Wedding Q&A: Wedding Invitations and The Plus One

Wedding Wednesdays Q&A by Jamie Chang Destination Wedding Planner of Mango Muse Events

It’s that time for Wedding Wednesdays Q&A, our weekly post where we help you with your wedding planning by answering your most pressing questions. For those of you who are new to our little community, a warm welcome! And for our return friends, we are happy to see you again. So, let’s dive in! Today’s question is about wedding invitations: I’m starting to think about my wedding invitations and I’m nervous about people bringing more people than we intend. Our venue doesn’t hold that many people and we are also trying to keep the wedding on the smaller side, so we aren’t giving plus ones to everyone. How do you think we should approach the wedding invitations to make sure we don’t have any unexpected extra guests?

Great question! Invites can be confusing and there are so many invite questions I get all the time that I should probably do a whole series on it. But, let’s answer your question specifically.

So, there are two places where you would indicate to your guests who is invited. The first is the envelope. When you address the envelope you’d say, “Mr. Jon Snow” if it’s just the one person invited, or you’d say “Mr. Jon Snow and Guest” if they get a plus one. If you know who they’d be bringing (e.g. a significant other) then you should put their actual name on the envelope as opposed to just the word guest. So, putting the guest’s name on the envelope is the formal way to invite them because who the envelope is addressed to is who is getting the honor of the invitation.

However, some people don’t take the time to really read the envelope, so to make things perfectly clear it’s also good to indicate the number of invitees on the RSVP. Beneath the blank line where the guest fills out their name, you’d have a line below it that says something like, “We have reserved __ seats in your honor” and then what you do is fill in the number for each invite. You can, of course, play with the wording to fit with your particular wedding invitations, but this way there is no confusion on how many people are invited. Doing these 2 steps will politely let your guests know who and how many people are invited and prevent any awkward conversations as you tally your RSVPs.

(Photo from the Postman’s Knock)

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