Addressing ettiquette and wedding stress

[andrewducker]

I'm sending out wedding invites at the moment, which is making me aware of all sorts of in-built biases in the conventions surrounding how we address people. I'm skipping over a lot of it by using first names for everyone, but even then there's a question of order. For older people I'm largely going with Male Partner, Female Partner, Children in order of age, but reversing the male/female order when the email address is for the woman of the house. For people nearer my own age I'm going with "Partner I know best->Partner I know less well, Children in order of age". Lesbians go in the order that I'm used to people putting them.

The whole invitation thing has been more stressful than I thought, largely because the venue has space for 80, and it turns out that Julie and I have 57 family members between us, so there are only 23 spaces for friends. This means that we've had to cut some cousins I haven't seen in 20 years, and restrict a few people to not having +1s if we're going to fit in even the people that we see/chat to on a regular basis, and a couple of really old friends. And the reception can take 30 more, but that still left us with 57 people that we don't have space for. I just hope people understand.

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

I confess that although I would aim for "ask them what they want" I would mostly default to "Mr and Mrs Smith" for all my older relatives. For people in my social peer group I think I'm much more likely to simply invite individuals individually for the sort of event that requires more individual invites than "hey entire LJ flist, come to mah house for teh noms and boozes".

I saw one etiquette guide once that attempted to explain that "Mr John and Ms Jane Smith" was just WRONG and you should, nay MUST, put "Mr and Mrs John Smith" because, LOL, addressing people how they like is bad or something now? (I know two married couples who would prefer that style of address, but it's not really a sensible default-assume these days). Amusingly though they had a whole list for the correct ordering to use for partners with more unusual/interesting titles (can't remember it all though; and anyway how many couples do you know who are "Ambassador and General"?).

(I also have oodles of relatives... however I don't actually like many of them. Lucky for them I'm not getting hitched, so they don't have to be snubbed.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oh, and, I was invited to a cousin's wedding via my parents - which I found extremely USELESS because I DON'T LIVE WITH THEM and therefore found out rather later than ideal! Send grown-up-children their own invite, to their own address...

(My friends are quite good at getting my style-of-address correct; although I don't care about minor deviations to the extent that I don't even recall them and wouldn't throw a hissy fit for anything that wasn't clearly just trying to piss me off because it's really hard to remember how all of a large number of people like it)

[fearmeforiampink]

I've been going through the titles table of the membership database at work, and the different things we had there… "Reverend & Doctor", "Rev", "Rev." "Revd" "Rev'd" "Reverend", and "Professor, the Lord"