I interpret it as being “you can bring another person”. This person can be anybody you think it’s proper to bring with. Ideally they will resemble a human being enough to pass.
Nava, who’s had to remind relatives that “I drove my mother here” does not equal “I’m married to my mother”.
Re. children: in Spain if someone is organizing something that would normally accept children but they won’t, it is on them to give warning. That includes late-hour weddings, because while for some people “it should have been obvious” there is always someone to whom it wasn’t.
It might not be socially acceptable to turn down *all *wedding invitations from close friends and family - but I kind of wonder how you are a close friend or family member and don’t know anyone else at the wedding. If you are family, then you are also related to some of the other family members and if you’re a friend, I would think you’d know at least some of the other friends. I once went to a wedding where one guy at my table didn’t know anyone at the wedding except his wife/SO - but he wasn’t a close friend or family member. The groom was a customer of his bait shop - most people wouldn’t invite someone they didn’t actually socialize with so I don’t think that’s a particularly common situation.
I don’t do plus ones. If I’m inviting you, I know you well enough to know if you are married, living with someone or in a long-term relationship. And if the LTR is recent enough that I don’t know about it, then you’re close enough to tell me about it when you get the invitation. And if I know **Nava’**s mother can’t get to the party unless Nava drives her, then Nava gets her own invitation.
It happens. A friend of mine got married mid-week hundreds of miles from home on fairly short notice (they had their reasons for being in a hurry.) It was a small wedding; I was one of only 3 or 4 friends she invited and the only one who could make it. I had met her parents but they were pretty busy during the festivities. I didn’t really know anyone else there; it was all family members. I managed, but this sort of situation would have made me very uncomfortable when I was younger.
For my own wedding, I wrestled with whether to invite some childhood friends. These were people I’d known nearly all my life, whom I still really cared about, but who had scattered all over the country and wouldn’t really know anyone else. They were people who, if they got married I would understand if I didn’t get invited, but if I did I’d be touched and would feel obligated to attend. And then I might not know anyone there, and without my husband it would be a whole trip across the country alone. But I would’ve loved to have them there, and I imagine many bridal couples feel similarly about their old friends.
IMHO, plus one means an adult. Personally, I’ve only ever gone to “plus one” events either solo or with my partner. If someone were to show up with, say, their sister, or someone that they weren’t in a serious relationship with, it’s unusual, but it’s never struck me as a faux pas. But if someone were to bring their child with them, then I would consider that a faux pas.
Of course. Naturally it’s not socially acceptable to announce “I’m not coming to your wedding because I think it’ll be boring or awkward”, but you can always have an unspecified previous engagement that forces you to regretfully decline. Maybe there’s an exception in the case of the weddings of, say, parents or siblings; but generally if people can’t enjoy themselves and socialize at the weddings of their own parents or siblings without having their own separate “date”, they’ve got worse problems than the lack of a “plus-one”.
Again, though, the hosts have an obligation to make the guests (reasonably) comfortable at an event which is their party and at which they are entitled to decide their own guest list, without delegating bits of it to their invited guests to bring along random strangers. As I said, I’m not faulting the generosity of hosts who are willing to let guests bring their own unidentified plus-ones, I’m just pointing out that it’s not rude for them not to do so, because the whole “plus-one” concept is somewhat problematic etiquette-wise.
Meh, again. It doesn’t do much for the “social comfort” of the event as a whole when a bunch of the guests stay huddled with their own individual “dates” who may not know one another or anybody else connected with the wedding, and who treat the wedding as a free public entertainment where they’re entitled to ignore everybody else, rather than graciously socializing as a group of people who are supposedly united by their affection for the bridal couple.
Well, even if there was a problem with it, I would hope your hosts would have the politeness not to tell you so.
The idea that wedding formats are completely universal and unchanging is just bizarre to me; I certainly get that in certain social circles there are The Way Things Are Done, but they’re clearly not universal. Just in ‘normal’ weddings you can have anything from inviting something like a dozen people to short, quiet, intimate ceremony with a brief reception afterwards to a giant get together of hundreds of hundreds of friends and family with a loud reception/dinner/party after that lasts for until people take cabs home and stagger into bed to destination weddings where the wedding is the centerpiece for a multi-day vacation getaway - plus all the variations about food, drinking (none, BYOB, open bar, paid bar), dancing, gifts, kids, and so on. There is just no way that anything is actually going to be ‘one size fits all’, and if you’re intending that people read something other than ‘you can bring one additional person’ into a ‘plus one’ you should probably just spell it out instead of hoping they read and agree with the same etiquette expert you did.
I also find the idea of policing what counts as a ‘significant other’ for someone else pretty bizarre, so telling someone that the person they brought isn’t “SO” enough for the invite would just not occur to me.
Yup. This is why, as I said, the “plus-one” concept is problematic etiquette-wise. People are issuing their invited guests with free passes to bring a random stranger to their wedding, so they’re obligated to put up with anyone their guest brings who isn’t causing an actual breach of the peace.
But at the same time most people aren’t really enthusiastic about hosting and feeding random strangers at their own wedding, nor do they like the idea that their friends and family are going to find their wedding so tedious or uncomfortable that they won’t be able to enjoy themselves unless they bring some kind of date, however random or casual. So hosts would prefer that their guest’s “plus-one” turns out to be somebody who’s actually partnered with the guest in a significant way. But they can’t actually say so because see previous paragraph.
Especially since not everyone here is American. For instance, it took me years to realize that when Americans say “wedding party”, they’re not actually referring to the wedding party; that’s called the “reception” for some reason. And that’s just one of the simple things.
Just in case you’re actually interested- it’s called a “reception” because there an old concept in English ( I’m pretty sure it’s not restricted to the US) of “receiving” referring to greeting or welcoming. A baby is wrapped in a “receiving blanket” because there was a custom of wrapping a newborn in such a blanket right after birth before being given to the mother. And many receptions (wedding or otherwise) have a “receiving line” where the hosts ( and possibly guests of honor) greet guests as they arrive.
Yes. In America “wedding party” means the people who are involved in the wedding: bride, groom, best man, maid of honor, bridesmaids, groomsmen, etc (obviously not all weddings will have all of these).
That’s because it’s been traditional in Anglophone Christian culture to separate the ceremony and reception by location, and also sometimes to have non-identical guest lists for them. Originally, the only place a couple could legally exchange wedding vows was in a church or other place of worship, and subsequently also a registry office (I believe the UK still requires wedding ceremonies to be performed only in places of worship or registry offices?). And of course nobody’s going to have a big ol’ party with drinking and dancing in a church or registry office.
So traditional English-language wedding invitations specify those events separately (“The honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of… Reception to follow at…”), and sometimes even invite guests to them separately. You can send out invitations to the ceremony and include a separate “reception card” for a subset of the guests, or if the reception guest list is bigger, send out invitations to the reception and include a separate “ceremony card” in some of them.
AFAIK in the UK, due to many churches being smaller and parties becoming bigger, it’s now pretty much standard practice to invite the full guest list for an evening reception while a smaller number also attend the ceremony beforehand.
In the US you can get married anywhere you like (because FREEDOM!!), as long as you have an officiant who’s legally authorized to perform weddings, or at least your wedding (see: rules for special ordination and one-time officiants), in the jurisdiction where you’re getting married. Generally people who get married right on a beach have a reception in a nearby building with facilities for food service, although of course if you’re having a really informal shindig then anything goes.
In the UK, you can get legally married only in a legally approved wedding venue, which must be “a permanent structure with a roof, approved for marriage and accessible to anyone to book for their marriage”. (I believe I was incorrect in my previous post when I suggested that places of worship and registry offices are still the only legally approved kinds of wedding venue in the UK.) So ixnay on tying the knot on that sunny idyllic British beach [/s] under the open sky.
No - but “wedding” in the US can refer to either the ceremony, the reception or both together. It’s very context dependent- if I tell you I’m going to my sister’s wedding Sunday, I could be going to both the reception and the ceremony or just the reception or just to her civil ceremony because she isn’t having a reception. The separate locations for the ceremony and reception are traditional for a certain segment of Anglophone Christian culture - but secular ceremonies and non-Christian ceremonies commonly take place at the reception venue and in some regions/Christian denominations , the reception commonly takes place in a building/space on the church campus although not in the church itself.
Right. I should point out that I don’t think anybody’s claiming this sort of wedding-venue separation doesn’t also occur in non-Anglophone Christian cultures, but just assuming that the wedding nomenclature Alessan finds confusing is in English.
Wedding celebrations throughout historical Christendom have been largely shaped by the fact that marriage, at least since medieval times, was interpreted as a religious sacrament and therefore needed to be performed by a priest in a church, which was not considered an appropriate location for meals (other than the symbolic bread and wine of Communion) or partying.
I find the idea that the legal marriage has to occur at the same place as the ceremony really odd - the important part of the ceremony is the social, religious, or personal bond you’re celebrating, the legal part is to cover things like benefits and property distribution. I don’t really see why having a ceremony wherever you want and also stopping at a courthouse to file the paperwork for legal purposes is such a huge barrier to a lot of people. I know a number of people who did a very staid, traditional US-Christian wedding to satisfy conservative blood family members and keep the peace with them while doing a Pagan handfasting with a big party afterwards for their chosen family that they considered the real marriage, so the idea of separating things isn’t as foreign to me.
Also because pedantry is important, ‘tying the knot’ isn’t going to constitute a legal marriage in England on the beach or not, you’re going to have to either go to a church or magistrate a legal wedding, they don’t have independent officiants AFAIK. And to continue the nitpick further, according to your link the restrictions you discussed apply only to England and not the UK as a whole, Scotland doesn’t have the building restriction, so as long as you’re on a sunny Scottish coast (heh) it’s actually legal.
In part because in at least some places in the US, that’s not legally possible - you either have a ceremony wherever you want with an authorized officiant who then files the registration paperwork or you have a civil ceremony at the courthouse/clerk’s office. You can of course combine a legal ceremony at the courthouse/clerk’s office with a ceremony somewhere else that does not involve an authorized officiant - but there’s no way in my state that I could have a ceremony on the beach on Saturday without an authorized officiant and just “file the paperwork” at on Monday without having a civil ceremony.
Just curious. Here in the US, children are often invited and invitations addressed “______ and Family,” but it’s impolite to assume children are invited. So in Spain, if one wants only adults at the wedding, how are guests warned? “No children” on an invitation seems rude. Does the couple have to contact each guest to warn them the wedding and reception are adults-only?
