agonyaunt | (no subject)

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DEAR ABBY: One of my close friends' 37-year-old daughter was recently married. One hundred and fifty people were invited to her wedding, and I was not one of them. I sent a gift to the bride and groom before the wedding. We have been neighbors and close friends of her parents for 25 years. Needless to say, I am hurt.

My friend keeps sharing all the particulars and photos with me, which I gush over, but she doesn't realize my heart is broken. I thought we were the best of friends. She has other close friends, and I know them too. They were all at the wedding. I am sad and clueless about why I was snubbed, and I can't get over it. Help! -- HURTING INSIDE

DEAR HURTING: It was not your friend's wedding you were eliminated from but her daughter's. If there were 150 guests, half may have come from the groom's side -- friends, relatives, etc. Also, the happy couple may have wanted to include their own contemporaries. Level with your neighbor about how you feel and ask why you were left off the guest list. You may not have been snubbed at all.

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Or don't level with your friend, just get over yourself and realize that you are under no circumstances entitled to an invite to a person's wedding just because you happen to be buddies with her mother.

This whole letter reads like she thinks the mom was legit in charge of the guest list, for fuck's sake.

I think "entitled" is kind of the wrong word, here. Look, I'm not "entitled" to have my spouse get me a birthday present, but I've still been hurt when he doesn't (he's not good at presents). I think the LW is overreacting, but there are lots of things we're not "entitled" to that we can be hurt or bothered by not getting.

Agreed. She's hurt and feeling left out since her friend's other friends were invited by the daughter, presumably, and she didn't make the cut. It doesn't help that she still makes the cut for her friend to tell every little detail to, which is pretty damned clueless. I agree with the advice, though I think that's really hard to ask. I want to give LW a hug.

This exactly. Even without cluelessness and with best intentions on the mom's side, this would be a difficult situation. People do get very petty and entitled about weddings and guest lists, but I don't think that's the case here at all. It doesn't seem like it's about the invitation, it's the possibility that a friendship she viewed as very close isn't considered that by the other side - an actual realistic possibility. She's not saying her friend behaved badly, but that she's sad about the possible implications.

I read this and thought “Her friend didn't invite her to her friend's wedding and she's hurt, that seems perfectly reasonable, most people expect to get invited if their close friend is getting married...”

and then I realised it was the DAUGHTER'S wedding and went “Wait, WHAT? Who expects to get invited to their friend's CHILDREN'S weddings?”

Honestly? Some people. I'm not saying LW was right, here, but it is very common to invite a few people who are more friends of the parents than the couple being married. It's less common now that more couples are doing most of the wedding work and payment themselves, but we had a tiny wedding and still invited a couple of people who were more friends of my in-laws than my then fiance.

The LW says they've been neighbors and close friends for 25 years. Unless the bride is in her 40's, the LW has likely spent time with her and even watched her grow up. I think she's making a mountain out of a molehill, but I can understand her maybe a moment's (a moment's) hurt.

I agree with you⁠—I understand why the LW feels hurt. ⁠My wife and I had loads of people at our wedding closer to our parents than to us.

Frankly, I think the bride's mother is being pretty tactless to share so much about the wedding when she knows the LW wasn't invited. Guest lists have limits, and the LW should understand that⁠, but she doesn't need her exclusion rubbed in her face. It's hard to get over something when one gets constant reminders.

Maybe the bride's mother is trying to include the LW as much as she can? Or maybe she's clueless. Who knows.

I see your point, but... I grew up with my parents' friends. There are some I might have invited to my prospective wedding and some I REALLY WOULD NOT HAVE. I think pushing to find out why one wasn't invited to an event risks working too well and uncovering too much truth.

Oh, believe me, I'm not suggesting the LW push on or obsess over the issue. I was just addressing the issue of people being invited to a wedding who are more the parents' friends than the couple's.

There are friends of my parents who would be justifiably hurt if I did not invite them to my wedding (though none, I think, so gauche as to complain to an advice columnist)—but those are friends who also have a relationship with me, as unofficial auntie/uncle/mentor/responsible adult. They’re the ones who babysat me, or picked up birthday presents for me on business trips abroad, or took me out to dinner to congratulate me on my first job, or let me crash in their guest room on vacation road trips when I was a broke student. If they were sad about missing my wedding, it would be in the context of having watched me pass through many other life milestones and regretting not being there to witness this one as well. The absense of any of that in this letter—of any hint of how LW relates to the bride as anything other than an extension of her parents—is weird to me.

This is what I was flailing towards in my reply, and you've stated it clearly.

I think it would be different if other close friends weren't invited - I've seen people get offended over that, and I think it's ridiculous. But guest lists are a necessary but messy human situation where relationships have to be quantified in some way. It's possible that she really wasn't invited because her friend doesn't think of them as close in the same way she does. That seems like a legitimate thing to be sad about.

My parents are close friends with their neighbours and have been for thirty years, and they were indeed invited to the neighbours' daughter's wedding. (Well, both of them; the first one didn't work out.) I would probably consider inviting the neighbours to my wedding, too, if I ever had one. It's not that odd.

But _expecting it_, yeah, that's odd. :)

We invited a few of our parents' friends to our wedding, and had under 50 people total. But they were people we also personally knew and liked. The LW is really emphasizing her friendship with the mother of the bride, and leaving out whether she has any relationship to speak of with the bride herself.

I am ... not getting the hurt over someone LW has presumably not spoken to in probably over 10 years not inviting her to their wedding. At all.

My fiancee and I are intermittently planning our wedding, and I'm holding firm on "no one who hasn't reached out to contact one of us in the last year is guaranteed an invitation". It has seriously cuts down on the guest list, especially in the category of "friends of parents and distant relatives".

someone LW has presumably not spoken to in probably over 10 years

I don't know that you can assume that. My brother is 35 and in frequent contact with many of our mother's friends who were our neighbors when we were growing up; they have kids close to his age and he hangs out in the same social circles as they do. I'm 41 and I chat with those same friends once a year at my mom's birthday party. There's really no way to be sure what kind of relationship the LW has with her friend's daughter. I do think that if they were close the LW would have mentioned that, but there's a pretty wide range of ways to be not-close.

Good luck with the wedding planning! The guest list is often the hardest part.

This is a hard one, because I could easily see myself in LW's shoes - in that situation I would be hurt, too, to be left off the guest list. I agree with the advice that LW should share with the friend their true feelings and stop gushing, if that's causing so much hurt.

I'm also remembering the stress around my wedding - over half the guest list were my parents' invites, which included family, friends, and their coworkers(!). At least they paid for those people...after some tense discussions.

I actually have a very nice picture of spouse and me at his boss's daughter's wedding. I barely knew his boss, and neither of us knew the bride. I think it was boss's way of making up for the insane hours she made him work ;).

Level with your neighbor about how you feel and

...ask her to please stop talking to you about the wedding, because you're sad you couldn't be there. Let go of the "why" question—if you're not close enough to the bride to ask her why she didn't invite you, then that suggests you're not close enough to have been invited—and focus on having a more honest relationship with your best friend.

Edited 2019-11-09 23:37 (UTC)

I think the salient part, that negates the "but it's the daughter's wedding, not the friend's" issue is

I thought we were the best of friends. She has other close friends, and I know them too. They were all at the wedding.

She has cause to feel left out by the friend, not the daughter, if all the close friends were invited. I think it would be less confrontational and thus a little easier to let her friend know she's sad she didn't get to be there. The friend in turn can choose to give her a reason why she wasn't included with the other friends, respond with something else to let her know she is a valued friend, or ignore it. It's hard to learn someone doesn't value you as a friend as you value her, but LW needs to know if she is to protect herself from being hurt by this friend again.

I do wonder about "they were all at the wedding", though. It's easy to think that when actually only three or four were.

But yes, starting by being honest with her feelings and then making space for the friend's response, whatever it is, is clearly the way to go.

Yeah, I would cross-examine that "all" as well. But LW is talking about "close friends" not friends in general, so 3 or 4 would be plenty, right? Over that, it becomes "friends" without the "close" qualifier, but I am an introvert, so maybe extroverts would calibrate much differently. But how close can you be to 10 people, really! *she exclaims with introverted disbelief* But there's no point in devising advice if you assume that all these letter writers are unreliable narrators, so I just went with it.

Unless the friend was in charge of her daughter's guest list then she has not actually hurt the LW.

I read the LW as suggesting that her friend, not the daughter is responsible for all her friend's close friends being invited except for herself, and it's quite possible it is by her friend's request, otherwise it doesn't make sense why she thinks her friend hurt her.

This letter is a classic example of how writing in passive construction can make your writing very unclear, because if you look at her sentences grammatically, LW never indicates who did the inviting--not once. *makes comments in red all over this letter*

I think it unlikely that LW didn't consider that the daughter did the inviting without her mother's influence in any way and has information that made her rule it out, but you're right, never underestimate a person's lack of logical causal thinking. In any event, she needs to let her friend know she's hurt about not being invited and hopefully the friend will shed some light on what happened. I still think the friend is being pretty clueless telling every detail about the wedding to LW when she knows she or her daughter didn't invite her; the friend is definitely rubbing salt in the wound LW has been trying to hide, and it doesn't take much sensitivity to figure that out.

I don't think you can even say whether the friend is being clueless or insensitive or not, because we have no idea if she knows that the LW is super into weddings and is the sort of person who is completely and utterly heartbroken that she didn't get invited to a neighbor's daughter's wedding. If the friend herself is not that sort of person, then she might have no idea that the LW isn't just happy to hear about the wedding.

No, I can say that! (-: I'm sticking to my "clueless at the least", because if the friend has no idea if "the LW is super into weddings", then she's sharing every damned little detail with LW because she's conveniently there and not because she thinks LW would simply looooove hearing every detail of Wedding Madness--I call that being a user, and a total bore, and so not worth the LW being so hurt over. (My predisposition: if someone is feeling left out and utterly alone, I am their champion--I can't help it--I sucked at team sports and musical chairs as a child.) But I agree the friend has no idea how much the LW is feeling hurt, probably. Unless the friend is totally savvy and an uber-sadist having the time of her life--you never know.

It's normal to talk about big things that are going on in your life. Talking about the daughter's wedding to her friends is pretty normal. No one has to be super into weddings to do that. Clearly you can't imagine the LW being unreasonable, but I'm pretty sure that most people do not care as much as the LW does and it's not on the friend to be psychic and know that the LW is so hurt by this terrible, terrible slight and never wants to hear a word about the wedding.

LW says: My friend keeps sharing all the particulars and photos with me

I interpret that as the friend being super into weddings, even if it's just this one. And it sounds like the friend is sharing a lot. All we have is the LW's words here to interpret.

Clearly you can't imagine the LW being unreasonable

Whoah there! Don't underestimate my imagination. Them's fighting words, pardner.

Honestly, I don't care what is "normal" or what most people care about. If you do, that's fine.

The worst case scenario, to me, is that the friend never even thought they were very close - so much so that it doesn't occur to her LW may have expected to be invited. In that case it's not cruel or even insensitive, it's just sharing a happy thing with a neighbor you're very friendly with. I find that option really sad, but it is possible.

Leave it alone. If other past neighbors were there clearly they formed a closer bond with the daughter than you did. Get over it. Weddings are expensive. They can't invite every Tom, Dick and Harry that have ever lived next door.

I agree that not every person can be invited to a wedding. But I feel like there is 2 ways communication isn't being done in this scenario.

1) we don't know who did the inviting. It is possible it was the daughter. If so then she got a list from her mom and then she picked the people. Perhaps the daughter never got along with LW. Perhaps she told her mom "you get 10 people" and mom whittled down the list. But the mother at any time could have said to LW "we had such a small amount of people we could have invited. I am sorry we couldn't invite you. Would you like to see photos/hear about the wedding?" and LW could say no or yes

2) LW is an adult and can tell her friend "Ya know, I would like to talk about another subject rather than all wedding talk all the time. let's talk about ...."

LW needs to be able to say her feelings to a friend. And the Mother needs to be able to say "wow. I have been all wedding talk all the time. What do you want to talk about" BOTH parties in this relationship are adults and supposedly friends. If that is true BOTH can tell each other honestly what works for them. And if Mother wants to only talk about all wedding all the time, then friend can kindly say "let's pass on hanging out for awhile."

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