Wedding Protocol: Who Do You Invite From Work?

Wedding Protocol: Who Do You Invite From Work?

Congratulations on your engagement! Getting married is exciting and magical! The planning of the wedding is… less so. There are so many details to figure out! There are so many different criteria that must be met! Trying to figure out the protocol for dozens of different situations (do your really have to invite your Grandmother’s church group?) can be really frustrating! One of the hardest things to figure out is what to do about your co-workers. You spend forty (or more) hours with them a week. This means that you spend most of your awake time with them… but do you really have to invite everybody to your wedding? The good news is that this is a decision that you have to make early on so you don’t need to worry about it plaguing you for months during the wedding planning process. You need to decide early on because it will affect how how many of your summer wedding invitations that you need to have printed up and sent out. If you’re planning on keeping the wedding as small as possible, this alleviates the burden of having to invite co-workers or your boss. You can simply spread the word that the wedding is limited to family and very close friends only. To avoid hurt feelings you need to either invite everybody at work or nobody from work. Even if you are very close to a few of your co-workers it’s best to keep the work invites an all-or-nothing situation. If you hate the idea of doing an all or nothing invite rule, consider the following trend: invite only your closest friends with work—but only if they are not directly above you or below you. No bosses or assistants/team members/underlings. This way you don’t worry about your boss seeing you in a potentially embarrassing situation or looking like a suck up. You also won’t have to worry about the people of whom you are in charge feeling like the invitation is mandatory. A lot of the etiquette involved with this problem is tied up in how formal you want your wedding to be. If it is something more casual, like a backyard potluck wedding, you can invite people from work and not worry about whether or not they can make it. If the ceremony and reception are formal and you are paying per person for things like meals, and so on—it’s better to not invite your co-workers. Remember: the invitation process is full of minefields. Remember also: it’s your wedding. The only people whose opinions actually matter are yours and your fiancées. Don’t’ let anybody bully you into or out of inviting anybody! Photo Credit: Shutterstock

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