What would you do if one of your wedding guests invited a guest of their own to your wedding – without asking you first? I wish this was a hypothetical question, but unfortunately it’s not: last night we had a phone call from one of our guests, who was calling to confirm that he and his wife will be able to come to our wedding – and that he’ll be bringing his mother-in-law along, too.
The guest in question is a family member. He and his wife live abroad, so even although our invitations won’t be going out for a while yet, we’d told them the date of the wedding as soon as we booked it, to give them plenty of time to decide if they’d be able to come. What we didn’t stop to consider was that not only would they come to the wedding, but that they’d take it upon themselves to invite a guest of their own.
The whole thing has put us in a bit of an awkward position. Neither of us really knows the additional guest: we’ve met her a couple of times, but only very briefly, so she’s more or less a stranger to us both. And while Terry and I have had lots of differnt ideas for our wedding, there’s one thing we’ve been absolutely clear on from the moment we started planning, and that is that we don’t want to invite people we barely know. Now it seems that someone else has done that for us.
Our wedding isn’t going to be a particularly large one, and we’ve always said that we wanted all of the guests to be people we genuinely care about. There will obviously be a few exceptions to this: for instance, those of our friends who are single, and who won’t know anyone else there will be welcome to bring a guest, and that’s absolutely fine. It seems reasonable for people to expect to bring their partner. To bring their partner and their mother-in-law, though? Uh-uh.
Of course, this is just one extra person, but it is problematic for us because having been so firm with my parents (who got very excited when we set the date, and wanted to invite everyone they’d ever met) about the issue of inviting people we don’t know very well, it hardly seems fair to allow someone else to bring a near-stranger either. And where will it all end? It wouldn’t even occur to me to invite someone to another person’s wedding – now I’m having visions of everyone doing it, and me walking in to a ceremony which may as well be open to the public. Aaargh!
Am I just being mean, here? Should we just suck it up, and make room for a small one, or should we do some un-inviting, pronto? Answers on a postcard (or in the comments box), if you please…
