Soon your rehearsal dinner is gonna look like this.

Dear Uncommon Courtesy,

For the rehearsal dinner the night before our wedding, we are planning inviting all our out-of-town guests. However, I have a large group of friends who I met while we all lived in the wedding location. Some of these friends have since moved away from the wedding location while some still live there. Is it okay to only invite the ones who now live out of town to the rehearsal and exclude the ones who still live in town, though they are part of the same set of friends?

Sincerely,

Not Wanting to Exclude

Official Etiquette

Officially, you don’t HAVE to have a rehearsal dinner and even if you do, traditionally you only have to invite your bridal party and immediate family. It is a nice gesture to invite out of town guests and it’s fine to draw clear lines if you can’t afford to host everyone.

Our Take

Jaya: My idea is that everyone can understand setting a hard line between people who had to travel and people in town. This isn’t a “we liked these 5 people more so we invited them” situation.

Victoria: Exactly. Although, I will bring up the point that if we are talking about 10 people out of town and 1 person in town….maybe at that point just bite the bullet and invite all of them. But if its a fairly even split, then yeah, people will understand. I am interested to know when this whole “invite the out of town people” thing started. And at what point it gets ridiculous. Like if 3/4 of your wedding list is at the rehearsal dinner….

Jaya: Yeahhhh, I mean, I think it has decent intentions. If people have traveled you want to make them feel welcome.

Victoria: Totally!

Jaya: And then I think it went to “all out of town family” which again, reasonable. And then all out of town everyone.

Victoria: Haha yeah, I think so. My cousin got married in…..like 2008? And did not invite out of town family to the rehearsal and we were fine. I think maybe we arrived the morning of the wedding anyway. We will see if that holds true at our next family wedding this fall.

Jaya: Yeah, I also think it depends on where it is. Like, if you’re getting married in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing to do, it’s nice to offer a fun dinner instead of your guests sitting around ordering room service in your weird suburban home town.

Victoria: Yesss!!! That’s a very good point.

Jaya: But sometimes I’ve gone to weddings in fun destination places and it’s like, quit it with the events, I want to explore! That’s a sad thing to measure, though. “Is your wedding destination boring as hell? If so, entertain people.”

Victoria: HAHAHA. I mean, you could just be practical about it….like, okay, our hotels are actually miles from any food and people didn’t bring cars, so let’s entertain them vs. we are downtown in a big, cultural city, people will be fine.

Jaya: Right.

Victoria: Or like, we decided to make everyone camp in the middle of the woods for four days so we are providing ALL the meals.