And this exchange earns you the official title of “WEDDING WEENY DU JOUR!”[/SUP]TM[/SUP]
Once your friend had stated the no-kid rule, it was rather obnoxious of you to whine about it to him. Really.
Oh well - I guess you made up and the problem is solved. However, in this particular situation the communication break-down was 100% your fault.
And this exchange earns you the official title of “WEDDING WEENY DU JOUR!”[SUP]TM[/SUP]
Once your friend had stated the no-kid rule, it was rather obnoxious of you to whine about it to him. Really.
Oh well - I guess you made up and the problem is solved. However, in this particular situation the communication break-down was 100% your fault.
My husband and I had to attend a wedding in Belfast with a 7 month old infant. The wedding was specifically ‘no children’ but what were we supposed to do? I mean, we’d flown from Seattle to Northern Ireland, we hardly were going to be able to find a babysitter, and all family were planning on attending the wedding! So, we got a special dispensation, I stayed in the back, and the first time the baby peeped I took her outside. I missed most of the wedding because I stayed outside with the baby, but that was okay with me because it was my husband’s family, not mine. Actually, I wouldn’t have cared if it had been my family - I’d still have left with the child rather than have her disrupt.
I feel bad for the OP, because I understand his situation. Except I have 4 children under the age of 7 (one with special needs), and it’s amazing how many people simply assume I can call up “my babysitter” and go out for an evening.
Ha. I don’t have a babysitter. My parents refuse to watch my children (possibly because my brother has dumped his kids on them so often, more likely because I have not raised my children to the exacting standards of behavior my parents expect, such as “little girls should not squeal when playing”) and my husband’s parents, while extremely generous, are a resource to be used seldom, so that there will never be feelings of being taken advantage of. If I were invited to a wedding that was ‘no children’, I couldn’t go. Period. If I was expected to drive 6 hours each way, and leave a breastfeeding infant at home(!) I would laugh at the very idea, and send a scrupulously polite RSVP. Thank you, so sorry, other obligations, good luck, congratulations, hope to catch up with you soon.
It’s rough when it interferes with a friendship. It really is. I sympathise with the OP’s friend who is getting married. Not everybody likes kids, and not everybody wants 'em around at Big Important Events. But I wonder sometimes if folks who have no children have any real concept of what life is like with children.
(Having my own conflict with a sister-in-law, who has invited me over for a girls’ night out of drinking, but I can’t bring my children (as if I would, when drinking) because children should be seen and not heard. Spoken like a true person who has never lived in a house with 4 little girls. She’s one of those who thinks every family naturally has a babysitter on retainer, on call, at need.)
Still doesn’t help much, as there will still be awkwardness - sure, the couple might learn from it, but at the expense of spoiling this particular event.
It isn’t a case of being self-centred - having children is a new experience for first-time parents and it can take up a lot of their attention; they used to be ‘Dave and Debbie’, now they are suddenly ‘Dave and Debbie and their new baby, Dennis’ - in a lot of informal situations, they will receive invitations that imply inclusion of the infant, even though they don’t explicitly mention him. Sure, formal invitations are a different animal, but formal invitations aren’t something that most people deal with every day, so it is not at all surprising that people aren’t familiar with the so-called ‘social standard’ - I don’t believe ‘common sense’ is a fair description of formal etiquette, which is something that must be learned.
This pretty much encapsulates what I said above - etiquette isn’t all about getting things done, it is about making other people feel small.
Actually, it’s more like them asking “please would you thingy the you-know-what?” - the assumption being that the listener knows the routine (and if it was a safe assumption in the case of formal etiquette, we wouldn’t be having this conversation).
It’s all very well to say that there are books about this sort of thing, but it is entirely possible that the invited guest may not be aware that he lacks knowledge of formal invitation - you can’t expect someone to go and find out something that they aren’t aware that they don’t know.
Exactly the point I’ve been trying to hammer home. Glad you came around to my way of thinking.
CG: Really? So all the mannersists out there have painted themselves in a corner?
“It’s impolite to gnaw the hostess’s leg, but dash it all, I can’t say anything about it!”
Oh no, etiquette mavens are much brighter than that. It’s impolite to accuse somebody of rudeness directly, but it’s perfectly okay to ease them out of their rude behavior in a tactful way: “Oops Gamera, excuse me but I’m afraid you’ve accidentally got the wrong drumstick there! Here, do have one of these instead. Aren’t they yummy?” Or “Oh Gamera, that great werewolf impersonation of yours always just kills me! But Mrs. Proper is a little ticklish, so instead why don’t you finish that wonderfully interesting story you were telling us just a minute ago?”
And then once the guests have gone, they can simply resolve never to let that mannerless thug Gamera cross their threshold again. Problem solved.
*Of course, there are things that I do generally agree with in the generally-accepted manners codes. Definitely no peeing in the fireplace. That’s simply indecorous. *
Well, look at you getting all conventional when it comes to behavior that you personally don’t want to put up with. “Simply indecorous”, is it? How come you get to decide which manners violations are “simply indecorous” and which ones are things that “nobody should be bothered by”?
A-ha! But people often DO ignore traffic laws, and those even have real penalties! They do so because it’s more convenient for them, or perhaps they’re ignorant of specific statutes. And yes, it causes collisions, of course…
Exactly. This is why it’s a problem. And the people responsible for it are the ones who don’t bother to learn the basic shared rules, as well as the ones selfish enough to think their own individual convenience justifies annoying and endangering everybody else by ignoring the rules.
*To put it another way : You cannot possibly guarantee every person you know has the same ideas and level of knowledge about etiquette as you do. *
Very true, and it makes it even more difficult if they’ve decided that they’re simply going to choose and adhere to their own individual rules regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. That’s why we have basic etiquette standards.
If I saw an invitation addressed to me and my hypothetical wife, and we had a hypothetical child around 4, I would feel free to bring the child.
If you’re just saying that that’s the natural assumption you’d make when you didn’t know the etiquette convention that says the child is not invited if s/he’s not named on the invitation, that’s one thing. If you’re insisting that you’d go ahead and bring the child, without even checking with your hosts about it, even though you know that from the etiquette clues on the invitation the child is very likely not invited, I don’t see how you can possibly consider yourself a “polite person”.
You’d simply be declaring that because the hosts are relying on you to understand basic etiquette standards that you’ve individually decided you don’t want to bother with, you are free to do what you want without caring about what your hosts want. (And you’re trying to disguise it as righteous parental concern by snorting about how much the child depends on you.) That wouldn’t make you a sensible or polite person. That would just make you a rude asshole.
I just don’t understand certain posters’ objections to relaying information to their guests that, obviously, THEY feel their guests should know.
Actually, we’ve spent a good part of this thread discussing polite ways to indicate a “no-kids” policy to guests who don’t understand the basic “only named invitees are invited” rule. Obviously, true politeness is about making social interactions go as smoothly as possible for everybody, even those who are ignorant of basic manners, and I think everyone here’s operating with that assumption.
What seems to be bothering you is the assertion that saying something like “No Children Under 13 Invited” on a wedding invitation is impolite or tacky. Lemme try to explain. It’s not because it’s somehow against the rules to give people information that they need to know. It’s just because it looks awfully ungracious to extend a welcoming invitation to somebody while simultaneously telling them you aren’t inviting the beloved family members that they spend all their time with anyway.
Now—and here’s the actually interesting part of the topic—you might argue that that makes it intrinsically rude to exclude young children from attendance at weddings, and that etiquette should no longer condone “child-free” wedding plans. That would be an extremely interesting debate, and if you want to defend that position, knock yourself out. But remember, when debating etiquette you have to play by the rules—you have to explain why you think your position ought to be made part of the basic etiquette standard for everybody, not just yell and stamp your feet about how you personally don’t have to follow those silly rules if you don’t want to, and anybody who doesn’t like it can go to hell.
Anybody who uses etiquette to make other people feel small is just an asshole. The whole point is to make everyone feel comfortable.
The invitation thing, if you are aware of the etiquette of invitations, is actually very clever. If children are not invited, they are simply not listed. This is much more comfortable a situation than specificially disinviting them, how rude is THAT?
The problem is that uppity assholes use etiquette to make other people feel bad. Miss Manners, the maven of etiquette, says that the worst breach of etiquette is pointing out other people’s shortfalls. Someone puts their elbows on the table, or uses the dinner fork for their salad, the classy person shuts their mouths, the dickhead points it out. End result of these assholes is that nobody wants to know a thing about etiquette, we’re all just flying blind and it makes communication harder, not easier. If Jonathan knew the etiquette, the invitation would have been 100% clear from day one, and he could have made arrangements more easily than he can now. That is getting things done.
I think I wooshed you with some mild humor there. ‘Simply indecorous’ = my impersonation of a prissy manners-obsessed person. The actual objection I’d have to such an action is that it’s indecent exposure, and thus illegal.
And yet, you rely on these folks to follow the rules, knowing that many won’t or don’t know to.
Not so basic, it seems. I consulted the one etiquette advisor I’ve ever put stock in… my not-yet-sainted Momthra. (Dadzilla - not so much the etiquette maven) She’s been to dozens of weddings, and has been around for almost 30 years longer than myself… her ruling was that an invitation that invited boths heads of the household was ambiguous, that she’d probably call for clarification if she was considering bringing a child, but that the default implication was that inviting both heads of the hosuehold included any and all rugrats over which they have guardianship.
Like Holiday Inn - kids stay free.
My point? It’s not so universal a standard as you claim. Maybe we’re just a little more relaxed about such things around here… we are more or less Southern.
Etiquette clues on the invitation? What, like a rebus?
Again… it’s not a basic standard. The parental concern is not justification for violating the no-child rule if they’ve explicitly stated it, but if they expect no children, they should explicitly state it.
You love to toss around that word ‘basic’ . [Inigo] I do not think this word means what you think it means. [/Inigo]
Not at all. If you want to set such an arbitrary condition, I don’t find it ungracious at all to spell it out. If you want everyone to wear blue, you tell them to wear blue, not use your Miss-Manners decoder ring to hide a secret message in the margin of the invitation, referencing a page of the Manners Manual.
Well, if I thought child-free weddings were rude, I’d say so.
I don’t. I think 90% of the so-called etiquette standards aren’t standard at all - so why the devil would I argue for including an extra rule into a system of arbitrary rules with which I disagree?
And since we’re discussing rules of debate… you assert that this named-invitees only thing is ‘standard etiquette’ - where’s your proof?
The person sending the invitations is very likely to know the etiquette (because they are organising a wedding and will have immersed themself in the details); not all of the recipients can be expected to know the etiquette, or even to realise that their knowledge is lacking.
CG: The actual objection I’d have to such an action [peeing in the fireplace] is that it’s indecent exposure, and thus illegal.
Okay, if your personal standard of manners is that anything goes if it’s not illegal, that’s up to you. But you still have to recognize that basic etiquette rules have higher standards than that, and that it’s widely considered rude not to conform to those higher standards.
And yet, you rely on these folks to follow the rules, knowing that many won’t or don’t know to.
Well, I keep saying that it **is[/] important to provide tactful ways to help ignorant people follow the rules. Stubborn and selfish people, of course, won’t follow the rules if they don’t want to no matter how much help you give them, so there’s not much you can do about it except avoid them.
Etiquette clues on the invitation? What, like a rebus?
:rolleyes:
if they [wedding hosts] expect no children, they should explicitly state it.
According to the basic conventions of wedding etiquette, they have explicitly stated it by not including the children’s names on the invitation. You have now been told this (several times), and can’t pretend you don’t know it. It would therefore be rude of you to claim that you are free to ignore it and insist on everybody using your own personal “convention” instead if they want you to cooperate with their wishes.
I’d hope that what you’d do instead would be to check the envelope, notice that your kid’s name isn’t on it, remember that by conventional etiquette that means your kid’s not invited but that not everyone knows this etiquette convention, and think of a tactful way to check with the hosts as to whether or not the kid actually is invited. That would be both polite and sensible.
so why the devil would I argue for including an extra rule into a system of arbitrary rules with which I disagree?
Well, apparently you are arguing, pretty passionately too, for introducing a new standard etiquette rule: namely, that wedding hosts have to explicitly state “no kids” if they want guests not to bring their kids. As Cheesesteak pointed out, it’s actually simpler just to use the existing rule that wedding hosts have to explicitly leave the kids’ names off the invitation if they want guests not to bring their kids. However, since as you correctly point out many people don’t know that, we’ve also been discussing polite ways of implementing your suggested rule too.
… you assert that this named-invitees only thing is ‘standard etiquette’ - where’s your proof?
In any well-known etiquette book (such as the ones that have been mentioned by other posters in this thread), which is where we expect to find social etiquette standards. Asking your mom, although it’s nice that you rely on her judgement, unfortunately doesn’t count as getting the Straight Dope about standard etiquette.
Granted that Jonathan Chance should have known that the invitation was only for him and Lady Chance, I’m still in his corner on this situation.
I don’t see him “whining” about the no-kid rule in the exchange he’s quoted. He’s letting his friend know that due to the no-kid rule, there’s a very good possibility they won’t be able to attend the wedding. He’s letting his friend know this.
At that point, the friend takes it upon himself to see if he can alter the no-kid rule. This leaves Jonathan Chance in limbo. He cannot make any travel plans until he knows the outcome. Thus, he has to ask for information from his friend, because it was not forthcoming. Once his friend told him he’d “see what he could do,” the onus was on him to give his potential guest the information he needed as quickly as possible so his potential guest could make the appropriate decision regarding attendance.
Folks are quick to give brides and grooms the benefit of the doubt in many situations, and that’s a good thing – our society has turned planning a wedding into a highly stressful ordeal. However, the basic tenets of polite interaction still apply – if you tell someone you’re going to get information for them, you get it. Especially if the information is key to the person planning a 400-mile (or cross-country) trip.
Brides and grooms are asking people to come celebrate their union. In some cases, though, that means the people invited have to make a lot of sacrifices of their own – purchasing plane tickets, arranging child care, finding hotel rooms, etc. If it’s not possible for the invitees to make all these arrangements, the proper response by the bride and groom is “I’m sorry you’ll be unable to attend.” It’s not “Let me see if I can work something else out for you” and then not giving the information to the invitee.
That was certainly how I saw it.
With the one distinction that I had already made the travel plans and would have to alter them if we weren’t attending. I would have changed my flight from LA to DC to LA to Columbus.
No, I’m not. I’m not saying ‘It’s more polite to tell them explicitly that children can’t come.’ I’m saying it’s smarter. It’s more logical. I’m saying the imaginary rule that children must be explicitly included should be done away with.
Clear communication is more valuable than etiquette.
Your so-called well-known etiquette books are written by ‘authorities’ whose authority I don’t recognize. You need to prove to me, if you hope to convince me at all, that the so-called authorities writing these books reflect either A.) an etiquette system of near-perfect intrinsic value, or at least, so useful that it supercedes direct concise communication or B) at least the ‘etiquette standards’ of the majority of the people of this nation.
Let me put it another way. Just because a Catholic fellow tells me that it is proper to give something up for Lent does not mean I will. People write a lot of books on Catholicism. There’s even a single authority figure available for clarifications. It is, if I recall correctly, the largest religion in the world.
But I’m not Catholic. “Ah,” he insists, “you should be! For it is only through Catholicism that all men are united as brothers, yadda yadda, feast upon the lambs, the sloths, and the anchovies, etc.”
You subscribe to this set of manners. Many do. I’m not convinced that most do. Even if they did, I at best would call for clarification when receiving a wedding invitation from which the childrens’ names were omitted.
My mother is not a national authority on manners… but she does encounter a lot of people… she has a lot of friends, cousins, and clients (as a social worker) who she interacts with, and she makes an effort to offend no one. She’s been to a lot of weddings … and the idea that the omission of a child’s name form an invitation automatically implies that the child is not invited is completely foreign to her experiences.
So your precious standard apparently doesn’t apply around these parts.
Well yes but this thread isn’t about living with a child or experiencing the joys of seeing a human growing. This is about having the little screaming bastards at weddings 
yojimbo:- who has no kids.
CG: I’m not saying ‘It’s more polite to tell them explicitly that children can’t come.’ I’m saying it’s smarter. It’s more logical. […]
Clear communication is more valuable than etiquette.
But etiquette is precisely about clear communication, as well as about politeness. Having a common set of etiquette conventions is what makes it possible for us to go through various types of interactions every day with various complete strangers and still understand their behavior and what it means. If everybody decided to behave as seemed individually best to them for their own personal reasons and ignore conventional rules of behavior, it would make ordinary communication less clear, not more.
Changing the conventions as actual practices change is only reasonable, which is why we’re talking here about possible ways to implement a new convention for explicitly specifying “kids aren’t invited”. But sweepingly rejecting the existing conventions because you personally don’t find them optimally logical, or they just don’t happen to suit your personal preferences, is merely throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
*Let me put it another way. Just because a Catholic fellow tells me that it is proper to give something up for Lent does not mean I will. *
Of course not; that’s a question of personal religious belief. Your own personal religious beliefs and practices are nobody else’s business. When you interact with other people in a social setting, though, you’re making your behavior their business, and it’s reasonable for them to expect that you’ll live up to common standards of manners.
You subscribe to this set of manners. Many do.
Exactly. So since those “many” include authors of etiquette books that sell millions of copies, editors of wedding magazines with millions of readers, and millions of wedding hosts who send out invitations, don’t you think it’s sensible to recognize that this is indeed a standard etiquette convention and that it’s useful for you to understand and conform to it, at least when you’re dealing with some of the millions of people outside your mother’s social circle where they apparently use a different convention?
I’m not convinced that most do. Even if they did, I at best would call for clarification when receiving a wedding invitation from which the childrens’ names were omitted.
Which, you’ll notice from my previous post, is exactly what I recommended that you should do, if you wanted to be both polite and sensible.
Sorry, Sauron, but I’m afraid you’re wrong. You may see it as only “telling it like it is,” but the fact remains, he asked for clarification of the invitation and got it. At that point, what he should have done was shut up about it and not placed the burden of his problem on the shoulders of the groom to offer up an alternative or special treatment. It doesn’t have to be said in a whiny tone for it to be inappropriate to even say in the first place. He (unintentionally, I’m sure) put his friend on the spot.
Of course he did – Jonathan didn’t take a simple NO for an answer, which he should have.
Ok, no big deal. All of us do this from time to time, nobody can be expected to be perfect and never say anything that unintentially puts someone out. But then he further does exactly what I suspected he’d done and pestered the shit out of the guy…
It’s unfortunate that he was “in limbo” for a couple of days, but too bad. The groom has other considerations and a few days lapse in getting a response about an exception for Jonathan’s benefit is not nearly as much of an inconvenience as the one he’s asking to impose on the bride and groom. But he bugged the guy every single day! How annoying! He didn’t get the answer he wanted the first time he asked, so, like I said, he pestered him repeatedly until he wore the guy down, basically giving him no polite way out of an obviously uncomfortable situation. So now you not only want the groom to break the rules for Jonathan, but you expect him to do it lickity-split on Jonathan’s timeframe. Bugger that!
You’re right! And Jonathan broke them the minute he burdened his hosts with his logistics problems. If someone tells you very explicity that children are not welcome, then you do not put them on the spot to make an exception for you.
But again, I’m not trying to beat Jonathan up about what is really a minor faux pas. I’m just saying that it really was his faux pas to begin with and his annoyance at the groom for not giving him the answer he wanted, as fast as he wanted it or with the tone he wanted to hear it, is out of place.
I’m glad that these guys worked it out with no hard feelings and that The Chances are going to go to the wedding (hopefully without their child in tow). That’s the way things are supposed to happen with friends over minor miscommunications and misunderstandings. I say BRAVO to them for not letting annoyances of this kind of little stuff fester.
Assuming that everyone’s read the same etiquette book as you is not communicating with them at all, clear or otherwise. This may come as a shock to you, but there are several self-styled etiquette gurus out there… and, surprise, they don’t all agree on everything! And I can’t count the number of laments from those gurus that I’ve seen while Google-researching about this topic, crying about the general population ignoring the standards of etiquette … apparently, the majority has decided that they’re irrelevant old fuddy-duddies, and they bemoan their obsolescence.
Hypothetically, if I wanted to change them, what would I do? It’s not like we vote, as a nation, on these matters. If we did, I guarantee you that half of these so-called etiquette rules would vanish form the public consciousness overnight.
What makes Miss Manners right, and the majority of the American people wrong?
Religion is a social construct with codes of behavior and interaction. Now substitute ‘etiquette’ for ‘religion’ in the preceding sentence.
Ah, so book-sales is the standard of correctness? So if I put out a book claiming that it is customary to extend one’s middle finger at the happy couple after a wedding, that makes it so? Good to know.
I’m still waiting for you to prove that a majority of the US citizenry subscribe to this convention of etiquette. Notice that little ‘if’ in my statement.
Let me see if I can take a different tack on this to make you understand.
When I have a piece of information… that I consider important for others to know… I tell them that piece of information.
Now, let that settle in for a while. It’s really very simple.
I do not rely on a manual of elitist snobbery nor multiple manuals of elitist snobbery. Thus, I do not feel compelled to snub those who have not read it or who choose to disregard it. If someone conducts themselves in an offensive manner … I tell them that I find that conduct offensive.
It gives them a chance to either adjust their behavior with no real harm done, or to choose not to adjust their behavior. And if they choose not to adjust their behavior, then I can rightfully snub them. Because I’ve clearly delineated the nature of the offense and given them an opportunity to correct it.
Not quite what you said before…
If she thinks it’s ambiguous and would call for clarification, I’d venture to say that it’s not “completely foreign to her experiences.” In fact, I bet that if you asked if she knows what etiquette books say on the subject, she’d be able to tell you the same thing that we’ve been telling you.
Which is obnoxious. Upon hearing of the no-child rule, JC should have said ok, thanks - hope to see you there, and then sorted out his child care woes on his own.
Putting the onus of dealing with HIS child care problems on the already occupied bride and groom is obnoxious. If you miss-read the invitation, that’s your fault - not the fault of the host and hostess. To make it their problem is totally bad form, particularly when it’s their WEDDING they’re planning - gosh - I wonder if they have anything else to worry about?
Furthermore, I wasn’t clear from JC’s last post if baby was coming or not. If she is, be aware that your potentially creating a very uncomfortable situation for your friend, your friend’s wife-to-be, and the other guests at the party. I hope you’ve made some other arrangements for baby - not only will she not have fun - you’ll potentially create resentment between your friend and his fiance if she really didn’t want children at the wedding.