Creating Your Reception Seating Plan
The seating arrangement is a crucial element of your reception. If done well, your guests will feel at ease, have entertaining conversations, and maybe even form new and lasting friendships. Seat two feuding aunts next to each other and the ensuing fight will be all anyone talks about. To ensure that your wedding is memorable for the right reasons, put a little time and thought in to your chart.
Ideally, you should start planning seating arrangements as soon as you know the general layout of the reception venue, and most of the RSVPs have come back. Talk to your caterers to see whether you would like to assign your guests by table or by seat. If you are serving a buffet or having a small wedding, you might want to assign people by table. Those who are serving seated meals with different entrée opinions will probably want to assign guests by seat, so that the caterers can give everyone the correct meal.
Start by drawing a picture of the layout and writing down guests’ names on post-its, so that you can experiment by moving people around. There’s also computer software that you can get, to work out the arrangements paper-free.
Head start.
Confused about who sits where? Traditionally, the "head" table is a long straight table where the bride and groom sit with the groomsmen, bridesmaids, best man, and maid of honor. The bride and groom sit next to each other, with the maid of honor next to the groom and the best man next to the bride. The groomsmen and bridesmaids sit in alternating order on either side. Generally, the parents sit at a nearby table with the grandparents, siblings, and other family members. Young children sit with their parents, while older kids are placed at a children’s table.
Switch it up.
Today, many brides adapt or change this seating plan to better fit their guests. You and your soon-to-be husband might want to sit with your parents, or you might want to have all of the groomsmen and bridesmaids seated together. If one or both of your parents are divorced, you can have separate tables for each side of the family. Allow tradition to guide you, but be flexible and choose a seating arrangement that works best for you.
To split or not to split?
Deciding whether to split up couples is one of the most argued-about elements of the reception. Some feel that splitting couples up is more sophisticated and allows for conversation with new people, while others claim that dividing pairs will make guests feel awkward and upset.
Our solution: think about your guests and choose the option that would make everyone most comfortable. If your guests would be relaxed while conversing with everyone, dividing couples could give everyone a chance to talk to fresh faces and make new friends. If your wedding is very large or you think that your guests would dislike being apart from their partners, you should probably seat couples together. A great compromise is to place couples at the same table, but not seated next to each other.
Singled out.
You don’t want an unattached friend to feel like the only Bridget Jones among a group of smug duos. Placing guests at a singles-only table can make them feel ostracized and embarrassed. Take the middle ground by seating guests according to their interests and include a mix of singles and couples at each table.
If you follow tradition as a general guide, and then tweak it to your specific modern needs, you’ll find that your guests will have a blast, and you’ll be sittin’ pretty.