As the title implies, I have a question on bachelorette party invitation etiquette. Here’s the background:
I planned a bachelorette party for my friend who is getting married in the next three weeks. The party is a get-together of friends and family close to the bride and will probably end early in the evening since the bride doesn’t want to spend her wedding day recovering from sleep deprivation and a hangover. So, I sent out the invite via e-mail (our friends are notoriously bad at responding to anything else) and received back several replies noting that I hadn’t invited certain people and asking why they weren’t included.
The truth is that the bride doesn’t know those who were excluded from the list well enough to include them in a bachelorette party, though they are invited to the wedding. It’s not that she doesn’t like them, but they’re just not that close (some are the wives of some of the bride’s guy friends) and weren’t even included in the bridal shower.
I’m a bit stumped, first because I thought it was rude to ask someone why person X wasn’t invited to an event and second because I have no idea how to respond. So, am I just being old school here? Is it rude or not to ask why some people were included while others weren’t in an invitation to an event? Also also, what suggestions would you have on an appropriate (preferably diplomatic) response to such a question?
Yes, it’s rude for Person A to ask why Person B wasn’t invited to a third party’s event. I would simply not respond. There isn’t any response you can give that will satisfy Person A and not offend Person B – and you just know A will tell B – so just don’t go there, is my advice.
Personally, I’d use the “I” and not “we” because if there’s anyone who is an overly sensitive whiner who might get pissy about it, I’d rather have them mad at me than blame the bride for the “slight.” The bride might care if someone is upset with her while I wouldn’t care.
It is rude to ask. So the etiquette bar for your response is not set very high.
I recommend talking to these people by phone or in person. Diplomacy by email is doomed. Anything you write could be forwarded to the person in question with snark, and you don’t need that.
Is the bachelorette party at your house? If so, it’s understandable you’d limit the size. In that case my response would be that I had to limit the size of the party.
I’d keep half an ear open in case somehow you had really offended someone who actually is close to the bride and you just didn’t know it, or otherwise has some major issue that threatens to go nuclear. Holding the line on the guest list isn’t necessarily a hill worth dying on. Are these wives of the groom’s friends going to be stuck at home/hotel (possibly in a strange city) while the guys are at the bachelor party? That could be kind of a lame dynamic.
If the bachelorette party is at a bar/restaurant/club hopping, there’s less of a rationale for keeping the party small. Your best response is just that the bride wanted to keep it small, but personally I’d be a little more flexible if it’s in a public place. There’s a difference between hosting an event, which it is rude to ask to be invited to, and coordinating a group that wants to celebrate an occasion, which should, IMHO, be more inclusive. If more people want to celebrate the occasion than you thought, and the venue is public, why not react positively?
That’s some rude shit, by and large. The only exception is for someone who you really ought to have invited anyway, like a spouse who would otherwise be sitting alone in a hotel room while everybody else is out having fun. (Local spouses who would be sitting at home can suck it, however. They’re in the comfort of their own home, and have plenty of options for entertaining themselves or going out with their friends.)
I’m at a loss as to why you would think someone who wasn’t invited to the shower would be invited to the bachelorette party, honestly. I thought everybody knew you had to be on the top closeness tier for that. I can’t imagine someone who wasn’t close enough to make the shower list expecting to be invited to the bachelorette.
As for how to respond, (assuming none of these are people you should have included) I’d just say that you’re keeping things small and quiet with just her very closest friends and family because the bride wants to go to bed early. Beyond that, I’d quietly ignore the questions.
I think it’s rude to say “I saw X wasn’t invited and I want to know the reason.” But if it’s a phrased as “I saw X isn’t on the list, just a heads up in case it was an oversight” then I don’t think that’s rude. So long as your asking because you genuinely want to avoid embarrassment for the bride and organizer (ie, the organizer left off a bridesmaid), not because it’s your own friend and you’d have more fun if they were there. In this case it sounds like it’s wishing their friends were there, though.
I think the polite answer is to say that it’s just a small and casual get-together, the bride doesn’t want to do anything that’s a big fuss the night before the wedding.
I agree with Jodi and others who suggest its best not to respond at all. Unless the bride has issues with who you left off the invite list, you don’t owe anyone an explanation.
This sort of stuff is what makes weddings unbearably stressful for the bride and groom. Everybody has an opinion about every little thing and its impossible to please everyone. Everyone but the bride and the groom ought to pipe down.
For the same reason you invite out of town guests to the rehearsal dinner–it’s not nice to leave somebody sitting in a hotel room alone while everybody they know in town is at a party they’re not invited to, especially when you’re the whole reason they’re in town in the first place. If someone travels for your wedding, and their spouse is going to be out all night at the bachelor party, the kind and considerate thing to do is to invite them to your own party. They probably won’t want to come, but you really ought to make the gesture of offering.
I know they exist, but I’ve never known anyone to throw a co-ed bachelor/bachelorette party. They are a significantly different thing than a rehearsal dinner.
The situation to avoid is husband and wife travel to wedding of husband’s good friend. Husband goes out to bachelor party of groom. Wife sits alone in hotel room.
If there is a separate-but-presumably-equal bachelorette party going on at the same time, it would be considerate to invite this wife to the bachelorette party.
I think the inference is that this would be a female spouse of a guy friend invited to the wedding. So the guy may be off at the bachelor party and his wife, not invited to the bachelorette party, is left to twiddle her thumbs and watch overpriced porn in their hotel room.
Assuming there are only one or two women in that situation and not thirty, inviting them might be a harmless and polite gesture.
We had one of those. It was more focused on drinking and floating down a river in a tube than with sexy mayhem. Plus, we both had a lot of other-sex friends and couples, and this seemed more our style.
Thanks for all the responses. I think I’ll take the advice upthread and say (nicely) that the party is meant for very close friends and family and not answer questions beyond that.
I’ve been to one co-ed bachelor/bachelorette party - it was a lot of fun. It was way more relaxed than some of the parties I’ve been to with strippers.