STICKY SITUATION WORDING

There's no easy way to ask for certain requests for your wedding day.
But hopefully we can take a lot of the worry and stress out of it with our child-free wedding and wedding dress code wording templates. We've also got some great tips right here on what you need to know about making certain wedding requests of your guests.

When you need to request a dress code for your wedding guests.
When you want your wedding to have a specific level of formality, you need to make sure your guests are aware of it from the start. This can be as simple as a short line on your invitation or information card that says "Dress Code: Formal" or "Attire: Black Tie".

If you're planning an outdoor wedding ceremony or reception and the venue has a lot of grassy areas, you can ask guests to choose comfortable footwear with a line like "As our wedding is outdoors/on a grassed area, we recommend avoiding stiletto shoes as you may get stuck". And if your wedding is during a colder season or the venue experiences super cold temperatures even in the middle of summer, you can also include a line like "As it gets chilly at night at venue, we recommend having something warm on hand once it gets dark".

Make sure they know what to expect so they can spend more time partying with you and your love, and less time freezing or trying to avoid sinking into the grass!

You can be blunt about what isn't appropriate attire.
Note: it's important to distinguish that we mean blunt, and not rude - and you can be one without the other. This is a good thing to do when you're having a more casual wedding. A short line like "While our wedding is casual and we want you to be comfortable, we respectfully ask that you do not wear jeans, sneakers or shorts on the day". You don't want to write something like "No damn jeans, you hooligans!" unless you're 1000% sure your guests won't take offense.

When you're asking for specific colours to be worn, include them but be flexible about it.
While this isn't really an Australian wedding trend, we're seeing a few couples ask their guests to try and stick to the wedding colours. There's absolutely no harm in asking - just make sure you include swatches of the colours you'd like them to use, and craft your wording very carefully. You want to ask, not demand. And remember: not everyone will be able to honour this request due to personal style, taste, or finances.

Don't take it personally if your guests can't match your wedding colours - they don't love you any less or want to ruin your day. They're attending to celebrate you and your love, after all! So remember, they're not props, they do love you, they just may not be able to match your colour palette due to circumstances like money or personal comfort, and that's okay.

Wanting a child-free or no-kids wedding is perfectly fine and reasonable.
Your wedding day is about the vibe you and your love want, so if you want to party without small eyes and ears around, that's your prerogative and there is nothing wrong with that! You may find that some guests will try and get you to allow their kids, or that one of your loved ones can't guarantee childcare so has to respectfully bow out.

Have the day YOU want, not the day everyone else wants - you can't make everyone happy, so may as well make sure your wedding day makes you and your partner happy instead.

Take advantage of some wedding life hacks to ensure your day is child-free.
Talk to your venue coordinator on this - we can 100% guarantee that a lot of venues don't mind being painted as the "bad guy" for certain requests like no kids, so it doesn't hurt to talk to your contact and go "Hey, we don't want kids at the wedding, but we know without a valid reason we'll cop a lot of stress - can we use a line like 'due to venue restrictions, we cannot accommodate children at our wedding'?". More often than not you'll get a resounding YES to that request.

Another little hack - especially if it's really important to have guests attend and they can't find childcare or afford a babysitter - is to look into hiring an extra room at your venue and babysitters so guests can party, but little ones are not at the wedding itself. This does depend on two important things, though: can you afford to do this, and do you really want to do this? It's a super kind and loving gesture, but if you're not sure about it, you don't have to do it.

Think about an age limit or allowing kids at your ceremony only.
You might have a few niblings - nieces, nephews, friend's kiddos - that are older that you would love to have there on the day. So it might be worth having a cut-off age or age limit - this can be anything from single digits with a "our venue can only accommodate children 8 years and above" to late teens "we kindly request only 16+ children attend".

Another trend we see regularly - especially when there's a few hours between ceremony and reception - is to have kids at the ceremony and then have the reception set as adults only. Our favourite phrasing for this is "While we'd love to see your little ones at the ceremony, our reception is an adult-only event".

Triple-check your details and wording!
It never hurts to get a second and third person to check your wording! You get so used to what you've written that your brain automatically scans the first and last letters of each word, so you may skip any tiny typos just because you've been looking at your wording for too long. So get friends or fam to do a check for you just to be safe.

And that's it! Quick, easy, and not as scary as it looks, right? Right! But as always, if you need a bit of a hand or some wording suggestions for your particular wedding sticky situation, just get in touch. We love to chat and we're always here to help!