Wedding invitation wording when the parents are divorced
Somewhere between the venue and the flowers, a card has to be printed that says who is giving this wedding. For a family that has been through a divorce, that card is the first time the new shape of the family appears in print, permanently, in front of everybody who matters.
Which is why a decision that ought to take five minutes takes three weeks and two arguments. This page is the wording, case by case, plus the honest part underneath it.
People read the order of the names as a verdict on who mattered. They should not, and they do. Whoever is listed first, whoever is listed with a new spouse, whoever is not listed at all — every guest who knows the family will notice, and one or two will have an opinion about it.
Knowing that in advance is most of the work. The couple getting married cannot produce a card that nobody reads into. What they can do is choose deliberately, explain it once to the people who need it, and then stop negotiating.
One convention does most of the work
Where parents are divorced, their names are traditionally set on separate lines and not joined by “and”. The word “and” between two names is read as a couple. Two lines is read as two people, which is accurate.
The mother’s name conventionally comes first. That is custom rather than a rule, and plenty of families reverse it — usually because one parent is hosting and the other is not, which is the more useful basis for deciding.
Everything below is a convention, not a rule. There is no authority on this and anybody who tells you there is one is selling stationery.
The wording, case by case
Divorced, both hosting, neither remarried
The commonest case and the simplest. Two lines, no “and”.
Mr. Daniel Reyes
request the pleasure of your company
at the marriage of their daughter
Elena Marie
If the mother uses her maiden name again, use the name she uses now. The invitation is not the place to relitigate that.
Divorced, the mother has remarried
Her line carries her married name and her husband. His line stays as it is. Still no “and” between the two households.
Mr. Daniel Reyes
request the pleasure of your company
at the marriage of Elena Marie Reyes
Note what changed: once the hosting line no longer carries the bride’s surname, her full name goes in the body instead. Otherwise a guest cannot tell whose daughter is getting married, which is the one thing the card has to communicate.
Both parents remarried
Four names, two households, two lines. It looks crowded and it is correct.
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Reyes
request the pleasure of your company
at the marriage of Elena Marie Reyes
If it reads as a wall of names — and it often does — case seven is the way out, and more couples take it every year.
A stepparent who raised them
There is no convention for this because the convention predates the situation. Do what is true.
Mr. Thomas Whitfield
Mr. Daniel Reyes
request the pleasure of your company
at the marriage of Elena Marie Reyes
Three names on three lines is unusual and entirely permissible. A stepparent who did the work and is left off the card will remember it for thirty years, and so will the person who left them off.
One parent is estranged, or will not be there
The card cannot fix this and should not try. Two honest options.
Leave them off. The invitation names the hosts. A parent who is not hosting is not obliged to appear on it, and their absence from the card is not an announcement — it is a blank.
Or drop the hosting line entirely and use case seven, which names nobody and therefore excludes nobody. For a genuinely difficult family this is usually the kindest version.
What does not work is a compromise that satisfies neither — a parent listed who is not coming, or listed in a way that signals a demotion. People read demotion on a card faster than they read anything else.
A parent has died
The deceased parent is not listed as a host, because hosting is something the living do. They are named in the body instead.
requests the pleasure of your company
at the marriage of her daughter
Elena Marie
daughter of the late Mr. Daniel Reyes
If the surviving parent has remarried, the same line works with the new household hosting and the phrase kept exactly as it is.
The couple are hosting themselves
The one that solves almost every problem on this page, and the reason it has become the most common wording in America.
and
Samuel Okonkwo
together with their families
request the pleasure of your company
“Together with their families” names nobody and excludes nobody. It is true whoever paid, it survives a remarriage between the printing and the wedding, and it ends the argument about the order of names before it starts.
If you are three weeks into this and nobody will move, this is the exit. Take it.
Six practical things, learned the hard way
- Decide the wording before you order anything. Stationers charge for a reprint and the reprint is never the expensive part — the second argument is.
- Tell each parent privately, before they see it. Nobody should learn where they sit on the card by opening an envelope. One phone call each, in advance, prevents almost every version of this going wrong.
- Say the reason once, and do not defend it twice. “We used the wording that fits our family” is a complete answer. Repeating it invites negotiation.
- Whoever paid does not automatically host on the card. These are separate questions, and treating them as one is how a parent who contributed quietly ends up feeling erased.
- The reception card, the seating and the photographs are all separate decisions. Settling the invitation does not settle those, and assuming it does produces a second argument at the venue.
- Order twenty-five more than you think you need. True of every wedding, and especially of one where a list is being negotiated by more than two people.
If you are the divorced parent reading this rather than the couple: the card is not the relationship. Being second on a line, or on the same line as somebody who came later, is not a ruling about your place in your child’s life, however much it feels like one on the day the proof arrives.
And if you are the one getting married: the version that upsets the fewest people is almost always the one that names the fewest people.
Keep reading
- The occasions nobody wrote the rules for — the whole cluster: holidays, graduations, birthdays and funerals
- Blended families — what the research actually shows
- Stepparents and the court
- Co-parenting
- Dating again
- When your ex dies
- Graduations, when the parents are divorced — the same room, an earlier decade