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

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Weird, I can't think why I would've expressed any Erin-first preference.

As to Errag I definitely do say that when people say Morin but it's actually "The Errag" because it sounds like some sort of monster. I actually think portmanteau names are daft and don't care whether people use them or not, or what they use if they do.

[andrewducker]

I had generally thought of The Errag as a large monster with huge teeth, of the kind depicted in children's books when I was a child :->