One Man’s Wedding Lessons Learned – The Wedding Invitation Wording Edition

I’m going to cut right to the chase on this one.  Trust me, you don’t want people to look at your wedding invitations and either laugh or be baffled by the wording. You also don’t want to put yourself through the torture of coming up with your own wedding invitation wording from scratch.  Sure, you can go really casual and just wing it, put whatever you want on the invitation and do what feels right.  That’s a great way to go if you’re really free-spirited, you’re having a totally non-traditional wedding and you’re either not going to get, or don’t care if you get, unsolicited advice and input from family and friends.  But let’s face it; this isn’t an invitation to a barbeque party or a kegger at the frat house.

This is your wedding.  It’s your big day and something you’re going to remember – in one way or another – for the rest of your life.  A wedding is special and in our society weddings have had several centuries of being special to build up a unique set of traditions and expectations.  Yes, it is your wedding and no one is trying to tell you to give in to the whims of your great aunt or future in-laws (although telling them to go pound sand will likely reduce the quality of the gift you get  – just a thought).  But what I am saying is take the advice of someone who uses words for a living; there’s no need to completely reinvent the wheel with the wording of your wedding invitations.  That trail has been blazed before, so put the efforts of those who came before you to work, save yourself some hassle, and have a wedding invitation that reads like it’s supposed to!

So just how is a wedding invitation supposed to be worded you ask?  Well that actually depends on your situation.  If it was still 1955 and all weddings were hosted by the parents of the bride none of this would really be an issue; everyone’s invitation wording would be the same except for names, places and dates.  However today’s weddings, even those that you’d consider traditional, have so much variation that you’ll likely need more than one example of wedding invitation wording to set you on the correct path.  We’ve rounded up a collection of wording examples for a variety of different kinds of wedding situations.  you’ll find not only the traditional invitation from dear old mom and dad, but also wording for invitations from the bride and groom, from both sets of parents, from divorced parents and even wording suggestions for destination wedding invitations.

Remember these are suggestions to get you started out on the right track and help you rest assured that the wording you picked for your invitations is proper.  But there’s nothing wrong with tweaking them to make them your own and fit your situation.  We’ll keep adding more examples for more types of weddings as we go.  If you don’t see one that you think we should have, let us know and we’ll see what we can come up with!