Your Seat Is Not Guaranteed

What if we treated wedding invites more like exclusive event registrations? Could a shift to a first-come-first serve approach to RSVP-ing ease planning stress?

Photo from Death by Stock

I’ve worked in the wedding industry for more than 16 years, but it’s a whole other beast being on the other side of the planning process. I’ve been to literally hundreds of weddings, witnessed countless moments of joy and drama, been intimately involved in the complicated logistics, and yet somehow still stayed blissfully out of the path of any real emotional stakes. Until, of course, I started planning my own wedding.

One thing I always try to gently remind my clients, is that no one really cares about your wedding. I say it with love because it’s a hard truth to swallow, but it comes with a lot of freedom from expectation as well. I try to frame it as an opportunity: no one really cares about your wedding, but with some intentional expectation setting, we can make them care.

But even though I went into my own wedding planning with this tough kernel of knowledge practically tattooed on my brain, it still stung to be confronted with such apathy in real life. I think we all secretly believe—or perhaps foolishly hope—we are the exception. People will surely care about my wedding.

A screenshot of a comment on an article on the Cut that says the quiet part out loud.

But slightly hurt feelings aside, the real issue turned out to be that my inability to predict the extent of that apathy brought up a bigger logistical problem. Since we are hosting our wedding at our little rustic olive farm in Spain, where we only have one small bathroom and a tiny kitchen, we knew we had to keep it really small. And the smaller the wedding, the more intentional you have to be about the guest list.

Knowing that not everyone would make it, we initially invited a handful more than we could realistically accommodate, the internet suggested a buffer of 10-20%. With such a small group 20% is only a few extra people, but I was reluctant to invite too many more, because I didn’t want to risk too big a group, both for practical reasons, and my partner and I are both pretty introverted and prefer intimate gatherings to big blowouts. Even though it’s my second wedding, I thought people might at least be lured by the beautiful location and chance to visit our new farm. I assumed everyone felt a bit of what we did when deciding to have a wedding: that when the world feels especially brutal, it’s even more integral and meaningful to gather to celebrate life’s joys together.

I set an RSVP deadline for two months before the wedding, but asked on the wedding website that if anyone knew for certain they couldn’t come to please let me know as soon as possible. I thought then, that if some space opened up early on, we could still invite other people. We got a few early and enthusiastic acceptances, but every single person who declined waited until the last possible moment to RSVP (and even a few after the deadline had already passed), something I probably should have predicted, since much of my friend group also has ADHD (we travel in packs, apparently). With a good chunk of our guest list in the states, airfare through the roof this summer, and lots of small children and two pregnancies in the group, more than half of the people we invited weren’t going to make it, and it was too late to invite anyone from the B-list.

Admittedly, I did shed a few tears during the last week when people I assumed were for sure yeses turned out to be reluctant nos, but ultimately my partner and I were actually relieved it would be small. As an experience designer I am putting a ton of work into the details, and a small group means I can spend more time and money per person and really go all in on spoiling the guests that are there. Still, I got dinged on the catering deposit, and there are several folks I regret not inviting earlier had I known there would for sure have been space for them.

I go back and forth about whether I should have predicted this. My first wedding was 20 years ago, and everyone we invited showed up (plus one extra person we weren’t expecting), but we’re not in our 20s anymore. We’re busy. I get it! But it did get me thinking about how I would have done things completely differently if I had it to do over.

What if I had treated my wedding like any other event that I plan? I have done a lot of work outside the wedding industry in corporate, education, and culinary events. When I plan a pop-up dinner or workshop or networking event, there’s a limited number of spaces available, and they are first come, first serve. Even for free events, you have to register in advance and when the seats are filled up, there is a waitlist in case someone cancels. Why couldn’t this work for weddings?

Photo by Death by Stock

I typically promote being really really intentional about who to invite. But until I was planning my own wedding I admit I had a blindspot about how to navigate the mountain of emotional landmines and social issues within your family and friend groups that this process brings to the surface. There are the people you don’t really want to invite but feel like you have to, or people you invite because they invited you to their wedding, or people you want to invite but know coming might be a struggle for them and you don’t want them to feel obligated. It’s a difficult balancing act of not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings by excluding them, but not wanting to burden someone by inviting them. There is often outside pressure from family and connections that are deeply and inextricably intertwined, like if you invite one cousin, you have to invite all of your cousins. It’s often complicated and messy and emotionally draining managing all of the intricate things that come up during the process. But what if switching up the way we approach the invitation/RSVP process could offload some of the emotional labor to our guests instead of having to bear it all ourselves?

What if, instead of sending out a set number of invitations and leaving the guest count to chance, we set the size of the guest list, invite everyone we might possibly want to invite, and let them determine how badly they want to be there by jumping on one of the available spaces before they are filled up by other people. Typically a wedding invitation means your seat is guaranteed, but scarcity is an incredible motivator.

True VIPs like close family, can perhaps get a head start before sending out the invite to the wider community, and a few spaces secretly reserved just in case someone you really want there is late to reply. People who don’t really want to come but don’t want to hurt your feelings by telling you they don’t want to come have plausible deniability by simply missing out on the window of opportunity. And people who really want to be there will put in the effort to figure it out quickly.

As with anything outside the ordinary, if you’re breaking from tradition, you just have to clearly communicate it. It’s a process everyone is familiar with, just not perhaps for weddings, and plenty of event booking platforms are already set up to handle this way of doing things. The potential downside, of course, is not having total control over the guest list, with the potential for key folks getting squeezed out by peripheral ones, but you trade having control of the who for the how many. There’s a little bit of synchronicity and magic, then, in determining the group of people who are present.

After encountering this situation myself, I started hearing from friends in the industry how much weddings are changing. Couples are leaving the planning much later, folks are flakier, and costs are staggeringly high at the moment, all increasing the likelihood of more than anticipated invitees sending their regrets. Maybe then our approach should change, too, allowing more flexibility on who we can invite and freeing ourselves up from a lot of tough choices.

As with many wedding traditions, we do it the way we do it because that’s just the way it’s always been done. But is it the best way? Maybe for some, but not for every wedding. For sure if I had it to do over I would have cast a much wider net and let the guests sort it out. What do you think? Would the way we handle other events also work for weddings? Why or why not?