets of friends total we are inviting. Most of them are in the wedding party.

This was how I built my list :

Bride

Bride's parents

Bride's siblings and their SOs

Bride's grandparents

Groom

Groom's parents

Groom's siblings and their SOs

Groom's grandparents

Bridal party and their SOs

Friends and their SOs

Aunts and uncles

Cousins

Children of any of the above

2nd cousins

Only invite people who you have a relationship with. Its fine to invite the cousins on your dad's side who you are close to, and not invite the cousins on your mom's side who you don't know or don't know well. If you haven't seen or talked to them in a year, they shouldn't be invited to your wedding.

FH and I have 20 aunts and uncles between us (not including their spouses). With cousins and their families, we'd be at over 200 with family alone. We each narrowed it down to about 50 to invite total, knowing that several wouldn't come. My parents are contributing some, so I felt it was important to invite their siblings and I didn't feel as though I could only invite some of them. I only invited one cousin from my side. FH only invited 3 aunts/uncles who he was close to and their kids.

I only felt comfortable excluding groups, not one person from here or there, whereas for FH, it was easy to do that based on who he was close with.

A 50 guest wedding may be hard to do if you come from a big family and plan to invite all your aunts, uncles, AND cousins. Are you inviting whole families including kids or is it going to be adults-only? If you opt to invite cousins and some have kids, that can easily add several dozen more guests, depending on how many cousins you have and how many kids THEY have.

My fiance and I eliminated any cousins from our guest list entirely because we're not close to any of them, in fact we barely know most of them, but I can see where this would be more difficult if you have closer, more sibling-like relationships with any of your cousins.

Anxiety is awful to feel, have you guys considered just eloping? Or limiting your guest list even further to only parents, grandparents, and siblings and their significant others? Obviously I don't know what your family dynamics are like, but if the majority of your aunts, uncles, and cousins are reasonable folks and know about your anxiety, they may actually GET this and be understanding if you chose to invite immediate family only.

You don't want to spend the next 2 years stressed to the max about both this big event you're starring in/hosting AND money. Talk to your fiance on it and discuss your options and really think about what's right for the two of you.

*edited for typos

You got great advice, the best being 'build up, not down'.

The great thing about intimate weddings is that the list kind of limits itself. You can absolutely invite parents, siblings, grandparents and call it a day. Aunts, uncles, cousins? They dont' need to be there.

Good luck!

I had 54 guests at my wedding.

I have 15 aunts/uncles and 22 cousins. Almost all of which are married and have children.

If I had included my cousins and children, my guest list would have easily tripled.

I started thinking very strategically by limiting potential invites to only those I have spoken to in the last year or have some kind of close bond with. I realized this meant that I would be inviting some cousins but not others, so I choose to invite none at all, since I'm not all that close with any of them and they would have all had to travel across the country for my Sunday wedding.

We didn't invite cousins. We invited 58, the final count will be either 40 or 45 (waiting on a family of 5 to RSVP). I did get blowback from 1 cousin but the rest we're super understanding

I wanted to have around 50 guests but my FH wanted more family there so we'll end up around 60. We added us then our bridal party, parents, siblings and their family. From there is was who could we not imagine the day without. I ended up only picking one aunt and one uncle no cousins and my grandparent we are gonna set up a stream so they can stay home.

If you aren't close enough to spend whatever it costs per head on a birthday gift for them, they don't need to come. That's what we used to size it down...I think it's a good method!

My fiancé and I are having a 50 (well, 48) person wedding. He has a HUGE family and they are all close to each other, so inviting on the few aunts/uncles/cousins he's close to wasn't really an option. My side of the family is relatively small (~20 people) and I'm only close to a couple. So our solution was to invite NO relatives outside of our immediate families and their SOs. That alone was about half of our guest list, and the other half are our closest friends.

It's hard to feel like you're "excluding" people but honestly, having a hard and fast rule for it is the easiest way to go about it. Picking and choosing certain people only makes for more trouble, and for us just having the "sorry but we're inviting immediate family only" response was the cleanest and easiest.

My hubby and I made list 1 (brothers sisters moms dads grandmas grandpas) list 2 (close aunts and uncles, first cousins) list 3 (okay aunts and uncles, first/second cousins) list 4 ("thanksgiving list" ; extended family we saw for the holidays) then we widdled it down from there.

My Family literally takes up one table at the wedding it is quite sad. His family is huge. I got my parents one grandfather and my 4 siblings.

Your situation sounds exactly like mine! We chose to do a destination wedding to cut the list (still invited everyone but are expecting 50 since I know not everyone will make it)