'How many weddings have you got next summer?'
It’s a question that my friends and I have been asking since we turned 25. We’d sit around in the pub and one-up each other for who had the highest number of hotel rooms, train tickets and White Company vases to pay for, glumly totting up how much we were going to spend on headbands and floral wrap dresses. Because that’s being in your mid-twenties to mid-thirties, isn’t it? Your weekends and disposal income are largely spent celebrating other people’s love. And while we all enjoyed a good whine about going to Glasgow on a Wednesday, ultimately it was quite fun.
And then Covid came, and all of the carefully planned, longed for 2020 weddings temporarily bit the dust, making summer 2021 Wedding Super Season, making all previous wedding seasons look like small fry.
When I started writing my book, The Power of Rude, which is a woman’s guide to asserting herself, I meant to include weddings as a section in a chapter about friendship. But it got so long that it had to become a chapter all by itself. Because weddings are one of the places where we need the most help when it comes to setting boundaries. Being rude, I always argue, doesn’t mean being unkind. It just means putting your own wants and needs first. And with next year shaping up to be the most wedding-laden year of all time, now is the time to embrace the power of positive rudeness.
It might sound obvious, but the first thing to remember is that a wedding invitation is not a summons. You are not obliged to attend anyone’s nuptials, and whatsmore, you don’t have to come up with an excuse for why you’re unable to attend. You can tick the ‘cannot attend’ box, and if you’re being classy about it, you can send the happy couple a handwritten note thanking them for the invitation and wishing them a wonderful day. You do not have to provide an alibi for your movements that day, alongside an RSVP that reads ‘no’.
The next step is to do a cost-benefit analysis of the invitation, where you measure how much fun you’re likely to have against money and/or annual leave it’s going to cost you to attend. A teetotal raw vegan wedding in Bognor Regis might be pretty cheap on paper, but it might come at a higher emotional cost than a more expensive trip to a good friend’s wedding where there’ll be a great band and lots of attractive single men.
When you do the cost-benefit analysis of your invitation you might also want to factor in whether you’re allowed to bring a plus one, which would halve the hotel room cost, and mean that you’ve got someone to talk to during the boring bits. I would always suggest asking for a plus one if you are invited to a wedding where you don’t know many people - whether you are in a romantic relationship or not. It seems ludicrous that the bride’s second cousin gets to bring the boyfriend no-one has met before, but her best mate will have to turn up alone because she’s single. Platonic plus-ones are a perfectly reasonable addition to any wedding party, and they might make attending more worthwhile.
Being honest about your own willingness or ability to be involved in someone else’s wedding is the number one skill that you need to survive WeddingBowl 2021.
It’s also perfectly possible that you’ll be invited to weddings you’d like to attend, but that you can’t afford to, given that in 2018 a study by insurance company Provident found that it cost an average of £1,015 to attend a wedding in the UK. Add on a hen-do and a new outfit and you’re looking at a really sizable chunk of your annual income. It’s important to start off by doing some sums. No-one wants to end up as the millennial cliche who can’t pay her rent because she’s spent her life savings on flower crown making.
If you do want to attend a wedding, but something specific - like a lack of money - is putting you off, talk to the people who invited you. Chances are the bride and groom will tell you that you really needn’t buy them a present, or might be able to put you up with a family member who lives nearby. So many of us, especially in the UK, are terrible at being transparent about our financial constraints, which creates a sort of Emperor's New Clothes effect, where we all pretend that we totally don’t mind spending £100 on a decorative plate for a couple who’ve lived together for the better part of a decade.
Wedding season inevitably brings on the thorny issue of being a bridesmaid. What starts out as a lovely confirmation of your friend’s affection for you can often turn into being an unpaid party planner slash lady’s maid. How many of us have spent afternoons at work trying to moderate discussions in a Hen-Do Whatsapp group, when we’d rather be doing literally anything else?
Again (you might be able to spot a theme here) it is absolutely fine to say no to being a bridesmaid, and you don’t need to come up with some complicated excuse for why not. It is far, far better to tell your friend that you’re beyond touched to have been asked but that you don’t feel able to do the job, than to say yes and then be a half-hearted bridesmaid.
When you’re trying to unlearn lifelong lessons about being ‘nice’, and embrace the power of rudeness, it’s important to remember that no-one is as worried about, or interested in, your behaviour as you are. Unless you are a member of the direct family, or an extremely close friend, the bride and groom are not going to have a lesser wedding day because you are not there. It might sound cruel, but there’s something intensely liberating about the realisation that no-one thinks about you even a fraction as much as you think about yourself.
Being honest about your own willingness or ability to be involved in someone else’s wedding is the number one skill that you need to survive WeddingBowl 2021. The hurt that you cause by saying a firm and kind ‘thank you but I won’t be able to’ is far less than the hurt you will inevitably cause by being a bad guest, dropping out closer to the time, or going through with it in bad grace.
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