You’re Not Invited to my Wedding, and You Shouldn’t Care

This is the one. The straw that broke the camels back. I wrote this in December of 2004 and the powers that were refused to pulish this artice, instead publishing an article about day-trading. I suppose that it would also be prudent to tell you that the unfunny right-winger shagging the editor was (and is) strongly anti-marriage. I suppose she's really strongly influenced by show such as Sex and the City, glamourizing eternal bachelor/bachelorette-hood (don't they all get married in the end?), and sitcoms that have no jokes other than husbands and wives taking pot shots at each other. This outlook on life was probably passed on to the ed. whilst shagging in the print office. Rereading the article now, I actually did invite my stepsister to my wedding (I'm so soft). She's not coming. What a surprise.

So I’m getting married this summer. We’ve been together for over five years, and everything in our relationship is perfect. I’m really excited to get married this summer; it’s just the guests I’m not sure of. To understand this situation fully, I suppose you’ll need some background:

My fiancée and I are from Winnipeg (no, neither of us ever lived on a farm, owned a mustang, or thought mullets were fashionable), and moved out here to go to school. We originally planned to have a large wedding at home in the ‘Peg, and invite all of our family, friends, and everyone else we’ve ever met. The wedding plans had been going smoothly since March (when I proposed), until about July. In July we had an engagement party in Winnipeg, and we came to a startling conclusion: one night goes by really damn fast! Considering all of the time, money, and planning we put into it, we didn’t get much in return. We invited about 220 people, and about 150 showed up. Pretty much, we spent one half of the night greeting everybody, and the second half of it saying goodbye. Did anybody care that the tablecloths looked really nice? No. Did anyone notice that all of the drink pitchers were matching? Unlikely. All I remember of the evening (apart from the greeting and send-offs) is my five-foot tall aunt Natalia, a heavyset Portuguese woman, bustling up to my fiancée to tell her “I don’ like thees food! Too healthy!”

After the party, my fiancée, Star (and no, her parents were not hippies, stop asking), and I decided that it was ridiculous to plan an even bigger event that would just wear us out completely. I don’t want to remember my wedding as “that night when I was so glad it was over”. Why should I put on a big show for hundreds of (apparently ungrateful – you got a free meal Auntie Natalia, why are you complaining?) people when they don’t really want to be there in the first place? So we decided to have a small wedding, fifty people, outside of Winnipeg to keep the numbers small.

Now to the point of this article: why do people care if they’re not invited to my wedding? I’m poor; I can’t afford to have a bunch of people there. To give you an idea of my poverty, we spent all of first year eating nothing but cereal and sandwiches every meal. There’s no way in hell I can invite all of these people to my wedding, and they know it! Here’s how the revised wedding is going down: it’s going to be in Elora, Ontario (30 minutes away from Guelph), we’re camping (yes, silk dupioni wedding dress in a tent) on Star’s grandmother’s property, and the bed and breakfast we’re having the wedding at can only accommodate a maximum of 52 people. So, Auntie Natalia, you are related to me through my stepmother, your son is getting married the next week (copycat), you’ve never camped in your life, and considering the fact that you thought barbequed pork skewers were too healthy, I can tell you right now you’re going to have a shitty time sleeping on the ground and walking from place to place. Yet, when I try and explain this to people, they get really pissed off! Nobody cares that they can’t come to the wedding, they only care that they’re not invited. They give you support until they find out they haven’t made the cut, then they freak out as if you’ve killed one of their children.

Here’s how an actual conversation between Star and her aunt went:

Aunt: “Hi, I heard you guys want to have a small wedding, and I think it’s a great idea! My ex-husband and I had a small wedding, and it was really a lot less stress than a big event. I have lots of ideas for you guys for keeping it small. Have you decided on a list of people?”

Star: “Well, the place is pretty small, and both Stephen and I have really large extended families, so we really can’t invite everyone that we wanted to. Stephen isn’t inviting any of his extended family at all, not even his stepbrother and stepsister, and everyone’s giving him a hard time.”

Aunt: “Oh, that’s really not fair. I’m sure they just need time to cool down, and then they’ll realize that it doesn’t really matter. It’s a good idea to have it in Elora because people will be less likely to fly there, and won’t be upset at not coming.”

Star: “That’s what I was hoping, in fact, with all the aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents, I don’t think I can invite the cousins.”

Aunt: “WHAT? You have to invite the cousins! How could you even think of excluding them? Have a potluck wedding in Winnipeg! Get a new location! I know my girls, and there will be a lot of hurt feelings! Even if you don’t invite them, I’m going to bring one of them with me anyways!”

Currently, I’m awaiting a phone call from my stepsister. I don’t talk to her much, and I don’t plan on inviting her to my wedding. She’ll be going to her cousin’s wedding the next week, and considering she’s flying in to Winnipeg from Calgary for that, I don’t think she’ll be too keen on making a trip to Toronto the week before. I haven’t told her that she’s not invited to my wedding yet, in fact I haven’t told anyone who isn’t coming, only those who are. I find it a lot easier to say “come to my wedding” in a random, unprovoked phone call, rather than calling someone up to say “you’re not invited to my wedding. So, how are things?” I figure I’ll just send them notices in the mail that we got married, and they’ll figure the rest out themselves. Yet I’m awaiting this impending battle with my stepsister, especially after the meltdown my overly dramatic stepmother had when she found out her daughter was not to be attending. But I shall rest… and wait… preparing my arsenal of “Star isn’t inviting her cousins”, “you got married in Cuba to keep your wedding small”, and “you’re going to your cousin’s wedding the next week anyways”.

I don’t care if you don’t invite me to your wedding. Most wedding attendees I have talked to of late have only gone to the wedding in the first place with the intention of getting drunk on free booze and trying to score with one of the bridesmaids. Considering my wedding will neither have booze nor eligible bachelorettes, nobody should really be that sad about not being in attendance. If I wanted to pay for my friends booze and … needs, I would take them to a bar and call them an escort, not invite them to my wedding so that they can hit on Star’s unimpressed friends. I don’t need to spend the evening running around buying bottled water because my step grandmother doesn’t want to drink from the tap (yes, this actually happened in July). If I’m not invited, I’ll just assume either: you can’t afford to invite me, your wedding is in some remote location, or you don’t want to invite me.

All of which are fine with me.