Wedding invitations are more elaborate today than they ever were in the past. It used to be the case that the bride’s parents paid for everything. Because of that, all invitations had the same wording. The parents requested the "honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter". The priest or pastor of the local parish was brought in, and it was hosted at a church. That was the olden days, and weddings, and wedding invitations, have changed a lot since then. Nowadays, blended families, remarriages, untraditional families, and divorced families make the wording on invitations a lot more complex.

There is the standard wording, the wording when both sets of parents are funding the wedding, the wording when the bride’s parents are hosting and want to include the groom’s parents on the invitation, the wording when the bride and groom are paying for the wedding themselves, the wording when the bride’s parents are divorced, the wording when the divorced parent and new stepparent are hosting the wedding, and the wording when the child of divorced and remarried parents are both hosting the wedding. If that’s not enough – there are untraditional families ad infinitum. The list goes on and on.

So how does one approach wedding invitations when there are so many different set-ups? First of all, one needs to look at sample wording online. No offline book, i.e., in print, can keep up with the vast array of untraditional wedding set-ups. There’s definitely someone with your same situation in a newsgroup, message board, or otherwise. Google has a lot of resources to help you find what you’re looking for in regards to the wording.

Wedding invitations can make kind of a campy joke about the unorthodox nature of the wedding’s set-up, and that’s all right. There’s not much else you can do when things are so bad that they merit that kind of attention. For example, divorced parents are jointly hosting the wedding with each of their new partners. It would look kind of odd to feature four hosts on the front cover so a little joke can be made about the situation. In the end, it’s more human than denying it. The really funny part is that all the relatives will think it’s funny because they’ve been through the years to witness your follies, changes, and mistakes. The hosts will have a chuckle with the guests when it comes time for the wedding.