I'm probably weird for thinking about this almost a year after our wedding, especially since everything about our wedding went fairly well, but I'm just having a moment of thinking about alternate "what if" scenarios. And I know that my wife is just relieved that it all worked out and would not want to rehash any of this.
We knew we wanted a small wedding. When we first started the planning process, we couldn't imagine wanting to invite more than 25 people, so we looked around for venues to accommodate around 30 guests. We found one we really liked, with a max capacity of 50 guests, so we booked it. Then we worked on our guest list.
Somehow, with the slightly larger capacity than we'd originally envisioned, our invite list grew to almost the 50-guest maximum. Mostly it came from her family's side. As is apparently common, her parents kept requesting to add family members, and she obliged, until the list was well into the 40's. My parents tried to do the same with some aunts and uncles, but I showed them the guest total and said there was no more room. I hardly knew those aunts and uncles and didn't really want them there anyway. Then I learned that I'd made a grave error in adding some married friends without their spouses, so that meant I had to add their spouses to the already growing list. This brought us to 48. Then she discovered that she'd forgotten to add a really important friend (a bridesmaid) and that friend's parents, whom she'd thought she'd already added, so adding them took us over the limit. She had to then remove a couple, which she was okay with, which brought the final invite list to 49, out of the 50 allowed. Of the 49 we invited, 42 showed up.
We overall enjoyed that day, and so did the guests, at least the ones who told us so. But looking back, despite 42 being a low guest count compared to most weddings, it didn't really feel like the small wedding we'd really wanted. I only knew 10 of those 42 guests, including my parents and her parents and my three groomsmen. And a lot of the guests on her side were relatives that she wasn't really close with.
This makes me wonder, what would've happened if we'd chosen one of the 30-max venues we'd originally looked at? Or what if the venue we picked had a 30-guest max instead of 50? Would that have given us the excuse we needed to omit a lot of guests and give us the small wedding we wanted? Or would that have caused a lot of drama and arguing over who to cut? Would those aunts and uncles and cousins who actually came to our wedding have been offended if we didn't invite them due to lack of space? Obviously no one can realistically answer that without actually knowing them, but is this a thing that happens with small weddings? Relatives getting offended over not being invited, because they don't realize it was a really small wedding for close friends and immediate family? Perhaps it was just dumb luck that the venue we picked had a larger capacity than we were originally seeking, thus we were able to accommodate just the right number of people that were supposed to be there. Perhaps it was also dumb luck that I hardly know anyone from my extended family at all, aside from my one cousin who actually came (and was a groomsman), thus no having to cut some of her relatives to accommodate mine. But I still can't help but wonder if we could've gotten away with a smaller venue and had a smaller wedding like we really wanted.
