Miss Manners: Addressing mail

[cereta]

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Almost all of the examples I now see on how to address invitations are totally different from what I was taught in school many years ago. Have the rules changed, or are young people these days making up their own etiquette rules?

I was taught that for a married couple, the correct address would be " Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Jones" and "Mr. and Mrs. Patrick White," not "Mr. Ben and Mrs. Elizabeth Jones" and "Mr. Patrick and Mrs. Taylor White." I was also taught that the male's name came first on the envelope.

Please set the record straight before too many young brides commit a faux pas and look uneducated.

GENTLE READER: Yes, some rules have legitimately changed, and yes, unauthorized people who make up their own rules are often unintentionally offensive. But come to think of it, the old standard that you cite also sends some people into a tizzy.

Miss Manners wishes everyone would just calm down.

There are couples who use the Mr. and Mrs. form you learned (the only one in which the gentleman's title comes first) and they should be so addressed. But there are others who prefer to be addressed more as individuals for various reasons, some of which are eminently sensible, although society used not to recognize them.

All that takes now is one extra line on the envelope:

Dr. Angelina Breakfront

Mr. Rock Moonley

or:

Mr. Oliver Trenchant

Mr. Liam Lotherington

or:

Ms. Norina Hartfort

Mr. Rufus Hartfort

Is that too much effort to ask?

Comments

[redbird]

The odd thing is that this is still coming up in 2017, with that sort of fake-helpful phrasing from the letter writer. I know Miss Manners has addressed it before, including noting that even in the days when more people were happy to be addressed as "Mr. and Mrs. John Doe," the multiple-line form was appropriate for households other than married couples, including such utterly respectable situations as a widow living with her daughter. They might have shared a surname, but that sort of old-fashioned style didn't call for "Mrs. Rock and Miss Ruby Star."

[amadi]

To this day, my widowed mother and I, who share a home, continue to get holiday cards and event invitations addressed to "Mrs. Firstname Lastname & (Almost always misspelled version of Amadi's birth first name)" so I'm 43 years old and I'm an afterthought who doesn't even merit a last name.

And then there's my father's family, who make it worse with "Mrs. Deadfather Lastname & (Misspelled version of Amadi's birthname)."