Reception invitations

I'm a bit confused. Are you talking about a "tiered" wedding where only some people come to the ceremony and then more to dinner and then more afterward? If so I would stay away from treating guests differently or more importantly than others. That leads to hurt feelings.

People always have the option not to come, with the RSVP card in the invitation.

Sorry, but I’m afraid that won’t go over very well with guests. Those people will eventually find out about only being invited to the ceremony and not the reception (especially with good ol’ social media 😬). These days the only acceptable format is for very few to be invited to the ceremony, but for more to be invited to the reception and call it a “celebration of marriage”. Even then, guests get upset about that too because they feel like they weren’t important enough to be invited to watch the act of the marriage.

All guests should be invited to both the ceremony and reception. It would be extremely rude to only invite them to one but not the other. If you want to cut costs then cut from other areas.

Guests should be invited to both ceremony and reception together or nothing. Regardless of the popularity of the current post-Covid trend where the ceremony with legalities is considered an afterthought and not important at all even though it is the main event, there is no polite way to have a tiered event without offending loved ones which results in rifts.



Invitations always allow for guests to decline. They are never a summons even though some people consider them to be. Gaslighting and bullying from parents, etc to invite people you have no relationship with is always unacceptable and if you don’t set and maintain boundaries from the beginning with fiancé as a team, then you will be railroaded into other decisions after the wedding that are no one else’s business: where you live, how and where holidays are spent, how future children are raised and the list goes on.

Inviting fewer people to the reception and everyone else to a ceremony is considered rude. It's OK to invite fewer people to a ceremony and then later have a larger celebration of marriage. But it's not appropriate to invite people to a large ceremony and only a select few to the reception or IMO a select few to the ceremony and a large group immediately following.