The guest list for our wedding -- which is still just over a year away -- is, so far, the single most agonizing thing we've had to deal with. Bigger than the budget and the venue and the should-we-or-shouldn't-we of hiring a coordinator. The guest list, right now, is the only thing that makes me want to cry every time I think about it.

I would just like to take this time to apologize in advance if you are not invited to our wedding. Please believe me when I tell you it's not personal.

Seth looks at our guest list -- a Google Docs spreadsheet shared to the two of us and three households of parents -- and sees dollar signs and logistical headaches. I look at our guest list and see an emotional minefield.

Do we invite every coworker? What about cousins we haven't seen in 20 years? If we invite some friends from college but not others even though we see them with the same frequency, will the friends who aren't invited be insulted? What about people who were really special to us five years ago but never call anymore? What about people we really like but haven't known very long?

It's led to some tense moments. The other day Seth stopped by the office so we could look at a venue proposal together. Then we pulled up the guest list.

"Who's that?" Seth asked, pointing to an unfamiliar (to him) Italian last name.

"That's my Uncle Ray," I said. "He's invited." I could tell I was going to have to get ready to play defense.

"What about all of these people?" he asked, gesturing to a list of names that had been indicated as friends of my parents.

"What about them?" I asked back.

"That's a lot of names."

"Those are people I've known my whole life! They're family friends!"

"OK, fine," he said, backing down. "I just haven't met any of them."

"You have met some of them!"

After he left, I went back into the spreadsheet and changed the group's category from "Susan and FX's Friends" to "Nolan Family Friends" just to eliminate any confusion about whether my parents are hogging the guest list. (They're so not.) I was glad I'd already classified my godparents as "Maia's Family" so I wouldn't have to explain those last names.

Here's the problem with our guest list: It turns out we know a lot of people. And we're related to a lot of people. (And it's not just my Irish Catholic family that has all the relatives.) Our parents -- all five of them -- live in town, and they have three unique circles of friends with almost no overlap, which is pretty amazing for Anchorage. And then there are our friends, many of whom also live in town. And then there are the out-of-town friends -- the college friends, the law school friends, the high school friends, the camp friends... and by the time we added everyone we love, we were looking at a guest list that would have been totally manageable if we had a $50,000 budget.

Yeah, it turns out more guests = more money. And not only more money -- more logistical challenges. I've learned that there are very few venues in this town that can accommodate more than 200 people, which is a number we started to approach just by adding our collective relatives to the guest list. I find myself no longer irritated with the friends from New York who didn't invite me to their wedding after I moved back to Alaska. I get it now. We don't see each other that much. They had tough choices to make.

So now we're performing a quadruple bypass on the guest list. We told our parents today they have until the end of the week to make sure everyone they care about is on the list. Then we'll make sure everyone we care about is on the list. And then the cutting will begin. It's not going to be fun. I want everyone we like to be there to celebrate with us. But the fact is we can't have everyone we like. Or rather, we could, but we would have to get married in a high school gymnasium and serve bubble gum and homemade water, and the receiving line would be an hour and a half long.

Of course, after a wedding like that, we probably wouldn't have any friends left at all. So I suppose there are worse things than having to perform a vicious slash and burn of the guest list for what is, after all, just a party.