agonyaunt | Dear Prudence: Plus one

Q. Wedding +1: I can’t believe I’m asking this question, but I’ve become super-duper anxious all of a sudden. I was invited to a wedding of a longtime, but not close, friend. I was given a plus one, which just says “guest.” I want to bring a friend, one whom the couple has met a few times. The couple has no idea whether I’m dating anyone, they don’t know my orientation, and they gave me a plus one anyway. The internet seems dead set against bringing anyone other than a date, but I can’t imagine that these people, who are queer-friendly, are super into conventional, couple-centric etiquette. So, can I bring my friend? Should I calm down?

A: If I count as part of the internet, then it certainly isn’t all dead set against bringing anyone besides a romantic Interest as a plus one to a wedding. You’ve been given a plus one and get to use it as you see fit. (Does the internet think that if you’re not in a romantic relationship, you should return your plus one to the happy couple and arrive stag? What’s going on with the internet today?) Bring your friend and have a great time.

Follow Up:
Q. Re: Wedding +1: It is unbelievably rude to bring a friend to a wedding. This really is for dates only. A wedding is not about you. It is about a couple. It is one thing to come with your boyfriend or girlfriend, but another to impose on them a random friend they have not invited and now have to pay for. (A wedding dinner’s cost per head is expensive.) If the letter writer is not close enough that the couple doesn’t even know whether she is queer, to do that is just outrageous.

A: Why on earth would it be rude to bring a friend to a wedding? In what way is bringing a guest when an invitation specifies that one can bring a guest making someone else’s wedding “about you”? I agree that it would be rude, inconvenient, and financially burdensome to bring a guest when an invitation doesn’t specify a plus one, but I’m not at all clear on why you think this is so outrageous.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I am gobsmacked by the follow-up. Is there some kind of questionnaire used to determine if a plus-one is good enough? I've brought friends as "dates" to a number of weddings, and thought nothing of it, and I sure would rather a guest at my wedding have someone they were comfortable with than that they be alone and lonesome. Good grief.

I don't understand the Prudie structure. Where do the followups come from?

Also, I've brought friends as plus ones before.

People care if you bring a friend to a wedding? A Plus One invite doesn't specify what your relationship to your guest has to be. Making a big deal out of this seems like it would take attention away from the couple getting married, so I think the Don't Bring Friends crowd need to relax on this non-issue.

A wedding is not about you. It is about a couple.

About *the* couple? Maybe. But certainly not only about couples. Where do people get this shit?

I have no idea where "wedding etiquette" like that comes from. It baffles. Also, re: the cost of guests, Spouse and I were scrambling to invite as many people as we could think of because our venue/caterer had a minimum head count that we weren't able to hit. We were paying for non-existent people anyways!

Miss Manners teaches people not to invite complete strangers to their wedding; if they're unknown to the hosts or either member of the couple getting married, why would they even want to go? But it's possible a guest has an SO it would be wrong to exclude whom the hosts/couple don't yet know well. So her rule has been to find out the names of people you're trying to invite and invite them directly. She does not believe in "and guest."

But the fact remains that "and guest" does exist. If you invite people+1, you take whatever +1 they bring along. You can't tell people they can bring along an additional guest whose name or mere existence you haven't bothered to learn or confirm and then audit that guest's suitability. Can't have it both ways.

We were going to have a 'no kids' wedding (ended up not having the wedding -- still married, but didn't do anything ceremony or party-shaped because of family drama), so it was "any plus one who is 21 or over." Only one person complained horribly about it. the one person flipped out about how 'weddings are about family' and I was like 'no, actually my wedding is about me and I don't want kids there,' but so long as the other person was an adult, I don't GAF what your relationship is. Anyone who writes +1 is opening themselves up to that and presumably they're intelligent enough to mean it which is why I was very specific about noting that children and teens were not welcome. Being specific is okay, but this invitation WASN'T, so bring your friend!

Oops I should have read your comment before I made my own. :D

What I have seen called out as rude is asking for a plus-one if you aren't seriously involved with someone. Miss Manners' old answer for "I'd like to bring a guest" was "I didn't know you were engaged, we can tell everyone at the wedding." Now that she has recognized that serious couples are treated as social units, that would be something like "I didn't know you were seeing someone seriously. What's their name, so we can put it on the invitation?"

Yes, the host can reasonably decide that they will invite specific people, and those people's partners, but not "plus any one person you feel like bringing along, regardless of relationship or how close you are." But none of that applies here, because that's about when it's polite for a guest to ask to add someone to the invitation—in this case, the hosts have said "bring whoever you like," and it's unreasonable for third parties to try to override that.

I nearly posted this one here myself, just because I was so gobsmacked by that reader response.

We had a poly wedding and many of our friends are poly, so invites with a +1 wouldn’t have worked well AND could balloon our guest list unmanageably. So, we found out in advance who the serious partners were of the people we wanted to invite and explicitly named them on the invitations and made it clear to people when they rsvp’d that we needed to know in advance if they wanted to bring anyone different/additional.

If you say +1 or + guest(s) with no other stipulations then you don’t get to police the relationship between the person you’ve invited and any guest they choose to bring.

This is one of the reasons Miss Manners hates plus ones. Her advice is "if you want your single guests to be able to bring someone, reach out to them and find out whom they'd like to bring. Then invite them by name."

Very often, people are invited to weddings who won't know anyone there other than the people getting married, and it's nice to let them bring someone else along to talk to, since the people getting married will have about 0.3 seconds to spend with each individual guest. The LW not being close enough to the couple for them to know the LW's orientation suggests the LW is not likely to be close to the extended family or close friends either. Since they received a blanket +1 invitation, of course they should bring along anyone who would make a good companion.

YES THIS x1000.

It is one thing to come with your boyfriend or girlfriend, but another to impose on them a random friend they have not invited and now have to pay for.

See, I disagree - they have invited the guest, by saying "AND GUEST". It's rright there on the invitation.

Also, large social gatherings like weddings are sheer fucking *hell* for people with social anxiety and other mental health issues. Being able, as a single person, to take my own choice of guest could easily make the difference between whether or not I'd attend a wedding.

Not that wedding hosts are obligated to cater to that! But there *is* a good reason to take a guest to a wedding even if they don't know the couple.

Dear Prudence: Plus one

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