We’re not talking about just any wedding, though, we’re talking about his good friend, his childhood friend’s wedding. Why didn’t he know there was an SO? If my childhood friend invited me and not my SO, I would certainly ask her, “Hey, is it OK if he can come along?” If not, though, I wouldn’t throw a tantrum.
I wasn’t addressing the situation in the OP, though, just archmichael’s contention that weddings are “couples” functions. I agree that if his friend should have known to include the girlfriend in the invitation. My own take on it is that the friend doesn’t particularly like the girlfriend and was hoping the subject of her attending wouldn’t come up, with or without a child. Judging from the subsequent events, I could see how jaozito’s buddy might not really care all that much for her…
Right, gotcha.
How true. jaozito, I must reiterate, your friend must have been really hurt you chose not to come.
Well, the OP said the groom had met the kid at some other wedding a few months back, so presumably he knew about the girlfriend. Why wouldn’t he invite her to start with? Dunno. Maybe the budget is tight. Maybe he thought she was a flavor-of-the-month sort of girlfriend. Maybe if they invited her, they had to invite other SO’s who they really dislike. Maybe he doesn’t like her because she’s the sort of person who would hold a lifelong grudge over something like this. Could be a million different things.
I can’t believe you picked your girlfriend over your lifelong buddy.
If he’s still your friend, I’m amazed.
Our venue has room for 110…that’s guests and wedding party. We have about 50 relatives between us, so it’s really only 50 guests for dinner. There is enough room for another 60 in the evening, after dinner. An evening reception carries no obligation for a gift, and is merely a way of extending an invitation for people you would love to have there, but can’t because of space constraints.
Our rule is, if we’re not friendly with both members of a couple who aren’t living together (none of our friends are engaged or married) only our friend gets invited. Obviously, any co-habiting couples are both coming, as are the couples where we know both people well. I want OUR friends there, not some of our friends and their partners who I don’t know, with other close friends excluded.
We don’t have unlimited space or money to feed people we barely know, so if the choice is between a friend’s SO who I’ve never met or a friend I’ve known for years, I’ll invite my friends without their partners.
I get the impression that single women, if they are in a relationship, don’t like to go to weddings alone. I’m not sure how guys feel about this
Aren’t things like the bouquet and garter toss reminders for the single people to get married? I would guess it would suck for a woman to catch to bouquet, and wasnt allow to bring their SO.
If Janet had caught the bouquet and Brad wasn’t invited they probably wouldn’t have ended up in Dr Frank-N-Furter’s castle. 
But judging by the support I’m getting on this issue you’re probably right
[quoteAnd yes, I think both members of a couple should be invited, whether they are married, engaged, living together, or living separately. And for those who say a SO in a live-in relationship should be invited, but not an SO in a non live-in relationship, why? They’re still only boyfriend and girlfriend. What gives them a special privelege because they’re living together? And what about people in long-term same sex relationships? They may never be able to get “married,” but does that mean they shouldn’t be invited to weddings as a couple?[/quote]
The etiquette principle that this all turns on it that of the “social unit.” Social units must, according to standard etiquette, be invited togather socially. Now, it used to be that only married or engaged couples constituted a social unit. In the last few decades, however, we’ve seen the concept of people living together spousally become respectable, so, nowadays, moving in together is considered to be a declaration of social unitude. So, from an etiquette perspective, at a minimum people who are married, engaged or living together (and this includes people in same-sex relationships living together) should be invited together. BTW, you should never use “& guest” to invite someone’s significant other. The etiquette rule is this: both halves of a social unit must be invited to social events, and they must be invited by name.
“& guest” is cmpletely different. Inviting someone “& guest” is allowing them to bring someone of their own choosing to your party. It isn’t wrong, to do this, really, but it isn’t necessary either. If you can afford to do it, and you want to, you can. But no couple should feel obliged to leave actual friends off of their guest list in order to allow their guests to bring strangers to their wedding.
As for the OP – if you and your girlfriend are fairly long term and since this was a verbal invitation, I wouldn’t consider you rude to clarify whether or not you could bring your girlfriend, or even her kid. If there had been a written invitation with just your name on it, that would have been different – the only people invited to an event are the people written on the invitation. But it was rude for your girlfriend to demand that she MUST bring her son, and it was controlling and rude for her to demand you not attend the wedding unless her son was included.
I have to reply to this one. I have known him all my life, true, but ever since highschool (6 years ago) we pretty much lost touch. And frankly… I think he’s a fine person, but he wouldn’t be my first pick when I wanted a friend… Had it been the wedding of one of the friends I love and things might have been different.
Since then I’ve seen him once, we played football and what happened was never brought up.
You might want to poke around the Etiquette Hell messageboard sometime. There’s good advice to be had.
As others have stated by now, invitations ONLY apply to those whose names are written on the formal invite. Don’t assume someone forgot your girlfriend, your dog, or your step child. The general etiquette rule is to invite “established” couples (i.e. people who have been cohabitating as married couples for ages), those who are engaged to one another, and married couples. If the children’s names are not on the invitation, then they are not invited.
It was rude of you to ask for your girlfriend to tag along, but your friend was accomodating. It was even MORE rude for your girlfriend to ask for the child to come along and then get all huffy when she was told no.
Some people just don’t WANT kids at their weddings, and while we may or may not agree with their reasons why, it’s THEIR choice (and ultimately, their money when it comes to paying for the meals…)
Miss Manners says that a couple who are living together are presumed to be secretly engaged. Live-in significant others are invited because engaged couples are invited (yes, this applies to same-sex SO’s, gay marriage has been legal in Massachusetts for some time, the constant rain of frogs has been horrible on my commute). I agree with other posters that “and guest” is rude. If the “and guest” hasn’t been around long enough for the bride and groom to know his/her name, then there’s no reason to invite him/her. I say this as someone who was talked into adding “and guest” to invitations and ended up with a wedding album and video clogged with my husband’s numerous idiot cousins’ dates-of-the-day.
Oh, and your gf is a manipulative and unpleasant shrew. Your friend sounds like a nice guy. Keep him, ditch her before she attaches herself to your wallet like a remora.
His histrionic, just-looking-for-an-excuse-to-be-offended gf, at that.
I’m in no way qualified to offer advice based on a paragraph or two post on a messagbe board, but that won’t stop me 
If this woman issues ultimatems over such trivial things, I’m sure there will be much bigger drama later in your relationship. In ffact, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she has created similiar drama a whole lot of times before.
And as far as not going to your best friend’s wedding, you should work on repairing that relationship… I’m sure it was noticed.
Ah, so our mistake was not living together before we were married. It’s all clear to me now. :rolleyes:
Huh? She didn’t say that at all. She said couples who are married or engaged have made it clear to society that they are an official unit. Because at that time you and your husband were not married or engaged, society as a whole finds it difficult to distinguish that your relationship is so much more serious than Uncle Fred and the chick he picked up at the bar last weekend. Certainly extremely close friends ought to be better able to judge the seriousness of your relationship and make appropriate judgements from there, but in general couples who are dating do not appear as serious as those who have made their commitments more visible.
No, she said that living together is considered, as engagement or marriage, to be a “declaration of social unitude.” Thus warranting a live-in boyfriend/girlfriend an invitation but not couples who aren’t living together.
I think the idea is, if you have made a visible, public, major life change in order to faciliate your long-term/lifelong commitment to a person, then people in general can use that as a way to gauge how serious you are about the relationship. Marriage, engagement, and more recently, moving in together, all are commonly recognised means of saying “Hey world, this person and I are in this together!”
If you are dating a person you have not married, become engaged to, or moved in with, it is harder for people in general to know that your relationship is more serious than other dating couples who may be broken up next week. Like I said, if you and your husband were serious about each other at that time, then yes, I personally would expect a close friend to recognise and acknowledge that. But as a general rule, it can be hard to tell who is dating “seriously” and who is dating “casually”, since from all outward appearances those relationships often look the same.
Please note, I am not in any way saying that the relationships of those who aren’t married, engaged, or living together are in any way less important or serious or right than those who are. I just mean, I can see what Jess is saying about the “social unit”, and I understand and appreciate how such a guideline would have been adopted.
Sorry I misunderstood you, archmichael. Still, I’ll have to disagree. While it would be nice to accommodate everyone and their brother at a wedding, the couple is under no obligation, and should be under no obligation, to ask if there’s someone their guests would like to bring.
As for who’s invited and who’s not, I think that wedding invitation etiquette is pretty explicit. If your name isn’t mentioned regarding someone’s baby shower, you’d probably assume “I guess I don’t know the mommy-to-be well enough to qualify.” Or if your name isn’t included on the guest list for a sit-down dinner party, you’d probably assume you weren’t invited. To me, anyway, it’s pretty obvious that if an invitation is not addressed to me or to my SO and me, I’m not included.
For example, when I was just out of college, many of my friends got into a frenzy of getting married. My roommate often received wedding invitations from our mutual friends, and my name was never on the invitation, so I never attended the weddings because, well, my name clearly wasn’t included. I was kind of hurt, but my roommate was closer to these people than I was, so I just assumed that perhaps they had a tight budget or wanted only the closest friends and family present. Finally, one of these friends said, “Hey, why didn’t you come to our wedding anyway? We asked your roommate, and she said you weren’t invited. Of course you were invited - we addressed the invite to her and guest.” I didn’t quite put it this way, but I always thought to myself, why the hell wouldn’t you explicitly state my name on the invitation then? Am I supposed to read your mind and assume that I’m invited? If you send an invitation to “overly’s roommate and overly” or a separate invitation to each of us, it’s quite obvious who is invited and who is not. Besides, when you’re that age, you’re often dating a lot, and my roommate was always going out with her man du jour - regardless of who the man-and-wife-to-be thought they had invited, of course she wasn’t going to invite me as her date. So just because you’re close friends with someone or living with them does not necessarily mean you’re automatically invited, and regardless of my friends’ intentions, it would have been rude of me to assume I was.
I understand, and respect those of you who disagree with me on this. I in no way pretend to be an etiquette expert, nor do I want to be. My whole point was that I think it’s a load of hooey for people to say boyfriend/girlfriend relationships don’t warrant an invite, but live-ins do. I would have a much easier time accepting a no boyfriends/girlfriends period policy. That’s all. I apologize if I gave people the impression that I was more worked up about this than I am. I’m already married, did things the way I felt most comfortable for my wedding, and never plan to get married again. So everybody’s stuck with both of us at their weddings now!
I’d be interested to hear an update from joazito to see if he’s talked more with his girlfriend about this issue and her behavior.
Way off topic: I am a big fan of living together before getting married, but I thought that ‘shacking up’ was generally still frowned upon. Is my perception on this way off as well?
Hi, i’m the rude GF you’ve all been talking about and i find it very curious how you can say all those mean things you have been saying without hearing the other side of the story.
First of all they are not close friends, they have met at the age of 3, but they haven’t seen or called each other for six years (and not because of me).
Second, he would have never invited my BF if he haden’t gone to the Farm that belongs to my BF’s grandma (not parents house) to play soccer (it has a private field made specially for Joazito). And he only went there cuz the other friends wanted to visit my BF.
Now about that wedding:
My BF told me about the wedding and told me he wasn’t sure had invited me too, but he probably did because he invited all the other friends GF’s. I told my BF that it wouldn’t matter since i wouldn’t go without my sonand he wasn’t invited for sure.
After that he called his so called friend, didn’t explain the whole story as he should have and only after the friend gave his stupid answer, did i get pissed.
He said he didn’t want my son at the wedding cuz then Joazito wouldn’t have any time for his friends.
The other thing that made me furious was when he said that he didn’t know i had a son (remember that we were all at the farm the day he went there and his fiancé played whit my son the whole afternoon). So is he short sighted or is he just stupid?
About the ultimatum, i only did it because the groom was very unpolite at the phone and i would never go to a wedding if my BF wasn’t welcome.
Signed:
Joazito’s GF