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Do I have to invite my friend's partner to my wedding?

If they are married, engaged, or living together, yes — invite them, by name, on the same invitation as your friend. That is the line nearly every etiquette guide draws, and it is not really a ruling about the partner: an established couple is one household, and a household is one invitation with two seats on it. Below that line there is no rule, only a standard you set — a year together by the wedding, living together, met them at least once — and the only thing that matters is that you write it down and apply it to every friend on the list instead of deciding relationship by relationship at eleven at night. Twelve worked households and scripts follow, plus a builder that shows what a named partner actually costs you: a seat, not an invitation.

Build my guest list →Browse the worked households
Named, unnamed, or not invited?

Three states a partner can be in — and the fourth one that cannot ship

Every partner attached to your list is in exactly one of three states, and most arguments about them are two people picturing different states. Work down these in order and stop at the first that fits.

1

They are married to, engaged to, or living with your friend

Named. Both names, one invitation, two seats. This is the one case that is not really your call. An established couple is a household, and splitting a household is the thing people notice. In the builder it is one household label across two rows: the seat count goes up by one, the invitation count does not move, and the file exports one invitation with two names on it.

2

There is a partner and you do not know their name

Ask your friend for the name, then decide. A partner you cannot name is not yet a decision. One text — "what's his surname, and how does he spell it?" — turns it into one. If your friend genuinely cannot name them, or the relationship is too new to have a name attached to it, you have stopped asking who is on the list and started asking how many extra seats you are handing out, which is a different question with a different page.

3

They have been together a few months, or you have never met them

Decide by the standard you wrote, not by this couple. Pick one line — together a year by the wedding date, or living together, or married — write it at the top of the list, and run every friend past it. The standard is what you can say out loud; a verdict on one relationship is not. If the standard lets them in and you would rather it did not, that is a person-level decision, and it will be heard as one.

4

You grouped them into one household but only invited one of them

Fix the label — this is the state that cannot survive sending. A household called "Jonah & Rae" carrying a single seat is how a partner finds out they were discussed. Either Rae is a second name on that invitation or the household is Jonah on his own. Change the label to match the decision, and let the file say the same thing you actually decided.

Everything downstream of "is this person on the list" — how many extra seats you offer, what "and guest" commits you to, and what to do when a reply comes back carrying a name you never invited — belongs to the plus-one rules, which is why the extra-seats column is folded away in the builder on this page. If naming partners has pushed the list past what the room holds, the wedding attendance rate turns the seats you can fill into the number of invitations to send, and that number is the capacity this builder takes.

The panel this page is built around

🏠 What a named partner actually does to your count

Everything here comes back to one mechanic: a household is an invitation, and two people sharing a household label are one invitation with two seats. Each block below is written the way the builder holds it — one row per person, the household label doing the grouping.

Example 01

BEFORE — the partner listed as his own household Priya Raman · Household: Priya Raman · Close friends · Tier A Sam Raman · Household: Sam Raman · Friends' partners · Tier A — 2 people · 2 households · 2 invitations · 2 seats AFTER — one household, both named Priya Raman · Household: Priya & Sam Raman · Close friends · Tier A Sam Raman · Household: Priya & Sam Raman · Friends' partners · Tier A — 2 people · 1 household · 1 invitation · 2 seats The seats never moved. The invitation count dropped by one, because a partner is a second name on an invitation rather than a second invitation.

One invitation, two namesPersonalize
Example 02

THE FRIENDS CIRCLE WITH PARTNERS MERGED IN Priya & Sam Raman · 2 names · 1 invitation Tess Okafor & Dan Ferris · 2 names · 1 invitation Marisol Vega & Cate Lindqvist · 2 names · 1 invitation Jonah Bell · 1 name · 1 invitation Owen Pryce · 1 name · 1 invitation — 8 names · 5 invitations · 8 seats Eight friends' seats cost five invitations. Invitations are what you count when you are sending; seats are what you count against the room. Confusing the two is why lists come out roughly a third too big on the first pass.

8 names, 5 invitationsPersonalize
Example 03

YOU KNOW ONE OF THEM — YOU INVITE BOTH Tess Okafor · Household: Tess Okafor & Dan Ferris · Close friends · Tier B Dan Ferris · Household: Tess Okafor & Dan Ferris · Friends' partners · Tier B — 1 invitation · 2 seats You have met Dan twice and could not pick him out of a queue. He lives with your friend, so he is on the invitation, with his name spelled right. Being known to you was never the standard — being her household is.

Barely met himPersonalize
Example 04

⚠ THE ROW THE CHECKER FLAGS Jonah Bell · Household: Jonah Bell · Close friends · Tier B Rae Sandoval · Household: Jonah Bell · Friends' partners · Not inviting — 1 invitation · 1 seat, with a partner sitting inside the household and marked out of it Grouped together but invited apart is the one state that cannot survive being sent. Either Rae is a second name on that invitation or the household is Jonah on his own. Decide which, then change the label so the file says the same thing you decided.

Grouped but not invitedPersonalize

The partners' names are the ones you retype

You will write this list once for yourselves, again when the invitations are made, and again when you chase whoever never replied — and the second name in each household is the one that gets dropped, misspelled, or quietly turned back into a blank seat somewhere in the middle. Build the households once here, download the file, and every name after that is a copy rather than a retype.

Open the builder →
One rule, written down once

📏 The standard, and what it looks like applied to everyone

The partner decision that goes wrong is never the first one. It is the fourth, made differently from the first three because it was late and you were tired. Write one line, apply it to every friend on the list, and no single relationship ever has to be defended on its own merits.

Example 05

THE STANDARD, WRITTEN DOWN "If they are married, engaged, or living together by the wedding, both names go on the invitation." Applied to the friends circle: Priya Raman — living with Sam · Sam named · IN Tess Okafor — living with Dan · Dan named · IN Marisol Vega — engaged to Cate · Cate named · IN Jonah Bell — together four months, not living together · invited on his own Owen Pryce — single · invited on his own — One line, five friends, zero individual verdicts. Every one of them can be told the rule, and none of them can be told they were the exception.

The written rulePersonalize
Example 06

THE DATED VERSION "Together a year by the wedding, or living together, or married." Wedding: 12 June Jonah Bell & Rae Sandoval — together since February · four months on the day · Jonah invited on his own Owen Pryce & Nadia Kerr — together since last March · fifteen months on the day · Nadia named — The threshold is dated to the wedding rather than to today, so a relationship that clears it in the spring is not re-argued in the fall, and nobody's status depends on which month you happened to build the list.

How long datingPersonalize
Example 07

THE ONE EXCEPTION WORTH MAKING Wedding party — partners named regardless of the standard: Marisol Vega & Cate Lindqvist · 1 invitation · 2 seats Owen Pryce & Nadia Kerr · 1 invitation · 2 seats Jonah Bell & Rae Sandoval · 1 invitation · 2 seats — Anyone spending the day working — getting ready with you, standing at the front, staying until the chairs are stacked — has their partner named. It is an exception with a reason you can say out loud to the friends it does not cover, which is the only kind of exception that holds.

Wedding partyPersonalize
Example 08

THE FRIEND YES, THE BOYFRIEND NO Sasha Idowu · Household: Sasha Idowu · College friends · Tier B · invited on her own Reason recorded: together three months at the wedding, under the standard Reason not recorded: nobody in the group likes him — Both things can be true and only one of them is the reason. If your own standard would have let him in, cutting him anyway is a person-level decision wearing the standard's clothes — and your friend will hear the difference in about a second. Make it as a person-level decision, or do not make it.

Not her boyfriendPersonalize
The four conversations

💬 What to say, and when to say it

Each of these is short, names the standard rather than the verdict, and happens well before anything is printed. Send them yourself, to the person they concern, and do not repeat any of them to the group chat.

Example 09

"Quick one — what's Dan's surname, and does he spell it Ferris or Ferriss? Sorting the invitations out and I want both your names on yours." — One text, months early, doing two jobs: you get the spelling, and your friend learns her partner is invited without you having to announce it. Ask everyone whose partner you are naming, in the same week, so nobody reads anything into being asked.

Asking for the namePersonalize
Example 10

"I want you to hear this from me and not from the invitation. We set one rule for partners — married, engaged or living together — and we've held to it for everyone, which means Rae isn't on the list. It isn't a verdict on Rae or on you two. I'd have made the same call for anyone, and I'm sorry it lands on you." — Names the rule, does not audition the relationship, offers no review date. Said once in March, rather than discovered in a single seat in May.

Partner not invitedPersonalize
Example 11

"You mentioned Theo, so I should tell you where we landed. We wrote one rule for partners at the start and we've run about a dozen people past it, so I can't move it for one person without going back to all of them. If things change between now and the invitations, tell me and I'll run the same rule again — no promises attached to that, just so you know how it works." — The door that is open is the rule's door, not yours. That is what stops it becoming a maybe, and a maybe is the one answer that guarantees the conversation happens twice.

New relationshipPersonalize
Example 12

BREAK-UP BEFORE THE INVITATIONS ARE MADE Before: Owen Pryce & Nadia Kerr · 1 invitation · 2 seats After: Owen Pryce · 1 invitation · 1 seat What you send: nothing at all to Nadia, and one line to Owen — "Heard about you and Nadia. I've changed ours to just you, no need to talk about it. You're still very much in." — One row edited, one seat back, one sentence. If they were both your friends before they were a couple, that is two separate decisions and the partner standard has nothing to say about either of them.

Break-upPersonalize
Person, layer, or list?

A partner is part of a household, not an extra seat

Partners are the second place on a guest list — after coworkers — where a decision about one named human gets dressed up as a rule about everybody. Name the level first and the argument usually ends there.

1

If a friend is married or living with someone, both names go on the invitation

A whole layer · Every household in the circle. Applied to one friend and not the next, it stops being a convention and becomes a ranking of your friends' relationships — which is exactly how it gets described back to you.

2

We are not inviting Jonah's girlfriend

One person · One named individual. Justified as the standard, it re-opens the standard for everyone: your friend will check it against her own relationship, find it does not quite fit, and now the real reason is the conversation.

3

Partners are named only if they have been together a year

A whole layer · Every household in the circle. Bent once for the couple you like best, it is no longer a threshold — it is a favor, and every friend below the line is entitled to ask why they did not get one.

4

Naming partners cannot take the list over what the room holds

The whole list · The list as a whole. Enforced partner by partner it turns into a slow audit of your friends' private lives; enforced by cutting a whole circle it is one decision that holds.

5

Partners of our parents' guests come out of our parents' seats

An allocation · Each contributor's bucket. Left unstated, every partner your parents attach to a name looks like a friend of yours being cut somewhere further down the list.

This page decides one thing: whether a named partner is on the list at all. How many extra seats you hand out beyond that, what "and guest" commits you to, and what to do when a reply arrives carrying a name you never invited all belong to the plus-one rules and stay there. Turning the number of seats you can fill into the number of invitations to send is the wedding attendance rate — its answer is exactly the capacity number the builder above takes. If the question underneath yours is really about a partner's children, that is a whole-list policy rather than a partner call, and the wording for it lives with adults-only invitation wording. Once every household is settled, collecting everyone's contact details is the next job — this builder never asks for one.

The rules that hold up

Four rules worth writing down before you name a single partner

Written down, these are dull. Unwritten, each becomes an argument about one specific relationship, usually conducted at speed, usually with your own friend on the other end of it.

1

Write the standard before you write the first name

A standard chosen in advance is a rule. The same standard chosen after you have looked at the fourth couple is a justification, and everyone can tell which one they were given.

2

A partner is a name on an invitation, not an extra seat

If you know who they are, they belong in the household with their name on it. An unnamed seat is a different offer entirely — looser, easier to misread, and worth making deliberately or not at all.

3

Date the threshold to the wedding, not to today

"A year together by the wedding" survives a list built in October for a June wedding. "A year together" does not, and you will find yourself re-running it every time somebody's anniversary passes.

4

Run the same standard on both sides

Your friends' partners and your partner's friends' partners meet the same line. A standard applied to one half of the room is not a standard; it is a preference with paperwork.

Common mistakes

What goes wrong with friends' partners

Every one of these has been survived by thousands of couples. They are still worth avoiding, because each costs a conversation you did not need to have with someone you actually like.

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Leaving off a partner you know the name of

The clearest signal available to a guest, and it is never read as an oversight. If they are married to, engaged to, or living with your friend and you know their name, use it — that decision was made before you got there.

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Deciding partner by partner as each one comes up

Six sensible individual calls do not add up to a policy. They add up to six rankings that your friends can lay side by side, because they talk to each other and the invitations arrive in the same week.

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Cutting a partner because you do not like them

Sometimes the right call, but only ever as a person-level decision made openly, and never disguised as the standard. Your friend hears "we don't like him" as "we don't approve of you" unless you are the one who tells her plainly.

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Grouping two people and inviting one of them

A household label with two names in it and one seat behind it is the state the checker flags. Left in the file it ships, and the partner finds out from the way the invitation reads.

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Letting the invitation deliver the news

If a partner you know of is not on the list, tell the friend yourself, weeks earlier. The information is identical; the difference is whether they heard it from you or worked it out from an invitation with one name on it.

✕

Applying the standard to your friends and not to your partner's

It happens by accident — one of you builds a list carefully and the other adds names later — and it lands as a judgment on a whole side of the room. Run the two friend circles past the same line in the same sitting.

Free, and it never leaves your browser

Merge the households and watch the invitation count fall

The list opens with the family rows plus three friend households: one couple already grouped and both named, one friend whose partner sits inside his household but is marked not inviting, and one friend on her own. Group the names the way the invitations will read, watch the invitation count come apart from the seat count, and download the file once every partner on it has a name.

Wedding guest list templateFree · no sign-up · runs entirely in your browser

One standard, applied to every friend on the list — the checker flags the friend whose partner was left off.

This is how many people you can invite, not how many will come — turning one into the other is what the attendance-rate page does: to seat 100, invite 118 to 128.

4 circles are on this list. A circle is what the consistency check reads.

12

12 people in 7 householdsEveryone in tiers A, B and C is counted here; 1 person is in the not-inviting pile and stays out of the file. Set a capacity to see where the line falls.

First nameLast nameHouseholdCircleTierPlus ones
Two people with the same household label are one invitation.

Everything here runs in your browser. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere — there is no account, no saved list and no cookie holding your guests (we count anonymous, bucketed usage of the tool itself, never a name, a number or a list size). That also means closing this tab loses the list, which is why the button says download.

Where the line falls

  • ATier A — no wedding without them10 in this tier · 5 households · 10 with everything above it10
  • BTier B — you want them there2 in this tier · 2 households · 12 with everything above it2
  • CTier C — only if there is room0 in this tier · 0 households · 12 with everything above it0
  • Not invitingNot inviting1 in this tier · 1 households · left out of the export1
  • 1 of 2 friends' partners are on the list and 1 are not. Invite the layer or cut the layer — a split one is visible to everybody in it.

Downloads a CSV of everyone still on the list — tiers A, B and C, minus any tier you have switched off above. The not-inviting pile stays on this page.

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Keep exploring

More on deciding who to invite

Who to invite to your weddingThe whole decision, circle by circle→Wedding guest list templateBuild the list in your browser and download it→Do you have to invite extended family?Where the line sits between cousins, and why→Cutting the list downRules that take whole layers off, not individuals→How many guests parents getSplitting the seats before anyone writes a name→Deciding on a child-free weddingOne policy for the whole list, and its exceptions→
Good to know

Partner questions

Do I have to invite my friend's boyfriend to my wedding?

If they live together, are engaged, or are married, treat it as settled and put both names on one invitation — that is the line nearly every etiquette guide draws, and an established couple is a household rather than a guest with an attachment. Below that line there is no obligation. Set one standard, apply it to every friend on the list, and tell the friends it excludes yourself rather than letting the invitation do it.

Do long-term partners have to be invited by name?

Yes, if you know the name — and you should ask for it if you do not. Naming someone costs you nothing and settles the question completely: the household reads as one invitation to two named adults, nobody has to guess who is included, and the reply comes back matching what you invited. An unnamed seat is a looser, different offer, and it is worth making on purpose rather than by default.

How long do a couple have to be dating to be invited to a wedding together?

There is no established number, which is why the answer has to be your own line rather than a rule you can quote. The two thresholds couples actually use are a year together by the wedding date, or living together — both are defensible, both are easy to say out loud, and both fail the moment you bend them once. Date the threshold to the wedding rather than to today so it does not need re-running every month.

Can I invite a friend but not her partner?

You can, and it is a genuinely normal thing to do for a newer relationship — but only if your written standard puts them outside it, and only if you tell her before the invitations exist. What does not work is inviting a friend without the person she lives with: she will almost certainly decline, and the decision will be remembered long after the wedding. If the real reason is that you dislike him, own it as a decision about him rather than dressing it up as a rule.

What do I do if I do not know my friend's partner's name?

Send one text and ask, including the spelling. It takes a minute, it removes the awkwardness entirely, and it tells your friend her partner is included without any announcement. If you ask and the answer is vague — they have been seeing someone for a few weeks, nobody can quite name them — then you are no longer deciding who is on the list, you are deciding how many extra seats you are offering, and that is a separate decision with its own rules.

Do I have to invite the partners of my wedding party?

It is the exception most couples make and the easiest one to justify: anyone spending the whole day working for you has their partner named, regardless of how long they have been together. It is an exception rather than a hole in the standard, and it survives because you can say the reason out loud to the friends it does not cover.

We are having a small wedding — do partners still have to come?

The standard does not get weaker as the list gets shorter; the list gets shorter by losing whole circles. Cut a circle — college friends, coworkers, second cousins — before you start peeling partners off the friends you have kept, because a small wedding where three friends came alone and two came as couples is not a small wedding, it is a ranking. Married and cohabiting couples are the last thing to touch.

A list is names on a page.
Until you send it, that is all it is.

Build the list here, download it, and import the file into Text My Wedding — the same names then carry the invitation, the RSVP and every reminder, without anybody retyping them.

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