addressing the envelopes

OK, so it's actually a lot more complicated than (not my) boyfriend to the left would have you believe!

We are getting close to really taking action with our invitations. Enough planning, plotting, discussing and designing, we're ready to print these mothers!

While we're cooking with that, I want our calligrapher to get started on the envelopes. We decided to hire Fran Heider at Little Flower Calligraphy, who I discovered from Mrs. Swan! We're even using the same font as Mrs. Swan, "social butterfly."

I have to get our addresses all ready for Fran, and a whole host of questions have come up, most of which, from my perspective, require a good balance of etiquette, patience and feminism*.

What? Oh, yes. See, one little nagging issue is the "Mr. & Mrs. His-first-name His-last-name." I plan to take Garth's last name, but that's it! I am still Julia. I'll just be Julia His-last-name. I'm me! I am not becoming Garth.

The reason why this bothers me is that when names are phrased in that manner, it suggests:

Individual Man with His Own Identity + Wife.




Uh-uh! I will be more than "wife," and all the wives I know are more than "wife."








However, I am putting these feelings aside for the most part. For folks who are my parents age, I am going easily with "Mr. & Mrs." Heck, my mom prefers that, and she is a wicked feminist.

It turns out, most of our married friends do not share the same last name. I did some checking, and discovered that you address married people with two last names in this manner:

Mr. Donald Draper & Ms. Betty Friedan

Though I suppose you would call her "Elizabeth," not "Betty," and lose the ampersand. If you want to be really correct, you write:

Mr. Donald Draper
Ms. Elizabeth Friedan

Also correct is to list the names in alphabetical order, as above.

In our case, we're listing couples in the order that we most like each member of the couple:

Mr. Bradley Pitt & Ms. Angelina Jolie

Just kidding. We're listing them in the order of who we were friends with first. I have a girlfriend whose boyfriend's last name falls before hers in the alphabet, but I have never even met him. I am certainly not putting his name first.

I also found out that if one member of the couple is a doctor, you list that person's name first, even if (gasp!) it is the woman:

Dr. Jill Biden & The Hon. Joseph Biden

Ok, kidding again -- a senator would probably come first. But I couldn't think of another famous couple where the wife was a doctor and the husband was not. Hopefully, you get the point.

Other points:

The if a child is invited, and lives at home, the name goes on the next line after the parents' (this was an issue for me because I am inviting my 19 year-old cousin, who for all intents and purposes lives at home).

What to do about middle initials? I have generally read that you either use the middle name or leave it out together. No initials.

What tricky envelope addressing issues have come up for you?

*At the risk of calling out an entire paper company, I would avoid consulting Crane's for etiquette advice. They are in the dark ages, man. If a husband and wife are both doctors, they still have the woman using her "social title," which is "Mrs." To hell with that!

Making cuts

I already know that this is the kind of post that will get folks heated in the comments. However, I would like to discuss what has been happening with one of my guests over the past couple of days, culminating today in my more or less dis-inviting her from the wedding. (This dis-invitation is somewhat along the lines of movies where the employee says, "I QUIT!" and the boss says, "No, you're fired!" Kind of like that, only without comic relief.)

I'll give it to you straight: I have been sweating bullets over the guest list for the past couple of months. I've been given a lot of grief from various family members, and I have created grief for myself. I got it to a place where we could all be content, and we went about sending out the save-the-dates.

Our M.O. for guests was the following:
1) spouses of guests invited, of course
2) serious S.O.s invited (fiances, or living together)

Most of the single people coming to the wedding are either not traveling to come to it, or they know lots of people who will be attending. No single people on the guest list were invited knowing no other guests.

A former co-worker who is about my parents' age signed our wedding website guest book last week, and said that she was going to bring her sister-in-law as her guest.

I wrote her back and gently explained that due to financial constraints, we were asking people to attend as would be addressed on the envelope (i.e., all "plus-ones" would receive an invitation, but no one was to bring a random guest). I said I had really struggled with the guest list, and was left only with this option. I reminded her that she would know four other people at the wedding, and thanked her for her understanding. I really did try to be cheerful in my reply, transparent in my reasoning, and firm in my resolve.

I won't give you the nitty gritty of every back and forth, but this unleashed a torrent of emails from this guest, challenging me on every level for my decision. Irritatingly, she also assured me that she was not taking "this snub personally," although she clearly was, and kept signing her emails "warmly." The long and short of it was that she wanted to bring her sister-in-law as a buddy mainly for the trip, which was long for her.

Well, as much as I would like to pay my caterer $150 for her to have a subway buddy, I can't afford that.

The last email she sent me was on Friday, wherein she began, "After all we have been through together...." and concluded by letting me know in an exceptionally passive-aggressive way how disappointed she was in me.

I thought about my reply for two days so that I wouldn't write back in the heat of the moment. This afternoon, I wrote the following:

With all that we have been through, I invited you to my wedding.

I explained to you the reasons for how the guest list has been developed, and it is what it is, I regret that it's not to your liking.

The card you received was not the invitation, those have yet to be sent. It was just a save-the-date.

I don't know what else to say except that I have a million things on my plate right now, the guest list is incredibly complicated, and I don't want to to be asked again to justify our decisions. I was hoping to be able to share this with you, I'm sorry we couldn't work it out.

I then emailed the whole exchange to my mom, who quickly called me at work to try to talk me off the ledge. I appreciated that; my mom was exceptionally calm, reasonable, and understanding. She really chose her words to me carefully.

Ultimately, I know there are a lot of people out there who will avoid conflict at any cost. I am a person who will avoid feeling bullied at any cost, and I was feeling bullied here, big time. This is a sensitive subject for me, because I just went through a painful experience with graduate school where I also felt bullied, and I just feel fierce right now (and I don't mean that in the Tyra way.)

I am not giving you the entire story because I know all the he-said-she-said can be difficult to follow and not interesting to anyone outside those involved.

I realize that I was tough, that many people will think I should have just relented. I realize I am setting myself up for judgment here, and that's fine. Maybe I did the right thing, maybe I did the wrong thing, but it is done.

The reason I share this story is that besides all the kooky "bride brain" and floral meltdowns we may have, there are ugly parts of wedding planning, too. I bet a lot of you have had ugliness (hopefully, many of you haven't). For those of you who have, even if your story is much different than mine, I wanted to share this with you. I just wanted to say, here is the crappy thing that happened here. Here are the grey areas, the bad behavior, the misccommunication. For what it's worth.

invitation pre-planning

One DIY project we're doing that I am super excited about is our invitations. G. works as an editor at an independent poetry press in Brooklyn, and one of the great things about that experience is that he learned how to do letterpress.

The "paper" parts of our wedding are definitely his thing. He designed our STDs, with just a little input from me. We chose the paper and the ink colors together, and he took care of the rest. We went one Sunday to the press and letterpressed those babies ourselves. It took about five hours to make about 100 (we have lots of extras). That really brought home for me how much work is involved in letterpress. Oh -- that's why it's so expensive!

G. is in grad school (in addition to working full-time) so we really want to get these invitations done for the most part before labor day. He's not going to have much time to ruminate on projects once classes get cooking.

I am psyched about how psyched he is for this project. We both really had a good time making the STDs and it energized us for the invitations. For my part, it made me realize that we need to really think carefully about how much of the suite we want to letterpress, and what could be done on the ole inkjet. (A letterpress map to the wedding would look great, but.....)

I know that G. wants the suite to be a little weird, totally beautiful, and something that people will keep. (I know most brides want the invitation to be something people keep, but I am impressed that he, as the groom, does. To be honest, and I kind of hate to admit this, but the only wedding invitations we've ever kept are the ones we put in our scrapbook of romance. Isn't that terrible? Argh. Sorry.)

Anyhow, I can't wait to see what he comes up with. I am especially curious because he doesn't read wedding blogs and probably isn't as well-versed as I am about what's trendy in wedding invitation design. I think that he'll come up with something totally organically, which is awesome. Also, G. has a hell of an imagination so I expect they will be a little offbeat, too.

Of course, in a way we're two peas in a pod in that respect, because I have asked him repeatedly how we can work a beautiful image of a jellyfish into our design. Why? Why not!