My fiance and I have budgeted for about 135 people to come to our wedding. It'll be mostly close family, a few friends, and people we know from church. His family's list is much longer than mine, probably about a 30:70 split. With invitations going out to people on my side, there will be about 50 people total that I am certain will come (60 if all my cousins can come, which they probably won't). I told my fiance that he and his mom could invite about another 80 people that they anticipate would come. That leaves them with enough room to invite all his siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, neices, nephews, grandparents, and even some second cousins (and still leave enough room for friends/church people).
Here is where we disagree: He believes his mom would want to send additional invites to other people that she knows would not come. I don't know how many at this point, but I should find out soon. I told him that I don't want to send out a bunch of invites to people that most likely wouldn't come anyway. For one, I don't want to risk going over our budgeted number of guests. Secondly, I feel like sending out a bunch of invites to people who won't come is just a waste of paper and money. My initial compromise was that he could send out enough invites (between those would come and wouldn't come) to equal my total. Between guests that I anticipated would come, might come (my cousins being the "maybe"), and would not come I totaled 85 people. So I told him that it seemed fair if he sent out enough invites for 85 people. That would then put us around our budget if you take into account that 25-30% of the guests would not come.
He feels like it's no big deal to send a bunch of invitations when they likely won't come anyway. I feel like if we're going to send out those invites, that we need to anticipate the possibility of some of those people coming.
I also mentioned to him that more could come if his parents were prepared to pitch in with the cost of food. IAm I being overly unreasonable? The last thing I want is to stress out over too many people possibly coming.