There will be no children on the guest list for Danielle Wilde’s grand wedding party

The HappiestDayofYourLife™ is traditionally a massive loved-up free-for-all where anyone who has ever met you, your partner or your giddy aunt is at liberty to get wavy on your big day.

In days of yore, the village drunk, the priest and the local pervert would come together to celebrate the joining together of one local youngster to another in a humble, no-frills ceremony.

These days, weddings are big business. The average wedding in the UK costs nearly £20,000 and the wedding industry grosses an annual £10 billion profit.

As well as geographical and sociological factors such as the redistribution of family units and communities, the reinvention of the wedding as a highly commercial and aspirational event has necessitated that most brutal and contentious of wedding day stresses: The Guest List.

Our venue and our budget have a maximum capacity of 120 people. Sounds like a reasonable number, but when you consider that is 60 people each or 30 people with their partners we started to realise the tremulous horror of it all.

What followed has been a deeply unpleasant combination of X Factor bootcamp and Soviet-style purge, wherein we are forced to rate the quality of our relationships with our loved ones to determine whether they are sufficiently qualified to attend our wedding.

There will undoubtedly be many offended people when the wedding invitations are posted. But until you have made an excel spreadsheet of your loved ones in order of preference (most likely entitled meangirlsburnbook.xls) it’s impossible to understand how brutal you need to be. Nobody emerges from this ugly process unscathed.

Paying for the wedding ourselves has given us a stronger incentive to get a bit “badger cull” about the whole thing. We are reimagining wedding guests as units requiring 12 hours of free food and drink, which helps our tight fists make some hard decisions.

Then, of course, we get to the difficult issue of children. Some of our guests have them and we hadn’t counted them. Some of these children are so young that they wouldn’t even have the cognition to appreciate the couture outfits, the Dionysian artistry or the Comme des Garçons incense. How can we justify cutting an aesthetically developed adult for a baby or small child? Banning children from our wedding initially seemed so Cruella De Vil that we didn’t even dare suggest it to each other. But once we realised that this is a tacitly accepted wedding tradition we just went for it.

If we have any friends left by September we can guarantee a chic, tantrum-free day to remember. These stone cold brides can’t wait to celebrate with their A-teams. @RAGING_BULLdyke

Read more about Danielle’s wedding plans

Image credit: Unsplash

The Stylist Wedding Blog: why children are banned from our wedding