Maybe your wife should attend by herself. She gets to see her relatives, and you don’t have to be bored.
I think there’s a lot to be said for giving people* the benefit of the doubt and not looking for offense where none may have been attended. If I were willing to spend the time and money to make the trip, I’d go feeling pleased I wasn’t forgotten and look forward to having a nice visit with my child and seeing some other relatives.
*People from whom it’s reasonable to expect good intentions. Known scammers, beggars feeding you a line, telephone solicitors and the like probably deserve all the doubt you can muster.
What does the card say about gifts?
I think “They’re just in it for the gifts” is a very oldfashioned idea. It might be true if the couple explicitly asks for money. But no couple in this day and age really wants gifts anymore. Everybody is drowning in stuff.
If people want something, it is a highly personal specific thing. And everyone knows most gifts are generic stuff, or misguided stuff you will just have to return or donate.
So I would go, have fun, and don’t bother with expensive gifts.
Just seems like a gift grab to me.
Thanks again, everyone, for the input.
Trying to assess things a honestly as I can, I wasn’t at all surprised to not be invited. And while suppose I viewed the luncheon invite to be somewhat of an insult, in no way would I have dwelled on it, or thought differently of anyone involved because of the invite. Way too much water under the bridge for this to be anything other than a ripple.
Knowing myself, the prospect of going to the luncheon is more likely to cause me to feel resentment, than simply declining the invite. But I think my wife may wish to go. So I have to figure out how to support her in that. Sure won’t be supportive for me to go and be a jerk. I’m not a smiling backslapping kind of guy, and I pretty much hate small talk. That’s the way I’ve always been - not good at parties. So I could imagine going to the luncheon, fixing a smile on my face, and basically mouthing niceties, but that’s about it. I can’t really imagine why anyone - including my wife - would want me there either! But it would only be a couple of hours out of a visit to see my kid.
And we generally prize being honest with each other, so I can’t lie and say I’m excited about going. I think this is one of those tough things where my wife wants me not only to go, but to WANT TO GO and enjoy myself as well.
As best I can tell, the invite to the luncheon is from the mother, not the bride. And I was not aware of any suggestion of presents. And I have no idea of the invite lists for either the wedding/reception or the luncheon. It has all been via e-mail between my wife and her cousin.
In my twisted mind, it would make sense for the cousin to have a next day luncheon for all the family who have travelled to attend the wedding. Just a more intimate family reunion-type thing for people who are rarely in the same place. It is the idea of also inviting folk in just for the luncheon that strikes me as odd.
Actually it is a rather new-fangled idea.
Again, channeling my mother -
It is tacky in the extreme to say anything whatever about gifts on any invitation except “No gifts please - the pleasure of your company is all that we want”.
You are never obligated to send a gift, whether you are invited to an occasion (including weddings) or not, and whether you attend or not. Anyone who says differently is contradicting my mother, and is therefore wrong by definition. You may bring a nice hostess gift to the luncheon if you attend. But you don’t *have * to, and if you do, it is for the hostess, not the bride.
The purpose of the luncheon is, as mentioned, to see the bride open her wedding gifts, and to make semi-salacious remarks about the introduction of the bride, who was of course virginal yesterday and is no longer, to married life. (Whether the bride and groom have been living together for the last year and/or have children together is a matter of which Nobody Takes Notice).
Really, Dinsdale, you need to see this thru the lens of polite hypocrisy that society has created for occasions such as this. The bride shed many a tear over the fact that she couldn’t have you at her wedding, the subject of wedding gifts never came up in any discussion, the purpose of the luncheon was to rejoice with the bride over her new-found happiness, everyone involved loves everybody else, and the only regrets anyone has is that they couldn’t invite everybody and their spouses to everything.
A good 60% of wedding etiquette came about for exactly situations like this. All weddings involve this kind of thing, and etiquette works to allow you to deal with people you either don’t know very well, or don’t like very much, so you can also deal with the people who you do know or like without pissing off the rest.
As ever, if you simply do whatever my mother thinks is The Right Thing, you can’t go far wrong. And if you do, it allows you to say with a pitying smile “Poor dears, they should’ve listened to their dear mothers”.
Regards,
Shodan’s Mother
I don’t get the insult.
The couple decide who to invite to the wedding. You say you’re not close to them. So they didn’t invite you. Makes total sense.
The bride’s mother decides who to invite to the luncheon. She’s close to your wife. So she invited you. Makes total sense.
I can see it. ‘Hey, while a load of the family are in town anyway, I’d love to grab the opportunity to do a family-reunion-type lunch! But it wouldn’t be a proper reunion without Mrs Dinsdale and her siblings - I want to invite them!’
Again, I can’t see anything remotely insulting.
So grow the hell up and don’t pout.
Everyone does better in situations that don’t piss them off. That’s not something special about you. But most people learn how to occasionally suck it up and behave themselves when it’ll make a loved one happy.
Lots of things in life are a bit odd. No reason whatsoever to take offense. It is certainly not intended as an insult. (what a strange way to insult people, invite them to lunch). So, go or don’t go, but thank them for a nice invitation. My 2 cents.
Please do not go to this family luncheon. You will ruin it for your wife and possibly for her cousins too.
What about the other side of the family – both the other parent of the bride, and the groom’s family?
When my nephew got married last summer, they didn’t invite my cousins or my nephew’s cousins. The bride has a small family, the couple decided they wanted a small wedding, and – this is the important consideration – if they invited my sister’s cousins (which would have extended the attendee list realistically by only 2 people), they would have had to invite my nephew’s father’s cousins, too – and there are LOTS of them. Although it didn’t happen in this case, it is possible that the bride’s parents would have had a lot of cousins, too.
You can’t really expect the couple to decide to invite some cousins and not others.
Also, Miss Manners would point out that no one is obligated to give a present when attending a wedding, although it’s expected. If you’re invited to a luncheon that’s not an official wedding reception, I’d say you’re not required to bring a gift. It would be generous of you to do so.
This whole thing seems clumsy to me, which is the kindest way I can put it.
Having a small wedding ceremony with only a handful of people followed up by a party some time in the future is fine. Usually, though, the ceremony would be very small, and the party could be quite large. The majority of people at the party would not have been at the ceremony, so there isn’t any real division of A list and B list guests.
But to have a ceremony, small-ish or large-ish, to which (it seems) a chunk of your extended family has been invited, but not others, and then combining both the invited and the not invited at a luncheon the following day is … odd. This is odd.
The one question I would have is to check and see if somehow this got lost in the chain of communications somehow. If this is about “Edna and her fiance will be married in a private ceremony on Friday with only their parents attending, and we hope you will join us at a celebratory luncheon the following day for our extended families” then this invitation is completely above-board and fine.
But it SEEMS LIKE, from how you have described it, that the luncheon is Party Part II for those guests who already went to the wedding and reception, with additional B list family members stuck in. Obviously there aren’t any laws about this, people can invite anybody to anything they want, all willy-nilly, but socially graceful people do not structure events this way.
It is possible they think they are being helpful by giving extended family members in town for the wedding an opportunity to visit with other extended family members who weren’t invited to the wedding … but again, it’s more tone deaf than actually helpful.
So that is my opinion on the invite.
My opinion on whether or not you should accept it is to do what you wish, but if you do decide to attend the luncheon, resolve within yourself to chalk this up to them being socially inept, not malicious.
It’s not terribly uncommon not to be invited to a wedding, and to be invited to the reception only. It’s especially true when reception does not follow the wedding. I have been invited to several receptions but not the wedding when the wedding was either private, or at another time and place from the reception.
Sometimes the wedding is very brief, and if it is not followed immediately by the reception in the same or a very close location, there’s not much point in all the guests witnessing it.
I know that sometimes religious weddings, like Roman Catholic weddings, include a communion service, so it’s like a whole church service, with the union of the two people as just a sideshow, and then there’s really something to attend, but not all weddings are like that.
There’s nothing wrong with this and you should not feel insulted. There are all sorts of reasons that a guest list for one event might have to be more limited than for another, and “This person isn’t good enough for both” is probably not the reason.
However, it’s perfectly reasonable to decide that it’s not worth it to travel that far when you’re not invited to the wedding.
It’s only Party II if there have invited guests from both the bride and the groom’s family, including everyone invited to the wedding. If it’s just the bride’s mother’s family, it’s just taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people are in town to have a family reunion. That makes perfect sense to me: weddings are mix of at least two families and often several social circles full of people who don’t know each other. You often don’t really get a chance to talk to your family that much.
You’re offended that she wants you to travel two hours to go to a family event. But would you really be less offended if you found out she didn’t invite you --when she did invite a bunch of other family–because she figured you wouldn’t want to drive? It’s more gracious to let you know you are welcome than to assume she knows what you want to do.
You can set aside all the factors that aren’t the luncheon and decide to enjoy the food, family, change of scenery and potentially strengthened bond w/ your wife or you can add impossible conditions to the idea of what would make it acceptable for you to attend. There is little enough feeling of community within far-flung families anymore and at the very least you’re setting an example your adult kids will see - for better or worse.
What would you tell your adult kids to do in this situation, OP? That if the inviting couple first satisfied certain conditions only then should they be rewarded w/ their luncheon guests’ presence? That sounds petty as hell.
Decide to go, decide there’s value in doing so and then decide to enjoy yourself when you’re there being happy for others who are happy together as you listen to stories and look at pics from the day before. Then everyone wins.
I don’t see a problem with this either. Inviting a crowd only to the post-wedding luncheon would enable many people (with their boisterous kids) to celebrate their union, while still permitting a small, intimate wedding ceremony. I wouldn’t be surprised if this setup was a compromise.
I don’t understand how your willingness to travel for a wedding suddenly changes to unwillingness to travel to a reception. I’d be the complete opposite! Free food, less sappiness, more informal, maybe even free drink. While I know it’s a honor to be invited to a wedding, that doesn’t mean you should read insult into not being invited. Especially if you aren’t close family anyways.
Of all the things occupying the bride’s and groom’s mind right now, finding novel and creative ways to insult distant cousins is not among them. They aren’t doing anything unusual; this ain’t something worth sweating.
Hanging out at r/relationships has taught me that weddings are land mines. The dynamics of some families make it damn near impossible to not piss someone off while still catering to the couples’ individual wants and needs.
Perhaps the couple were dead-set on paying for the wedding/reception themselves. In such a case, it doesn’t matter how much money the “family” has. And maybe they’d like for their wedding guests to dine on steak and lobster and only the best wine, but they have only enough money to treat a handful of people to this feast.
But the parents want a family gathering to celebration the event, so they decide to pony up for a nice luncheon the next day. It’s not the couple’s shindig, but their parents’
Another possibility: maybe the bride was fine with inviting your wife, Dinsdale, but there’s no polite way to invite someone without their husband. Maybe they couldn’t afford to feed an assortment of wives, husbands, and other SOs. Or maybe they love you, but hate some other cousin’s spouse.
I suppose you have every right to feel pouty about this. But just understand it’s kind of crazy for you to take the most uncharitable view when there are so many more reasonable explanations.
Hell, even in perfectly drama-free families, just the potential for unintentionally pissing someone off is enough to make wedding planning stressful. I’m so glad that milestone is months behind me because it was worse than puberty. Okay, I exaggerate.
But seriously, someone right now is probably assuring the nervous bride (or groom) that everything is going to turn out fine, it’s not going to rain, it won’t be too hot, the dress will be altered in time, the flowers will be delivered like we requested, Grandma isn’t going to die the morning of, the caterer knows to start setting up at 9am and that we want crab cakes not those dumpling things, the bridesmaids will all show up even that flaky Monica girl, and for heaven’s sake, no one will feel like “second best” just because they’re not invited to the ceremony, are you crazy? Everything will be fine.
Pretty much what happened at my wedding - inviting my father’s first cousins increased the count by 4 ( 2 cousins, 2 spouses)- but I couldn’t invite them without inviting my mother’s first cousins , which increased the guest list by 80 (40 cousins, 40 spouses).
My best friend, who was also the best man at my wedding, didn’t invite me to his wedding. He and his wife had a home wedding, with only their immediate families present. No cousins, no best friends.
No, I wasn’t offended and we had a nice time at the reception.
Around the same time, a friend of mine got married at a little chapel near her childhood home. It was only large enough to hold maybe 60 people, but they invited at least 200. Guess what, we ALL showed up. And it was miserable. But again, we had a nice time at the reception.