Our Very First Fight!

Well, that didn't take long. About two minutes into our first sit-down talk to figure out how many people we wanted to invite, we got into our first wedding-related fight. A milestone, of sorts.

By Sara Cardace

Turns out, John is less than enthused about the intimate-wedding-in-Napa idea. I hear what he's saying--it's so far away, his family is going to have to hop a plane from New Mexico either way, and most of our guest list will be coming from New York, so...New York it is. I honestly didn't care too much about the location, so that was fine by me. Still, I'm sort of terrified at the prospect of planning what is now likely to be a pretty big wedding in probably the most expensive, overbooked, insanity-inducing city in the country, so I demanded that we sit down and plot out some sort of speculative guest list that very instant.

Coming up with a list of friends was the easy part. So far it looks like there will be about 50 of them altogether--not bad! We'd been worried about the numbers growing too fast, but since the "friends" number came out surprisingly modest, we decided to invite all of our cousins as well. And that's where the trouble started.

How do you define a cousin? And do you invite your first cousins but not your second cousins? What about great-aunts who feel more like regular aunts? If you invite one person in a category, do you have to invite them all? Even the ones you've only met once or twice? (According to our friends and family, the answer to those last two is a resounding yes.) I mean, you have to cut it off somewhere, right? But you don't want to offend people. Of course, most of all you don't want to offend the person you're marrying--which I managed to do in impressively efficient fashion by suggesting that his definition of cousin was different than my own, and thus wrong. Rookie mistake! After our excited list-making devolved into sulky silence and pouty aggression on both of our parts, we decided to just keep everyone on the list, which is now maxing out at about 150 guests. And so the venue search begins in earnest.

I've always been borderline obsessed with The Foundry, in Long Island City, Queens. It has a really cool, industrial vibe and if I recall correctly, it wouldn't break the bank because it's a bit cheaper than places in Manhattan. That one's first on my list. 

On a related note, we're thinking--naively?--that we can keep the number of guests a bit high because we've heard that about 10 to 20 percent of the people you invite to your wedding won't be able to make it. Can anyone confirm that that's actually the case? Help!