Inviting significant others to joint bachelor/ette party?

phira

My maid of honor and my fiancé's best men are planning a joint bachelor/ette party for us, the Friday night before our Sunday afternoon wedding. They've asked us for a list of no more than 30 people to invite.

I'm running into a weird issue: Do we invite significant others? Can we invite some significant others but not all?

For example, I've got several friends from out of town who will be traveling with their significant others. In some cases, I'm friends with the SO, and in some cases, I've never met them. I've also got out of town friends who might be bringing dates who aren't significant others.

As another example, I have two cousins (A and who will be recently married by the time my wedding rolls around. A got married this summer and had a co-ed bachelorette party a month before the wedding; my fiancé wasn't invited, but B's fiancée was. It didn't bother me or my fiancé, and I didn't think much of it because A and B's fiancée are pretty close. But now that we need to make the guest list for our party, I'd like to invite B's fiancée (who will be his wife at that point), but I don't know A's husband very well and wouldn't necessarily want to invite him as well.

Complicating, well, everything, is that our wedding party wants the guest list sooner rather than later, and our RSVP deadline isn't for another couple of weeks. So there are people we'd invite to the party who might not be coming to the wedding anyway, and we just won't know for sure for a while.

Any advice is appreciated!

Lauderdale Pink

Bachelor parties are as old as time, but bachelorettes are still a relatively new event.  My feeling is that if you have so many people in town with SOs and you are combining events anyway, be as inclusive as possible. I would not get stuck on who was or was not invited to past parties.  Make your own tradition.  It sounds like it could be a really fun night and the chance for people to get to know each other prior to the wedding night.  Win/win.

photokitty

Since it is a joint party and you want invite some SOs, my gut says you must invite SOs. If I was invite, but not my SO and I arrived and other SOs were there my feelings would be hurt - especially if he had traveled with me and I eft him int he hotel alone for the night.