At least in my case, family. My family is really big and loves parties, his family is really big and loves parties. That quickly becomes a 250-300 person guest list.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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That makes sense
Getting engaged was what made my fiancé have to come to terms with how phenomenally different we, and was the reason we eventually called it off and split. She had a big family, a huge professional network, and a massive social circle. I am completely estranged from my family, work in a small business where 95% of my shift is just me and while I like my coworkers, we’re not close. I’m sociable but I rarely make “friends”. My invite list was my dog and two buddies, enough to fill a best man (obviously my dog) and two groomsmen. It’s been a long time since that all transpired, but it still hurts a bit that what we thought was going to be a life defining moment and a foundation of the future ended up being the basis of recognizing “we are too different”.
my then fiancee and soon to be wife, we got a one way ticket around the world, stopping off in Vegas on the way, to get married.
Since divorced though :)
💰+vanity+tertiary characters.
Fair
200 might seem like a lot, but I can see it.
I actually got married last Saturday, we had about 120 guests.
Between close friends, family, people that you can't see as often because they live far and the +1s (and in the case of a guest in a polycule +2s) it goes up pretty quickly.
From the top of my head, we had about 20 family members, 20 friends from work, 25 people from the LARP we organize, another 25 from the LARP we play at, 8 bridesmaid+groomsmen, then a handful of friends from our other social circles.
I guess it depends of your definition of tertiary character: not all people we see every week, but it doesn't mean we wouldn't like to if we had the time and it made any kind of sense in the realities of adult life.
Commenting just to counterbalance - my wedding was like six friends at a rose garden without permission. My parents are separated and my wife's weren't great with travel, so we eloped.
Plus ones
I have 10 friends I want to invite, they have 10 friends.
40 guests.
I'm 1 of 4 children. That's 8 guests. If they were the same. 16 guests.
Over half way to 100 in just friends and immidiate family.
I have a dozen cousins from both sides. 24 guests. If they did, 24 guests.
Friends, immidiate family, and cousins. 100+
I have 3 best friends and at least 7 friends that have/will/would invite me to their weddings.
It adds up quick when you double then double again.
Why are you doubling the second time? Are you suggesting that you need to invite +1 guests for the friends of your friends for some reason?
OP calculation is for half of the bride/groom. Weddings typically take 2 to tango
Ah got it. The family made sense but friends were confusing me: the "they" refers to your spouse, not the friends in question.
I'm from a big family, I have roughly 30 cousins and 10 aunts and uncles, one you include partners we were pretty close to 80, that's before we add in 20 friends each with their own partners. We had to cull lots of people out of our list just to keep it down to 120
This was me as well.
Seems like some people might not understand how BIG families can get if you have one or two or 3 generations in a row with more than 6 members.
Our impromptu Easter this year was 85 people and it was just family.
My wife and I invited around 200 to our reception. I guess you could call it mostly "tertiary characters" (ugh, just typing that makes me feel like I'm falling into Main Character Syndrome).
We probably had around 30 friends (quick tally), then immediate family accounted for a dozen more, then extended relatives pushed us over 200. My mother and my paternal grandfather both came from larger families, so you get lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins that way. +1s definitely inflate that figure, too.
Am I super close with them all? No, but I was still happy to have them there. I generally like my extended family (fortunate in this day and age, I know!).
The size of families and the expectation of who gets invited varies a lot by culture, too.
Irish weddings are often big. Same for Mexican weddings, a lot of Arab folks.
I suspect Protestant Americans are outliers globally in the size of the average family and the degree of contact people maintain with cousins.
I worked with this Indian guy and a Indian woman. Both great great people and excellent at their jobs. We had a work outing(normally work ended around 5, we went to a restaurant with free food and 2 drink tickets starting at 3 and lasting till 6) and somehow we got talking about weddings, I think another women just got engaged. OH MY GOD, the weddings they talked about were insane. The guy didn't walk up the aisle, no he wasn't waiting up there for the bride, they literally rode live elephants down the aisle. Both of them said their weddings went for 3-4 days, plus honeymoon. Multiple performances by professionals including sword juggling, fire breathers, several live bands, etc. I don't even know what else. Yeah they were engineers and made good salaries and their spouses were also professionals with good salaries but not like actors or ceos or anything. I have no idea how they managed to afford it but they said it was "expected" in their culture.
Can you imagine how bland the average an American wedding must look to them?
Let's just say they were not impressed with the plans of the engaged woman...
Weddings and funerals.
One of my colleagues has 104 first cousins who she wanted to invite. Catholic families can be BIG.
100 is pretty easy to get to. I have 60 people on one side of my family alone. But for an average person, let's do a count. You've got say 8 immediate family members, including their partners. Your partner does too. Your dad's side has 10 people you want to invite. That's only two families of 5, so that's a low estimate for a lot of people. Your mom's side has two families of 5 you want to invite. Now your partner has the same. Lets keep it small and invite only 10 of your friends, so 20 with their partners. Your partner wants 10 friends as well. You are now at 96 people.
That's your immediate families, 10 relatives from each side, and 10 friends for you and 10 friends for your partner only.
My dad was a general contractor. The plumber he used was Italian, the woman he married was Italian. They had around 800 people at their wedding. The wedding cost about $150,000. And they walked away with about $20,000 extra in gifted money. They had 8 groomsmen and 8 bridesmaids.
No, you're not a loser, just some people have life on easy mode.
This was about 25 years ago too.
Ok... I can understand that but... What does the plumber have to do with it? Was he "laying pipe"?
The plumber was the one getting hitched to the other Italian. A bit of ambiguous pronoun use there.
Oh, it was a general contractor marrying the plumber. That makes sense. I read it as 3 separate people.
My dad used an Italian plumber (a man), the Italian plumber was getting married to an Italian woman (the 3rd person in the story).
My dad is just the person who the Italian plumber and I both know.
I guess that makes sense but its different from other reply
Say you get married young, early 20s, you may have less accumulated friends.
By the time you are early 30s you will have probably accumulated more.
Friends from uni / college, work places, hobbies etc.
How many of these people invited you to their weddings? Usually fair that you reciprocate.
That's how you end up with long guest lists.
I'm the opposite. Lots and lots of friends in my early 20s, almost none now
I got married at 40. Parents, siblings, 3 friends. We had a blast.
I have about 30 friends, but they're all over the world. These 3 friends lived where we got married.
I have a large family, but why would I want to waste money (for both them and me) inviting them to a huge event during which I probably won't get to talk to them because there are so many people?
Yeah if id gotten married around 28-34 like most people who’s weddings I either attended or was in then I could easily get 200 when including family friends.
My mom got jokingly mad at me for not getting married at the time because the unwritten understanding is that wedding gifts are a kind of a communal form of mutual aid. Everybody in the community gives gifts wedding gifts so the couple has a leg up to start out, she paid in to that but until my brother got married wasn’t getting anything back lol
Who makes more friends in their 30's instead of them drifting/moving away?? Please reveal your secrets.
We had less than 25 people at ours, city hall wedding with a late lunch afterwards and everyone home by 6pm. Spent the money we saved on buying a house instead, and the small number of people kept the day feeling really chill. We had a long engagement and kept putting it off because we were dreading having an expensive ceremony with everyone we've ever met in attendance...and then one day we just realised we can do whatever we want.
You invite the people you want to be there. That applies to both you and your soon to be spouse. It also applies to your parents if they’re paying (and sometimes even if they’re not). It’s also a great excuse to see people that you haven’t seen for a long long time.
It’s also extremely normal to invite family.
Now double the number because most of those people will bring a plus one, and add 20% cause that’s children that will come (unless you say no to kids which is becoming more popular).
Great, now your list of 20-30 people is over a hundred.
Of course you can have smaller weddings, but you will have to explain a lot to a lot of people, including family.
————
To give an example, I invited my brother, my two sisters, my parents, and my grandparents to my wedding. I also invited some coworkers and friends, I think like 6-10 I can’t remember.
My wife had even fewer friends to invite. About the same size family. But her parents wanted to invite several people we had never ever met before.
We had 140 people. The numbers sound small up until the minute you start writing invites. Then you realize just how many people “have to come”.
I had a coworker whose father was one of the owners of the company. Invited the whole office + their spouses, plus both extended families (and these were Catholic families, so big families), as well as a few coworkers from other offices. Flew in bishop to perform the ceremony, too. Really shelled put for that.
The sliding scales of inviting all the people you want to have there and avoiding people getting pissed off if they don't get an invite (or similar political reasons) are only limited by the financial means available.
100 is a relatively easy target to reach for most people. Family and friends and their +1's and children gets you there pretty quick.
Yeah everyone having a +1 is something I wasn't considering
I'm with OP.
When me and my wife got married, we invited 20-ish people. Small service, lunch for everyone, and every guest looked happy. It was a good day and looking back, I would not have done it differently.
One year earlier, we went to a wedding of a friend with ~200 people. Nice woman, but a total show-off. The wedding reception was horrible. They had a dress code, the service was spread among three locations, there were apparently massive costs, and many awkward, unhappy looking people. That marriage apparently did not last either.
My partner and I went to city hall, signed a few papers, and called it a day. It's not for a lack of people in our lives either, we both have huuuuuuuuuuuge overlapping social circles.
I can see how it's possible to have so many people and make a huge thing of it, I just don't see why. The wedding industry is particularly scammy on top of it
My bf knows a ridiculous number of people. But he's a pretty outgoing and super friendly guy who loves to party. 🤷♂️
I got lucky in a sense: planned for 50, number kept ballooning, but then oh no, covid restrictions, we get exactly 12 people in the room! Goodbye 3rd cousin by marriage who’d be all pissy if they weren’t invited.
My wife and I did a quick courthouse thing because I got a new job and she needed health insurance. The plan was to do an actual wedding of some kind a year or two later but COVID and a bunch of other stuff happened so it's been on the back burner. I think we're looking at a 10 year thing now, which is nice because it's given us a lot of time to think about guest lists and such.
We have a pretty decent amount of friends we want to invite, I think we're in the ballpark of around 30
Some of those are gonna have +1s, so that gets us up to around 50 or 60
Then we have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. and some of them have +1s, depending on the size and relationship you have with your family, that can make things balloon really quickly.
And if you're able to budget for it, it can be advantageous to invite as many people as you can, money and other wedding gifts can add up pretty substantially. That's not a major factor in our guest list, but for a young couple, maybe looking to buy a house and have kids or whatever, that can be huge.
The moms know a lot of people who they want to invite, and sometimes the aunts as well... The size of your wedding doesn't make you a loser or not, ofc, and if it had been up to my wife (to a certain extent, ofc, she's also a girly girl who wants what she wants, lol) we might've just planned a 20-30 people small and cheap get-together but who can deny the MIL's requests. 🤷
I can't imagine anyone can invite 100 active friends. Maybe I'm just too much of a loser to fathom that many, but I mean I do have a pretty broad definition of friend. Still only invited like 25 of my friends from all different times of my life. Add 25 for a spouse and 50 family, done: 100.
However, I could easily see inviting 100 family members in theory for myself, but it didn't pan out in practice. The generation before me, the weddings of my childhood, had a huge family turnout. They were grand/children of immigrants and still loved close by and gathered often. By time it was my turn though, they spread geographically and had all new close family members from their spouse's side. I invited 15.
So where do you go from there? Friends of friends. Coworkers. Inviting all your bosses/executives was a thing here. Acquaintances from minor prior interactions. Probably a bigger contributor is inviting all your parents' friends and coworkers because your parents want to show off. Sounds insane now, but it was just a thing they did. So "tertiary" might not even be disconnected enough. Plus the invite list can be much larger than the attendee list, with some courtesy invitations and possibly some strategic invitations to hope for gifts.
Some people just want to game it to be as big as they can make it. Some people have a list that big out of respect for family.
And if you do end up having a larger wedding and feel like some family member is a bit out of your life, if you don't dislike them, I recommend inviting them. The next time you see them will be at a funeral. Don't save it for that. But nothing wrong with keeping it small, either.
Self righteous, ignorant fucks. That mentality will never change.
it's about bragging and showing off.