Inviting guests?

[skiqt323]

What is the proper way to invite/not invite guests. Since we will be almost 24 when we do get married, we have alot of young friends that are not married. Many do not have boyfriends and we are usure if we should invite "guests" for all of them. It would also double our costs for the wedding and I don't know if I want to spend that on people that I won't even know. I really don't want to offend anyone though! Any help?

 

[Pomlover2586]

I've always heard that if you know the person has been seeing a significant other then you put "and guest" otherwise it's perfectly acceptable to only include the individual. Hope that helps!

 

[TheRealDoraExplorer]

I agree with Pomlover. After all, you're under no obligation to pay for somebody to take their boy or girlfriend out on a dinner date, especially if you don't know the other person that well. Generally, unless your invitation says "Mr or Mrs _____ and Guest", whoever you're inviting should assume that they are the only person included in your invitation. If you DON'T add "Guest" to the invites and somebody asks you if they can bring someone, then you can address it privately with them and see if it's something you can do.

 

[jasonandlisa]

Well, the "proper etiquette" dictates that only people named on the "inner envelope" of an invitation are actually invited. (So if "and Guest" or a boyfriend/girlfriend name doesn't appear, the invited person should not assume that he/she can bring a date; likewise, only children specifically named are invited.)

However, you will almost certainly have people who ignore this convention or think you're being "rude" by not allowing dates for single guests. In my case, I had a (*****y) first cousin tell her mom that she "lost" her envelope and wasn't sure whether she was allowed to bring her boyfriend. (A boyfriend I had never heard of and had never been to any other family events.) Anyway, her mom called my mom, and my mom said she could bring her BF.

Now, one thing you could do to encourage single guests to come alone is start early with efforts to coordinate roommates. We managed to pair up most of our single friends as roommates, which worked really well, even when they didn't know each other beforehand. It let them split costs and gave them somebody to eat meals with, travel to parks with, etc. I think that particularly since your friends are so young, you could really sell this idea as a way to help them save money. You'd still need to decide whether you want to give them the "and guest" option, but if you do give them the option of the date you could still encourage them to go solo to save money.

Another thing we did was use the save-the-dates as a sort of pre-invitation. We had a pre-RSVP deadline and a request for guests to email us by that date if they were coming. If at that point a single guest said he/she was coming but didn't indicate a boyfriend ("I" vs. "We"), then we didn't feel badly about not putting "and guest" on their formal invitations. We did get a few who said things like, "I plan to attend and will hopefully have a date with me." We gave those guests the "and guest" option, but as it ended up, the save-money-with-roommates offer worked so well that we didn't have any guests at all who brought non-serious-significant-others as dates.

Sorry for the long-winded response. I know this is a tricky issue. For us, it was the cost and worries about exceeding the maximum capacity for the Living Seas that made the "and guests" stressful. Good luck!!

 

[hmgolden]

We opted to invite even single friends to bring a guest. Our reasoning was that since everyone had to travel for our wedding, the least we could do was let them bring someone with them. Its definetly not required ettiquette wise, but we felt it was the right thing to do. In the end, I think only 1 of our single friends took us up on the offer.

 

[DisneySweetie]

I completely agree with the PP. If your guests are traveling, it seems appropriate to allow them to bring a travel buddy. They are making the effort and paying the expense to travel, therefore, it's a little vacation for them. People don't tend to go on vacation alone. So, we are including guests on the invites for each of our single friends that are out of state (which is most everyone). Although, I do not expect them all to bring guests. We have offered to help match people together and we are encouraging this. It helps them save money by sharing hotel rooms, rental cars, etc. But it also saves us money. We communicated this to everyone via our website.