Addressing ettiquette and wedding stress

[andrewducker]

I'm sending out wedding invites at the moment, which is making me aware of all sorts of in-built biases in the conventions surrounding how we address people. I'm skipping over a lot of it by using first names for everyone, but even then there's a question of order. For older people I'm largely going with Male Partner, Female Partner, Children in order of age, but reversing the male/female order when the email address is for the woman of the house. For people nearer my own age I'm going with "Partner I know best->Partner I know less well, Children in order of age". Lesbians go in the order that I'm used to people putting them.

The whole invitation thing has been more stressful than I thought, largely because the venue has space for 80, and it turns out that Julie and I have 57 family members between us, so there are only 23 spaces for friends. This means that we've had to cut some cousins I haven't seen in 20 years, and restrict a few people to not having +1s if we're going to fit in even the people that we see/chat to on a regular basis, and a couple of really old friends. And the reception can take 30 more, but that still left us with 57 people that we don't have space for. I just hope people understand.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I have:
Two parents
Two brothers, both with partners, one with a kid
Three uncles on one side, all with partners.
On that side there are eleven cousins, two of which aren't invited for space reasons, and two of which have children (three between them). Oh, and they all (bar two who are too young) have partners (or plus ones).
On the other side there are numerous more, but only my mother's brother and his wife are invited, again due to space reasons (and not having seen them in an age).
So that's 2+5+6+12+3+1 = 34. Plus 4 old friends of the family that I basically grew up with as pseudo uncles/aunts.