Weddingbee boards

Out guest list consisted of about 120 of my relatives from my mother's side of the family, exactly 0 from my father's side of the family, about 12 of my husband's relatives, and about 60 of our friends.  I can understand you wanting to keep things even, but frankly just being related to someone is not enough reason to invite them to your wedding in some families.  And it might not be enough reason for them to attend - or they might show up only to make trouble of some kind.  Every family is different.  My father hasn't spoken to his siblings in over ten years - and while obviously that's not an ideal situation, it's really not my place to fix that problem.  Inviting them to my wedding would just have caused my dad a lot of mental anguish - because he doesn't want to see them!

On my husband's side of the family, they just aren't close (as near as I can tell).  They don't write or call each other, or even send Christmas cards.  We finally invited a few of his cousins, at his request, but his mother actually had no guest list at all (a little like your FMIL).  The tricky thing here is to figure out (and here is where your FI comes in) whether your FMIL has no guest list because she has some kind of serious hate relationship with her family, or whether she just doesn't think they will be interested.  If it's the former, I would suggest that you just back away carefully, and plan to fill FI's side of the church with friends, and look at it as an opportunity for some of your family to sit closer to the front of the church!  If she just doesn't think they'll be interested, then figure out who your FI would ideally like to have come, and invite only them.  Do make sure that you run that list by his mom - tell her that your FI proposes to invite these family members - and then let him and his mom work out any issues that come up between the two of them.

Trust me, this kind of thing is going to go on throughout your marriage, and even if the way your husband's family relates in a way that seems really weird to you, you can't change them and probably shouldn't try.  My husband's family would barely bother to put each other out if they were on fire - certainly not if it involved getting up off the couch.  They almost never even pick up the phone to talk to each other.  I talk to my sister and my mom almost every day, and my dad several times a week, and we do things with them all the time.  The thing is, it's not just that my husband's family doesn't spend time together - it's more that they don't actually enjoy each other's company (at best) and actively don't get along (at worst).  While it would be nice if that wasn't true, they have spent years working up to their current level of disfunctionality, and there is really nothing that can be done about that unless they want to do it.