Baltimore Maryland Wedding Invitation List Do’s and Don’ts!

Baltimore Maryland Wedding Invitation List Do’s and Donts!

Creating The Perfect Guest List
Creating the perfect guest list for your wedding calls for clear thinking and deliberate action. Once you know who you want to invite (and who you don’t), you need to know how to make it happen.

Owning Your Guest List With Your Invitations
One of the key elements in getting the wedding you want is to control your guest list. To that end, and to honor all of your guests equally, invite everyone by name. Thus, married people—who some etiquette writers say are the only people who should receive a joint invitation— are addressed as “Jennifer Jones-Smith and Jessica Jones-Smith” vs. “Mrs. and Mrs. Jones-Smith”.

Similarly, couples on your guest list who are cohabitating would each be named and, to follow convention, would each receive a separate invitation. I think that’s still the right thing to do. But if you choose to send one invitation, then “Robert Anderson and James Stein.” That also makes it clear that you are specifically inviting those two people, with no substitutions to be made.

Invitations for Children
The same would be true with children. Invite the parent or parents as above and name the children on one or both of the parents’ invitations. Not naming the children indicates that they are not invited. As you can imagine, including language like “…and family” is the opposite of what we’re talking about. It gives away your control of your guest list.

The Bonds (and Requirements) of Marriage
Married people—and perhaps long-term couples—are the one exception to my guidance about inviting only the people who you love and who love you. The bonds of marriage (theirs, not yours) call for you to invite both partners in the marriage.

Saving Face With Wedding Announcements
If you’ve been working through your guest list (and especially if you’ve read this blog post about wedding guests, you probably have a ‘cut’ list of people who fall into that middle place of people whom you’d like to know about your wedding but are not, for whatever reason, people that you’re planning to invite. An excellent way to honor them is with a wedding announcement. This is a formal card, often with the same look and feel of your wedding invitation, and also sent via the physical mail. It does just what it says—it announces that you were married. Wedding announcements usually go out the day after your wedding. They can also serve the dual purpose of conveying your new address or name change, if either is the case.

The Invitation List Is The Guest List
Remember that all of your wedding planning revolves around your budget and your guest list. The list of people you plan to invite to your wedding—that is, the number of people to whom you plan to send invitations—is the number that you need to use when you plan your wedding, without regard to who you think will or will not accept your invitation. As much as you might guess at who will or will not accept, you won’t know how many people plan to attend until thirty days or less before your wedding. Nearly all of your planning will have happened by then. So the invitation count is the number that all of your wedding professionals will use to help you plan your wedding.

Being as mindful as possible of how you want your wedding to look and feel at the outset, before you start your planning, will help you create the optimal size and composition of your guest list.

My favorite advice about who to invite to your wedding is this: Invite the people who you love and love you. Invite the people that you want to be a part of your marriage, to guide you and support you and care for you.

Managing Unhappiness
Much of the stress that arises around the guest list has to do not with whom to invite or not but with managing the family outcry when someone is not invited. Trust that you and your beloved are making good decisions. There is no need to explain to anyone but yourselves why you have made your choices. You can be both loving and clear with those that raise objections, offering that you are doing what feels right for the two of you. Feelings are what they are. They can’t be argued away.

Affirmation
The experience of your wedding and the memories built there will affirm your decisions. In the end, the people whom you love and who love you and who are guests at your wedding will undoubtedly see and appreciate that you’ve created the wedding that’s perfect for you.

David Egan is the proprietor and steward of the castle at Chase Court, a wedding ceremony and reception venue in the fantastic Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland.

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