Your final wedding guest list affects some other guest lists, too. During your engagement, you may be faced with providing someone (your mom or your maid of honor) with a list of people to invite to a shower or a bachelorette. Someone might also decide to throw an engagement party for you. Whose names should you include, and why?

Showers

The old standby rule about showers applies to the destination bride as well: Only invite people who are also going to be invited to the wedding. It's just not polite to invite someone to celebrate your upcoming nuptials, accept a gift from them, make them sit through the opening and flaunting of your loot and then not invite them to the wedding.

Does this rule mean that if you're planning a very small (immediate family only) destination wedding, you are completely out of luck as far as the shower goes? Yes and no. Your friends and/or extended family members may decide to fete you anyway, despite the fact that you're not including them in the wedding. Accept this party graciously, because it is above and beyond what they need to do for you. (What do they need to do for you? Nothing, really, in light of the fact that they haven't been invited to the wedding.)

If you're planning a large destination wedding, you can go ahead and invite anyone on your wedding guest list to the shower.

Engagement Parties

The bride's parents traditionally have the option of hosting the first engagement party; if they have no interest in doing so, the option passes to the groom's family. You and your fiancé are not supposed to host an engagement party for yourselves, but some couples don't care much for tradition and they host a shindig celebrating their betrothal anyway.

Engagement parties used to be kept to an intimate circle of guests, mostly members of the two families. Nowadays, these parties are sometimes very large affairs. It's truly a matter of preference — and the size of the wedding.

Anyone who receives an invitation to the engagement party should make the final cut of the wedding guest list. Again, it's just in bad taste to invite someone to celebrate this part of your relationship and not give them the option to attend the biggest celebration.

Bachelorettes

Bachelorettes are usually given by the bride's closest friends, so the guest list will most likely include women you know and love. One caveat here: If it's going to get wild, limit the list to women you know very well and are completely comfortable with. Don't invite your boss, for example, as a way of improving your relationship with her. She may freak out when she sees a male stripper dressed as Tarzan — or you might freak when she pretends to be Jane. In either case, chances are the two of you will never view your professional relationship in the same way, so it's best she stay at home.

A good rule of thumb for the bachelorette, no matter what the size of your wedding guest list, is this: Don't make this a get-to-know-you night. In other words, if you haven't been out socially with a person before, don't bring her along on the bachelorette evening. There are just too many volatile factors involved. For example, if the groom's sister is uptight and you and your friends love to swing from the chandeliers, do everything in your power to avoid inviting her. Your reputation in the groom's family may take a sudden nosedive if she attends.

Must everyone at the bachelorette be invited to your destination wedding? If it's a big wedding, yes. But again, if you're only inviting five people to witness the ceremony, your friends are likely to be very understanding — and unwilling to let this opportunity for a night on the town pass them by.