Hello ladies! I need some advice and/or a good old tongue-lashing from you wise folks.
I'm having one of those age-old wedding dilemmas, but with a twist. A couple of the groom's parent's guests took it upon themselves to invite some extra family members along to the wedding, without asking.
One guest invited her husband and son. Now, don't jump all over me yet; the groom's parents aren't especially etiquette-minded, and for some reason they didn't tell us that this woman was married.They just put her on their guest list alone, without comment on her marital status. My fiance and I have never even met this woman, so we didn't know she was married; we just figured she was single, so we invited her alone. Neither of us mind that she wants to bring her husband. I feel badly enough about our inadvertent etiquette gaff. BUT, we don't know how to tell her that she can bring the over-looked husband, but not their kid. (Afterall, as previously stated, my fiance and I have never met this woman. We weren't particularly thrilled to have to invite strangers at all, let alone the second generation of strangers...) Any ideas on how to let her, and the over-looked husband, down gently about their kid?
The next guest-issue is weirder and trickier. The groom's mom invited her cousin, J, and his wife, K. Apparently, these are the folks who planned and officiated the groom's parents' wedding. But once again, these are two people who my fiance and I have never met. The groom didn't even recognize their name when we were addressing envelopes (which we addressed to "Mr. & Mrs. J[name] and K[name] [Last name]"). We weren't exactly crossing our fingers that they were going to attend, anyway.
Not only are they going to attend, they RSVP'd themselves, their son, S, and K's elderly mother.
Yes, we have guests who apparently think it's appropriate to bring their elderly mother to the wedding of two people that neither of them have never met.
I understand that parents might want to bring their child, but why on God's green earth would a grown adult want to bring their mother to a stranger's wedding? And it's not like the mother is the matriarch of the groom's side of the family, who will get to treat the event like a grand family reunion; she's the groom's mother's cousin's mother-in-law, from out of state. She doesn't know a single other person on the guest list. But her daughter and her husband are going to drag her across three states, to a city she has never been to, for the wedding of people that she has most likely never even heard of.
Obviously, I want to put my foot down on this one. My parents and I are paying for 100% of the wedding. This is not a reasonable request, and I feel no obligation to grant it. So I told the groom's parents, gently but firmly, that we would love to have his cousin and his wife, and the other guest and her forgotten husband, but that we do not have the extra space for either of the kids, or mother-in-law. Our venue is tight, and we don't have room for extra seats. Period.
I have told them this personally, I have told them this again through email (because they apparently it didn't make an impression the first time?), and my mother has told them this over the phone when they called her to beg for the extra seats. They just keep saying that J and K mean so much to them, and it will be so difficult to tell them they can't bring their family members, and to let them know once we get a final headcount whether or not we can squeeze in another two or three.
How can I make myself abundantly clear that your guests don't just get to bring whoever the hell they want to my wedding just because you don't want to have to tell them no, without sounding like bridezilla and/or stepping on my almost in-laws' toes?