WWYD about wedding guests?

[DaisiesAndCompasses]

I'm newly engaged and we've started talking guest lists, budgets, venues etc.

I'm orphaned, no surviving family. I had a selection of foster homes growing up, but didn't stay in touch with any long-term because I felt a bit rejected at the time that nobody wanted to adopt me. For that reason, I jumped around schools/the country a lot.

I have a circle of 6 - 7 close friends, although 2 wouldn't be able to make the wedding. They do tend to have families/kids now, so I could probably make it look like I had 14/15 people...

DP has a pretty big family (who are all lovely!) and I think we'd probably have to invite at least 40 people from them. Then he's got maybe 5 - 6 people who I don't know well, and then we have mutual friends that we see quite often but who know him first - maybe 8 or so.

We could marry abroad, somewhere that has meaning to us both - but really all that means is that a lot of his people won't come either, including the elderly part of his family, which feels a bit unfair.

Stick to the plan and try and ignore the disparity? I don't really want to invite acquaintances to make the numbers up on my side, I don't think...

"Wedding guests should be equal to the extent that you stop the list at cousins or 3rd cousins or whatever on both sides. The whole point of the wedding is that you are joining one another’s families. Sides don’t matter."

What?

It won't matter how many each of you have. We had 75 people at our wedding and only 7 were my husband's family because we got married in my hometown which is several thousand miles away. We just told people to not worry about sitting on the bride's side or groom's side, and it was great.

We did invite his whole family (which is much bigger than mine) but they opted not to come as it was so far, and some of them don't have passports.

Although our families are roughly the same size DH is closer to more of his family then I am so he had more guests at our wedding as I couldn’t be bothered inviting people I hadn’t spoken to in ages just because they were family. We didn’t have a seating plan so people just sat where they liked and mingled as they chose.