Guest list

I made probably 4. But I had to narrow it to a smaller list so I was having like 70 people for a venue that could accommodate 50. Maybe more depending on how many more. But at the same time I was coming up with a list on my own without FH because he kept not understanding that I needed to know who he wanted invited because the venue needs to know! Finally he told me and we got the list a little above 50 but about 6 are children. So I’m at about 56-57 people.

1 list.

W e made an original list with all our dream guests, and then trimmed it when we realistically knew how many people we could host— cutting out a few more distant circles of friends/family until we reached the max number we could host. And, that was our list. Didn’t change after that even once we sent out save the dates and then invites and some people said they wouldn’t make it. Simply had fewer guests than initially invited— but that’s normal!

I had two lists

I have one spreadsheet that ranks our guests. There are columns for whose guest they are (primarily connected to me or my FH), what priority they are (ranked on how close we feel to them/how much we want them there, so immediately family and my best friend who is like a sister are 0s, our wedding party and their SO's are 1s, close friends 2s, and so on, all the way down to "backup guests" who are people we'd invite if our initial invites declined and we felt we needed more people), contact info, whether they have a SO or +1, conflicts for them (date or child supervision, unable to travel, etc), RSVP status, dietary restrictions, mobility issues, etc. It has made it really easy to figure out how many people we really want to invite, where our list cutoff will be (and where we may want to extend or trim our list), who is on the list and getting an invite but won't come so shouldn't count towards our total, how many people will be traveling and whether we should organize a hotel block and shuttle, and making sure we have equal-ish representation so it isn't predominantly dominated by just "my" people or just "his". The list includes 117 people currently, but we are planning to invite a little over 80 and expecting to have between 60-80 guests total. This way as RSVPs come in if we see a lot have declined we can just add from the bottom of the list (friends whose company we enjoy but people we aren't super close to) and we aren't searching to fill spaces. We can also have a better idea of who, if anyone, gets a random, unnamed +1 guest (I personally hate random +1s but my FMIL requested that a couple of people on her list get one). This will also help us with seating charts when the time comes.

I started with 184 people with save the dates invite. of those 110 said they could not make that day so i then proceed to invite others form our second list with save the dates. i invited an additional 200 with the second round of save the dates this was a year ahead given to them. so i invited 384 people now and almost 300 have said they are not going to show so we are now on our 3 list of people and we invited i think an additional 213 people so total invited now is almost 600 or over that. we are working on the invitations and i am still sending to some that said they are not going to come cause they are family but i know the answer as they have said already but i am at the point where i feel enough is enough and if they come they do if they dont then its smaller. how do so many people have something to do a year 6 months and 5 months out. A few people have known a few years just not the date. We original set the number at 184 for everyone except the 2 of us so 186 now i have set the number to 2