In traditional Indian society, you can’t invite people to a formal social function without also inviting their minor children. But weddings are very different in Indian culture than in Western culture. Very different.
Western weddings are like a performance. Everyone sits quietly in rows and watches the performers perform. Indian weddings are parties from beginning to end. You can watch the ceremony if you want, but more likely, you’ll be wandering around and socializing, eating, chatting, having a good time.
DEAR MRS MANNERS: I am sending invitations for my wedding and have come to an impasse. I would like to invite my close friends and family to share such an important day, but I know that many of them are uncomfortable in large gatherings such as these, either due to social anxiety or just being mildly introverted. Many of the people will be strangers to each other and I would like everyone to enjoy themselves on this special day. I was thinking about giving the unmarried invitees a +1 so they can bring a friend. What do you say?
GENTLE READER: No. Do you really want your guests dragging in any rando off the street? You paid good money for your reception and you sure as hell aren’t buying a meal for your guests’ asshole friends. Tell your guests that this is your day, and you’ll yeet their asses out the door if they aren’t having a good time. In fact, don’t bother inviting them in the first place if there’s a whiff of nerd on them. You don’t want them harshing your big day.
:rolleyes: Dr. Strangelove, you’re making up a straw Miss Manners (or else just deliberately creating a distorted parody version of her as “Mrs. Manners”) and inventing fake opinions for her to hold so that you can oppose them. Re-read the genuine Miss Manners columns on the subject of wedding invitation “plus-ones” that I linked to in post #30 if you want to know what she actually says on the subject.
Well, except for the people who want to share a truly social gathering with a group of supposedly “close friends and family” united by their affection and good wishes for the bridal couple, rather than being ignored by uncomfortable individuals engrossed by their own unidentified plus-ones, who don’t know or care jack-shit about the bridal couple and are only there to interact with their “date” while consuming free food and drink. You apparently have no interest in making those people comfortable or ensuring that they enjoy themselves.
Look, I get it that weddings are potentially challenging and unwieldy occasions where a lot of compromises and trade-offs may be required. And as I’ve repeatedly said, I’m not at all faulting the generosity of hosts who are willing to share their wedding day with a set of random strangers in order that socially insecure single people among their guests can have a designated “party buddy” to allay their anxieties.
I’m just pointing out that you’re kidding yourself if you imagine that there are no potential social/etiquette difficulties inherent in the plus-one invitation system. Sure, if you really want to give plus-ones to your single guests, fine, go ahead, it’s your choice. But if you don’t, that doesn’t mean that you’re being rude or inconsiderate. If people really can’t enjoy themselves at the weddings of people who consider them “close friends and family” without the companionship of a designated “party buddy” who may be a total stranger to everyone else there, that’s ultimately their problem, not the hosts’.
I have many possible answers here. Mrs. Manners, like so many others, became cynical and profane in marriage. Wait, wait, that’s wrong. MISS MANNERS is a registered trademark of United Feature Syndicate, Inc. and should not be confused with other variations on the name. There we go.
The weddings I’ve been to have been hosted by those with enough trust in their guests to bring someone who would not just not make a scene, but add to the experience, with their sparkling wit or otherwise.
And in fact, the several times I’ve brought a non-date +1 to a wedding, or been a +1, the +1 likely would have been on the guest list had it been 1000 people long. They make the cut by virtue of an invited guest vouching for them. That’s good enough.
That’s true of every single aspect of weddings, and yet they are still held. Your implication earlier that married couples are a social unit with the same friends is not fully borne out in reality, to the point where the spouse being dragged along to a wedding is a tired sitcom cliche by now. It was probably a tired cliche a hundred years ago.
So yes, of course there are potential difficulties, as there are with ordinary couples and future in-laws and second cousins that didn’t quite make the cut and your drunk uncle and a million other things. A +1 smooths things over on the whole, which is why they’re so common. And in my experience (not necessarily generalizable, granted), they have exactly the effect I described of making a large gathering of mostly strangers a bit easier to navigate.
Sure. I’m not claiming that weddings held without plus-one invitations are necessarily problem-free. I’m just pointing out that the plus-one invitation compromise isn’t problem-free either. And that it’s entirely up to wedding hosts to determine which set of problems they’d prefer to have.
What I took issue with was your naive insistence that issuing plus-one invitations is part of wedding hosts’ “obligation to make their guests comfortable”, and that expecting single guests to be able to either enjoy themselves at a wedding without a plus-one or simply decline the invitation is a “strange view”.
Like I said, hosts are certainly welcome to hand out plus-one invitations if they want to. But it’s presumptuous of single guests to expect that they’re owed a plus-one, or that the hosts aren’t being sufficiently concerned with their comfort if they don’t invite them to bring a plus-one.
+1 leaves it entirely up to the invited guest as to whom to bring. There are no strings attached. Which makes me wonder why people send invitations like that in the first place.
I am an old fuck so I am a traditionalist. If you know someone well enough to invite them to your wedding, you certainly should know if they have someone they would like to bring, and so you put both names on the invitation. A wedding is not a free date; the wedding host does not have an obligation to invite strangers to a celebration of their life milestone event just so each single guest can have a hand to hold.
And when did this “plus one” business start? Used to be “and Guest,” which I thought worked just fine.
First, nowadays it’s unusual for invitations to be sent in writing; even when they are, often it’s after inviting people verbally (you get an estimate of guest numbers, apologize to anybody whose toes you may have stepped on (1), check whether any of the Old Folk will bring “plus extras”(2), ask about any restrictive diets you weren’t previously aware of…). And second, yep, after mentioning to your relatives with kids that it’s not going to be terribly kid-friendly, you write something along the lines of “ceremony at 7pm, cocktails and finger food start at 9pm, please do not bring children.”
In Spain a wedding is by definition a family affair, being the joining of two families into one, and children are often part of the ceremony itself (ring-bearers, arras-bearers (3), lectors…). A search for pics of “niños llevando los anillos” (children bearing the wedding rings" even shows me instances of people asking “there won’t be any small children at my wedding since my family doesn’t have any, who could be a good choice to bring the rings and arras?”
1: or your dad, or…
2: my mother has mentioned instances of “Grandma plus caretaker plus caretaker’s kid, who is of a similar age and already known to Grandma’s grandchildren.”
3: arras are coins given to signify a promise. In a wedding, coins or medals are given from one spouse to the other and back to signify the economic side of their joining.
Honestly, if I’ve been invited to a wedding and the only person I know is the bride or groom and I won’t have anyone to talk to if I don’t bring a friend . . . I don’t go, or I go to the ceremony on my own and duck out after. What fun is a party if you don’t know anyone? And that seems like a huge imposition on your plus one–hey, give up a Saturday to go to a party with me where neither of us will know anyone". I mean, it’s fine to offer a plus-one, but I can’t see ever taking advantage of it. But I also really don’t like weddings. Didn’t have one because I dislike them so much.
I have a very large extended family: If you start with my grandparents and count all of their descendants and spouses of descendants, the total is somewhere in the vicinity of 150 (of whom only six have died). Some of those people I see very seldom, or maybe have never even met, but it would be a breach of family etiquette not to invite all of them to a wedding (yes, even the ones I’ve never met). Sure, I expect that a lot of them probably won’t be able to make it, and I could even say which ones probably wouldn’t attend (i.e., the ones who live very far away and whom I see very rarely). But if one of them unexpectedly were able to come, they’d be welcome. And while I can (with a lot of effort) and should keep track of which of them are married and to whom, there’s no possible way I could stay up-to-date on who all of them are dating, and even less way that I could keep track of their close friends. So if I want all of them to feel free to bring someone with them, there’s no real way to do it other than “plus one” or “and guest” or some synonym.
A wedding is not just “a party.” The purpose isn’t for you to hang with friends, it’s to join the couple in celebrating their big event.
If you go to a wedding and say you don’t have anyone to talk to, then you are missing an opportunity. There are dozens of people there and you can always start a conversation based on what you have in common–knowing the bride and groom.
But if you just don’t like weddings, then you just don’t like them.
If not specifically mentioned on the invitation for a formal event such as a wedding, plus-ones are not assumed. At our wedding, we didn’t include any plus-ones upfront; I nearly had to have a firm conversation with an old childhood friend who had apparently assumed that plus-ones were assumed. (And for chrissakes, if you’re not in a relationship and all your old gang of friends are going to be there, why would you want to bring a rando to a wedding like that anyway?) All spouses, significant others, and kids were invited by name (or “and family” on the invitation).
We were constricted with the guest list due to the size of the venue, in addition to cost, so potentially doubling the guest list (or even adding 10%) would potentially be a problem. As the RSVPs started to filter in, though, and we realized we had a little wiggle room, we had a couple of inquiries about plus-ones, which we allowed. One was someone who was instrumental in getting the two of us together and who didn’t know anyone else attending, and the other was a cousin of the groom’s, who had apparently just started seeing someone and was getting serious with him (they got married a few years later).
Many years ago, I was a plus-one at the wedding of someone from my wider circle of high school friends, invited at the last minute by a guy who was a very close friend of the groom. The groom told me that he was glad I had been the plus-one instead of his friend’s flavor of the month.
1: It’s a more formal wedding with sit-down meals: Please tell us in advance if you’re bringing your partner or a good friend, because sit-down wedding meals costs a lot, and we need to budget for that, but. If you already know people there and can cut down our costs, great, but we do understand that you might not want to come alone. Just tell us by this date. We need to plan.
If the person you’ve told us about can’t come at the last minute, fuck it, bring someone else, we’ve already paid for their meal, bring Dave from the petrol station down the road. Then the food we’ve paid for gets eaten and he gives you a lift home. And we’re getting married, we don’t give a shit, we have bigger things going on. As long as he doesn’t try to make move on the bride then your last-minute date is fine.
Also, those friends of ours that we know are single, please be each others’ plus ones because we are crying while looking at the wedding costs and comparing them to everything else we could do with the money.
2: You may bring an extra person. It’s a party, possibly with a buffet. I don’t care if you bring someone or not, or what their relationship with you is, we just want an idea on numbers because the venue has a limit. Text one of us or one of the wedding party if you want to bring extra people.
The thing is, that doesn’t appear to me to align with the rest of what you have been saying in the thread. Your first post calls the “plus one” invitation kinda sad, and then you invoke “Miss Manners” in your second post to claim that such is rude on both sides and should not be done–that one should invite everyone by name. And you call it bad etiquette in multiple subsequent comments. So you very much seem to be saying that you do not welcome “plus one” concepts.
People are thus explaining why the plus one is actually considered polite in many contexts. And one of those is the context of the wedding where the invitee may not know the other guests, and inquiring about one’s romantic partner status (especially in a world where monogamy cannot be assumed) can be difficult. It can, in fact, be more polite to throw in the plus one.
I would in fact argue that the only time that the “plus one” invitation is given is in the rather formal context of the formal invitation, rarely used today. As such, it is actually considered an acceptable and mannerly thing to do. Sure, you don’t have to do it, but it seems strange today to call it rude.
I would thus argue Miss Manners’ opinion on the “plus one” invitation is outdated. This is not uncommon. For one thing, what is mannerly changes over time. For another, I would argue that the relative destratification of society has made a lot of old manners moot. I would argue that a lot of mannerly traditions started as class markers, a way for the relative upper classes to separate themselves from the lower class “riffraff.”
So, if you personally don’t like the “plus one,” you are free not to use it. But it’s not impolite to use, and thus this thread where you work out what “plus one” actually means makes sense.
And I agree that it is not necessarily one’s significant other. Such level of restriction would be impolite. The “plus one” is the invitee’s guest. All that matters is that they are on good behavior, because everything they do reflects on the invitee and their ability to pick an appropriate guest.
In Indian English, the whole age and is commonly called a ”marriage”—“I’m attending my cousin’s marriage next week.”
A formal invitation might use the more formal phrase “and guest,” but given that this thread isn’t a formal invitation, we are choosing to use a less formal locution that means the same thing. Is that a problem?
Uh, no, I repeatedly referred to it as problematic from an etiquette standpoint, not flat-out “bad”. I also said, repeatedly, that the generosity involved in hosts’ handing out plus-one invitations deserves to be appreciated.
What I am actually very much saying is that I don’t approve of attitudes that plus-one invitations are somehow obligatory or that hosts who don’t issue them are somehow lacking in due attention to their guests’ comfort.
I don’t think “polite” is the word for it. I have already acknowledged, multiple times, that there are good reasons to describe plus-one invitations as generous on the part of the hosts and convenient/appealing/comforting from the perspective of (at least some of) the guests. But inviting people generically and by proxy to a significant personal event such as a wedding is not traditionally considered “polite” behavior.
I would disagree, with the additional note that Miss Manners tracks and recognizes a whole lot of genuine shifts in etiquette over the passage of time. She (well actually they, the Miss Manners advice column has been largely taken over by younger family members now) is not simply sitting there in an imaginary 1953 shaking her cane at anybody who has the audacity to try to update traditions.
Where in this thread has it been worked out “what plus one actually means”? We don’t even seem to have reached consensus on whether it should be considered impolite or inconsiderate on the part of hosts not to issue them.
I don’t think anyone has yet observed a benefit of NOT bringing a +1 - is there anyplace better to hook up than a wedding reception? Free booze, good tunes and dancing, everyone in a good mood, lots of hotel rooms available…
That kind of depends on there being plenty of other people without a plus one, who are not close relatives of some kind. Not very common at the weddings I have attended.
