Do You Have to Invite Your Boss & Coworkers to Your Wedding?

Many of your wedding decisions will take a good chunk of time, thought, and debate—you’re choosing what to have on one of the most special days of your entire life, after all! Throughout the process, you’ll find that some decisions are easy to make—decisions like what flavor wedding cake, what signature cocktail, or even what entrees to serve during the reception, may take you just a few hours and conversations to figure out. However, there will be other decisions that you find yourself pining over for days without an easy solution jumping out to you and your fiancé.

One of those big decisions may concern the guest list. Figuring out who to invite can feel like a headache, especially if you have a long list of friends and family members. So if you’re planning a small wedding or you just want to make sure the people you invite mean a lot to you, trouble might come when you look at your work situation and begin figuring out who to invite from that mix.

Do you have to invite your boss and coworkers to your wedding? The answer is no. But it might not be that simple. What if you want to invite some people you work with but not your entire team? What if you just want to invite your boss? Or, what if you don’t want to invite any of them but you feel like it might be awkward to leave them off the guest list? Check out these four ways to handle the question of whether or not you should invite your work crew to your wedding.

1. Save Them for the End of Your List

Before jumping into your work friends, jot down your entire wedding guest list. How many people are on that list? How many people do you want at your wedding? See how many open spots you have and then take a look at the people you work with. Whether it's your boss, the person you’ve sat next to for years, or people you hang out with a ton during the workday, determine which of those people you really want to be there on your wedding day.

2. Decide if They Are Friends Outside of Work

Consider who you want to invite to your wedding based on who you consider a friend outside of work. If there’s someone you often hang out with and can envision being friends with for quite some time, inviting them will bring significance to your wedding day.

3. Realize You Can Invite Some and Not All

Just because you work with quite a few people doesn’t mean you have to invite them all to your wedding. You can invite just five people or just one person. It’s up to you and should always be decided on based on who you really have a true connection with over who you feel obligated to invite. If there’s no one from work you truly want there, feel free to take them off the guest list.

4. Prep for How to Handle Their Comments

One thing you might be stressed about is how they will react when they don’t get invited to the wedding. Be sure to have a default response prepared so that if they ask why they weren’t invited you don’t stumble over your words or say something you don’t mean. Simply say you were keeping your guest list small or that you were only able to invite a certain amount of people and you’d be happy to celebrate this major milestone with your work crew in a different way.