Wedding related one couple not reciprocating

[EWAB]

My 28 year old colleague is getting married later this year. It’s a large wedding and my partner and I are invited.

She is absolutely lovely, a very inclusive person. Single people are getting a plus one, children are invited. She wants people to be happy. It’s not entirely DIY but her cousin is in a band and there’s a buffet instead of a sit down meal. Her mum is contributing a small amount and buying her dress.

She was looking forward to going out on Friday evening with her partner and his cousin and fiancée, someone who she had me twice before in passing.

Essentially the cousin said that they were looking forward to the wedding but they were also getting married but not inviting them.

They were only inviting about 40 people as they didn’t want to spread their money too thinly and to be cheap.

What do you think of this. Is it rude or not? I can’t make my mind up. Colleague is really upset.

Oh I thought it was her son (he’s also getting married soon and, as you’d expect, fraught with tensions!) and OP has been SO pissed off in the past regarding her brother’s weddings (both of them she’s had issues with the invite list).

All sounds a little… terrifying

People can do what they like for their own weddings - it's nobody else's business. Hope that helps ☺️

All these wedding threads have reminded me of why my ex and I got married in secret, with just 2 friends as our witnesses.

Well, that and the fact that when his mother knew we were engaged, she started trying to get me to convert to Catholicism. I'm a lifelong atheist, ffs.

I knew it would be @EWAB !!

Yet another wedding one!!

Some weddings are smaller than others with fewer guests.

My eldest daughter only had parents, siblings and their partners at her wedding.
Her youngest sister is getting married soon with 120 people invited.

There's no reason to be offended when someone makes the choice to celebrate on a smaller scale.

Every wedding is different. If the partners cousin is only having a small one then that is their choice. They shouldn’t pass comments on how others organise their weddings though.

Yes you are being unreasonable.

I don't understand the issue.

Surely, accepting a wedding invitation doesn't oblige me to 1) have a wedding in future 2) invitate similar range of guests.

I have 6 cousins. Afaik 4 are married. I've been to 2 of those weddings.
What would it mean in the reciprocations logic?

You don’t have to invite someone back if they invite you. But it doesn’t mean people won’t be offended they aren’t invited.

WTF - im so confused, this has literally nothing to do with you.

Yeah, why does this even bother you.

We’ve been to lots of weddings but we eloped so didn’t reciprocate. I guess all of those weddings put us off of having guests!

It might be a little rude if the cousin was having a similar scale lots-of-people-invited wedding, and didn’t invite your colleague back. But the cousin is having a much smaller wedding, just 40 people - unless she thinks her and her fiancé are in the top 40 closest friends / family to the cousin, she has no right to feel offended. Not everyone has to have the exact same size type of wedding, and this means that it won’t all be exactly reciprocal.

They're each inviting who they want at their wedding
This is none of your business

I sometimes wonder if the sheer numbers of wedding outrage threads on Mn is because semi-reclusion is so normalised on here that people simply don't get out much, but still regard wedding invitations as difficult to decline without good reason.

So all the perplexity and shock that other people do things differently to me (the things children feel on their first couple of sleepovers) gets projected onto weddings by those people, because they don't leave the house enough to encounter the otherness of other people that much.

(See also the school run and, to a lesser extent, colleagues and neighbours.)

Life is far too short to lose sleep over the wedding invitation etiquette of your colleague's partner's cousin.

Who cares? Sounds like both couples are having the sort of wedding they want to have. If these events were 5 years apart, you wouldn’t even compare them.

Nobody should be taking offence here.