Co-workers at wedding a tricky proposition

Socialising with colleagues can be tricky at any time, but planning a wedding thrusts those tensions into the spotlight. Balancing your needs with damaging important relationships requires nuance.

It’s great to have lots of friends at the office — unless you’re making a guest list for your wedding.

It’s great to have lots of friends at the office — unless you’re making a guest list for your wedding.

Alishan Vazir enjoys his colleagues and would like to invite all 18 of them to his nuptials in November. But he and fiancee Emily Freeman have capped their guest list at 130, leaving room for only three of his co-workers. Vazir, 26, an account manager, senses some are a little hurt. But “just because you’re really cool with and close to a friend at work doesn’t mean you’re going to be cool and close in your personal life”, he says.

Socialising with colleagues can be tricky any time, but planning a wedding thrusts those tensions into the spotlight. Balancing your needs without damaging important relationships requires nuance.

Being left out of a colleague’s wedding can evoke childhood memories of being excluded from a sleepover by a playmate who says, “I don’t like you that way.” Everyone involved feels awkward when the image the bride or groom projects at work, as a caring friend and ally, suddenly seems inconsistent with reality, says Melissa Dahl, author of Cringeworthy, a book on uncomfortable situations.

Portia Williams Edwards and her husband, Rickey, have numerous friends among their co-workers at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas, where she’s a staff trainer. They kept quiet about plans for their 2016 wedding and invited only 30 colleagues. “When I got back to work, people came out of the woodwork” complaining about being left out, Edwards says.

When one co-worker refused to speak to her, Edwards soothed her hurt feelings by promising to invite her to a housewarming party.

Wedding trends are squeezing guest lists, which fell last year to an average of 136 from 149 in 2009, according to a survey of 13,000 couples by The Knot, an online wedding-planning marketplace. More couples are choosing smaller, less formal venues such as historic mansions or barns, forcing them to cap guest lists at lower levels than allowed by banquet halls or hotels. “Couples are really sticking to friends and family, the people they feel are going to be with them down the road” when deciding whom to invite, The Knot’s editor in chief Kristen Maxwell Cooper says.

It can be hard to keep quiet about wedding plans at work. Nearly nine of 10 couples posted engagement photos on social media, according to a recent survey of 17,862 newlyweds by WeddingWire, an online marketplace.

Nicole Anzio and her husband, Thomas, invited only two of her colleagues at the hospital where she works as a nurse to their wedding last year. She was concerned when another co-worker started talking up the event, saying, “I’m really excited. I want to come to your wedding,” says Anzio, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She explained their decision as gently as she could, saying, “I’m really sorry but we have kind of a strict guest list. I hope there are no hard feelings.” The co-worker seemed to take the news in stride and congratulated her warmly after seeing their wedding photos on Facebook.

If you work on a small team, it may be best to invite everyone rather than leaving out one or two, Dahl says. Julia Mynhier, 24, a senior project manager at a Nashville, Tennessee, ad agency, posted an invitation to her wedding last year on the office fridge for all 15 of her co-workers, she says. To hold down costs, “I didn’t have extravagant flowers or a top-of-the-line dress. For us, it mattered more to have there the people we wanted, and to have a good time.”

It’s also important to look ahead at how guest-list decisions may affect you and your career. “Think about how awkward it will make your everyday life at work if you don’t invite” a particular co-worker, says Davia Lee, a wedding planner in California. Whether to include your boss raises other thorny questions. It makes sense if you and your boss share details about your everyday life outside work, Lee says. Did you tell the boss you were engaged right after it happened? Do they know your dogs’ names? Do they get your holiday card?