Wedding season has arrived! Balancing wedding invitations and sending regrets is common story

My friend Sophie, 30, has a full summer of weddings. She's going to five. She's a bridesmaid in three. In fact, she has a bachelorette party and a wedding shower on the same weekend.
"The bachelorette party girl doesn't live in New York, so she's flying in for a destination modern wedding invitations," says Sophie. "And then Saturday afternoon I have to slip out for the bridal shower."
Like Katherine Heigl swapping outfits in a taxi to attend dueling events in "27 Dresses," Sophie will perform the real-life bridesmaid juggle. And this after she politely turned down two weddings. She could have gone to seven.
Her story's not uncommon. For folks in the second quarter, there comes a time when crowds of high school and college friends get married all at once. This simultaneity creates conflicts and costs. Sophie estimates she will spend around $350 on each of her three bridesmaid dresses, with alterations. Luke, 27, estimates his wedding travel for the year will exceed $5,000.
"Hell yeah, it gets expensive!" he says. "It's the destination weddings - the hotels, the trips - those are the ones that sink you. And then on top of that you have to buy gifts."
Lining up his invites, Luke had to draw the line - somewhere between Hawaii and Jamaica, to be exact. He'd been to lavish nups in the Pacific and attending another beach ceremony would have cost him and his date almost $2,000.
"I felt guilty saying no because only a select few friends got the Jamaica invite," he says, "but that bride had another reception back in the city. I said, 'Don't worry, I promise I will come to one of your receptions.'"
Of course there are some weddings you can't miss, but if you don't know the bride and groom intimately, they just may understand. I asked one recently married pal and she admitted it wasn't the regrets that stressed her out, it was people who showed up unexpected.
Where things get tricky is with close family. Anne, 26, a magazine editor, will attend nine weddings before Labor Day and either she or her boyfriend is in five of them. She could have slimmed the list if she'd sent her boyfriend to his share alone, but she stuck to the rule of reciprocity: "I'm going to his," she says, "because I want him to come to mine."
Then two invitations arrived for the same date. Her beloved cousin. His sister.
"And the weddings are on opposite coasts," she adds. "It took me emailing a friend with the subject line of 'O Wise One' before her words made me come to my senses. In my case, that's family first, until my boyfriend is family."
Her story is all too familiar. After I picked my own June wedding date, I opened my calendar to pencil in the details and found a note in red ink that said, "Avoid this day. Holly's cousin's wedding."
I called Holly right away. She's my best friend from college and the first person I lived with in New York. But I know the cousin in question is a guy she grew up with - and I knew I would lose out.
"I'm coming to whatever part of your wedding I can," she assured me.
Her solution? She'll be at my rehearsal dinner Friday night and lead the charge to the cocktail party afterward. Then she'll haul herself out of bed at dawn blue wedding invitaitons

morning, fly from Connecticut to California and watch her cousin walk down the aisle.