agonyaunt | (no subject)

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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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.