Small wedding vs. larger wedding

I actually prefer larger weddings, though I think I'm the minority. We are inviting around 275 people. We expect to have around 200 to attend (we can properly host everyone if everyone attends, but there are some people I really don't expect to travel for our wedding). Granted, my mother is paying for the large majority of things, and she wants to invite a lot of extended family, so that definitely bumped the list up, but large weddings are fairly standard in our crowd. I've been to maybe one wedding that had less than 50 people. As a guest, I feel like I can blend into the crowd more at a larger wedding, and I like the atmosphere of a large crowd. Also, in my family, weddings are almost like a family reunion, and they are a chance to get to see relatives I enjoy seeing, but just don't get much of a chance to. Certainly nothing wrong with a small wedding, and there have been many gorgeous small weddings, but it wasn't what suited my fh and I.

I wish we would have had a small wedding. We have a guest list of 80. I would have loved one the size of 15-20

We invited 80 to our DW. We fully planned on all attending from a budget perspective but expected about half of that. Now it looks like we are going to have 60-70 based on the amount of texts we have gotten from our guests who just received the invites. Had no clue so many people wanted to be a part of our day. I honestly was hoping for more declines to make it more intimate.

Completely #teamsmallwedding over here! Total guest list was 25, 21 are coming and I'm so so so much less stressed than I was when faced with planning the 250 person monstrosity. We will get to celebrate and relax with the people closest to us without worrying about making sure we spend time with Aunt Sally's 14 kids.

We ended up with 58 people including ourselves and it was the perfect size. We spent plenty of time with most guests but it was still big enough to feel like a party.

Thank you all for your input! I don't have room for an update in my original post so I'll add it here. I thought about what everyone said and FH and I went to look at the venue I mentioned above. We were absolutely blown away. After talking with the proprietor of the house, and voicing our concerns, we can no longer imagine having a larger wedding. She is willing to work with us to make it exactly what we want and has offered adjustments to the package that will make our wedding more suited to us. We have made a guest list of 25 and we are sticking to that! Thank you all again for your help! 11-04-17 is still our date!!

Our decision was based on budget and making a list of actual guests we wanted to invite, not ppl we just felt obligated to. I won't lie that at some points I said let's elope bc of the planning and money being spent but at end of day I knew I wanted the dress and all..

That's great news, MsVanWinkle!

We're planning on a large (200+) wedding, but we're also planning on a 1.5-2.5 year engagement to pay for it. We both have large families that we're close to and want to have them all there - the way we see it is that there's so many bad things that happen, we want to celebrate the good ones. Plus, we want a big fun party!