I just have to get this off of my chest. We feel like the wedding is the party to celebrate our marriage & having a bunch of pre-parties leading up to the party is just a bit odd. It feels a little gift-grabby and AW to us (I understand the sentiment and tradition behind it, but we're in our thirties and have been living together for a few years already, so it's not like we need anything to get our life together started). Well, one of our friends hosted a surprise engagement party for us. It was very simple, at a local restaurant, with maybe 15 or 20 people there. We had a blast, and we were so touched that our friends did this for us. The problem? The friend who hosted reached out to a very close friend of mine (we will call her Jackie) to help with the invite list. Jackie suggested they invite some of our (mine and Jackie's) acquaintances from a local group we are members of. These acquaintances are not people I see regularly, call to chat, or people I would invite to the wedding. I see them at most once a month for a meeting of our group, for an hour or two. Nice enough women, just nobody I have much in common with outside of a shared hobby. No post-meeting drinks or dinners or socializing outside of this setting. So I show up to the surprise engagement party, and there's a dozen people there who I barely know and rarely socialize with. In retrospect, there was a conversation I had with Jackie one day when we were discussing these acquaintances, and I told her we wouldn't be inviting them to the wedding. She seemed overly shocked, and I didn't think it should have come as a surprise that I wouldn't be inviting casual acquaintances to a very small wedding. I realized later this was during the surprise party planning, and she had already invited them and couldn't un-invite them.
Am I obligated to invite them to the wedding? The icing on the cake... there were several recently single women at the engagement party commenting "Well we need to start working on finding our plus ones for the wedding!" Our guest list is limited, particularly so because we are allowing for guests of our currently single friends and family in case they have an SO by the time of the wedding. I did mention at the party that since we are paying for it ourselves, we are keeping it small, hoping to deflect expectations... I just feel like this is weird etiquette ground and don't really know what to do.