No Response Rant

Being a bridesmaid or maid of honor is certainly a big job. Even if the bride doesn't want much help, there are still dresses and shoes to buy, parties to plan, hotel rooms and beauty treatments to pay for. I get it, you've got a lot on your plate.

Still, that doesn't mean it's okay to skip the normal guest stuff. Seriously, I realize that the bride knows you're planning to attend the wedding, but you still need to send in that little card (or respond online if applicable). For starters, often the person you are responding to isn't the bride but her parents, and they may not really know who you are or be in contact with you. Secondly, those little response cards are a tool for plotting the seating chart and sometimes planning the meal (our caterer for this wedding needs menu selections by the week before, for example). If you aren't in that pile you can cause a lot of confusion. It's also bad enough that some guests will invariably need to be called for their responses but for a member of the bridal party to create all that extra work is just plain rude!

Same goes for the shower, bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, day-after brunch, or any other parties you are invited to. Unless you are the person who is receiving responses (obviously, you know if you are attending or not) you should make sure to respond, even if you are helping to plan the party.

We ran into this problem with my sister's bridal shower. As maid of honor, I was the main point person on it with a lot of help from the mother of the bride (secretly, of course, for etiquette's sake) and a little help from a bridesmaid and two friends. The other three bridesmaids not only didn't show up but only one bothered to let me know she couldn't make it! Yup, true story. My poor sister had two members of the bridal party (including me), two friends of hers, and a whole bunch of her mother's friends attending her shower. Honestly, it was a lovely shower but I felt really bad that her friends were so lame about coming and so few let us know either way that we had to plan the party for anywhere from 15-40 guests! Do you know how hard that is?

If we hadn't been graciously offered the home of a family friend to hold it in it would have been a disaster.

Now I'm sitting here, five days after the RSVP date for her bachelorette party with only one response. Since I'm hiring a limo I really need a head count right away and it's making me very angry that I have to call everyone AGAIN!

So, here's a rule that needs to be lived by, when you get an invitation in the mail, check your calendar and respond immediately. That way you won't forget and you'll be making the lives of many people far easier. Oh, and don't forget to mark the date in your calendar while you're at it!