Which work colleagues do I invite to my wedding?

I’m a member of a professional sporting team and am about to get married. I only want to invite a few of my teammates, but I fear this will cause a rift within the club since other weddings within the group have involved all 44 players. How can I limit the invitations while maintaining harmony at work?
Anonymous, NSW

Credit: Simon Letch

A: You can’t invite 44 professional sportspeople to a wedding: it’s not financially feasible. Professional sportspeople eat a lot and you’d need to provide quality, well-balanced meals with wholegrain carbs, lean protein, healthy fats and orange slices at the halfway mark. Professional sportspeople drink a lot, too, so you’d need to buy loads of booze, with extra champagne for spraying on the newlyweds and Gatorade so everyone stays hydrated on the dancefloor when The Horses starts playing. Professional sportspeople are large and muscular, so you’d need to hire a bigger venue to fit everyone in and reinforced seating to support their bulk. And a team of medics with a stretcher for the bouquet toss.

So if you want to invite just a few teammates while still maintaining harmony at work, do what everyone does when they don’t want to invite certain people to their wedding: blame your partner.

Put on a big, apologetic, hard-done-by performance and tell your unwanted teammates that you dearly wish they could be there on your special day, but your partner is pathetically cheap and wants a tiny budget wedding. Or your partner is pathologically shy and can’t deal with large groups of people. Or your partner is a member of a bizarre religious cult that dreads the number 44. Or your partner doesn’t like sport, doesn’t like people and suffers from a life-threatening allergy to Dencorub. Tell any or all of those things to your teammates. But not to your partner.

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