Part 1: Whom to Invite
Rather than wrestle with ambiguous criteria for choosing your wedding guests, why not plug each of them into the following formula? Decide how many guests you can afford to invite, then rank them according to the numerical values assigned by the following formula.
+10 points for members of the immediate family
+5 points for members of the extended family
+1 point for every year that you have known the potential guest
-1 point for every year it has been since the last time you heard from them
-5 points if it is someone you have never met
+ 5 points if you like them
-5 points if your better half dislikes them
+1 point if you expect them to give you a nice gift
-1 point if they don’t expect to be invited
-5 points if they belong to an entire group of people who could be (but do not expect to be) invited
+3 points if they have been endorsed by someone subsidizing the wedding
-10 points if they are a former significant other
+10 points for mutual friends of the bride and groom
-5 points for members of the opposite sex who are not mutual friends
+2 points if they congratulated you promptly on your engagement
-3 points if they congratulated you on Facebook and that was the first form of communication in several years
+1 point if you were invited to their wedding
+3 points if you went
-5 points if they will try to make out with your mother while in a drunken stupor during the reception
This should provide objective criteria by which to navigate an otherwise difficult decision. Remember: this is your day and the numbers don’t lie.
+2 points if they were some of the first people to get phone calls announcing your engagement
-1 point if they take forever to return your call
-2 points if they didn’t return your call at all
What’s the magic number that gets people an invite? How much pull do superdelegates get?