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

[pigwotflies.livejournal.com]

I think we (well, I, as I did the addressing) went with Male partner, female partner, children in age order as you suggested. TBH, as long as everyone's name is on there (and correctly spelled), I wouldn't worry about. I also went with X & Y Surname for the envelopes rather than bothering about titles (apart from for the 60+ age group), as I was pretty sure there were a few people on our list with PhDs that I didn't know about.

Most wedding guides/anecdotes will tell you that 25-30% of people you invite won't be able to come. This was certainly our experience. Probably better not to count on it, though. Numbers are a headache, really. Ours were still changing up until a few days before as people suddenly weren't in the country/got ill etc. This is probably why the table plans were only done the night before. Not at all because I under-estimated how much stuff needing doing in the last weeks, oh no! :)