My fiance and I are getting married in January of 2011. We finalized our guest list in June and sent out Save-the-Dates in July. One weekend while my family was looking over the guest list, we realized that we're over the limit on the number of people we can accomodate and afford. Luckily for us, we had only addressed Save-the-Dates to the person each of us knew (e.g. "Mr. John Smith" not "Mr. John Smith and Guest"), so we were able to cut 37 people from our list.
Our rationale for the people cut is that they personally don't know either of us and so the criteria for people we kept was that they were either 1) a married couple, 2) have been living together, 3) are engaged, 4) have been dating for over 4 years, 5) are traveling from out of the state/country, or 6) would know no one else at the wedding. So basically, everyone at the wedding who's not allowed a date will know someone else there and not be "lonely". To make things easier, we never planned on inviting children because my cousins have hoards of them, and that saves on space as well.
We plan on inviting each of the families in my small cul-de-sac because we've known them for 20 years (all original house owners) and they've watched me grow up. My main problem is the college-age daughter of one of my neighbors. She's only been dating her boyfriend for about 2 1/2 to 3 years, we've never met him and he knows nothing about us really, but a week or so ago my neighbor's daughter and this boyfriend got engaged. After we sent out Save-the-Dates, it was determined that he didn't meet any of the criteria for keeping someone, and since we don't know him, we were just inviting the parents and the 2 daughters.
Now that they're engaged, my thought process is to still not invite him, because we didn't know they were that serious and didn't make a seat for him (or we might have made room for him initially and not sent a Save-the-Date to someone else). My question is: Would it be rude to still invite only the family, not the now fiance, and when they ask why he wasn't invited, we'll just politely explain that we're still likely over the limit, even if most of the out-of-state people can't make it, and appologize? Sorry, long-winded explanation and question.