When someone asks me “Steve, why do you hate people,” I generally reply by saying “honestly, I don’t.” But now I can add “but if I did, this woman would be why, the fucking ungrateful cow.”
She invited a bunch of people to her wedding. Those people brought gifts. She didn’t like what one guest brought and chose to make that fact known by doing…this.
Later, you get a text from the bride — “I want to thank you for coming to the wedding Friday,” it begins.
“I’m not sure if it’s the first wedding you have been to, but for your next wedding … people give envelopes. I lost out on $200 covering you and your dates plate . … and got fluffy whip and sour patch kids in return. Just a heads-up for the future.”
Here’s a taste of the email exchange, grammatical errors and all:
Gift-givers: “… to ask for a receipt is unfathomable. In fact it was incredibly disrespectful. It was the rudest gesture I have encountered, or even heard of.”
Newlyweds: “Weddings are to make money for your future … not to pay for peoples meals. Do more research. People haven’t gave gifts since like 50 years ago! You ate steak, chicken, booze, and a beautiful venue.”
Gift-givers: “It’s obvious you have the etiquette of a twig, I couldn’t care less of what you think about the gift you received, “normal” people would welcome anything given, you wanna have a party, you pay for it, DON’T expect me to.”
Newlyweds: “You should have been cut from the list … I knew we were gunna get a bag of peanuts. I was right.”
I’ve been to a number of weddings, and all of them, unless they were marriages of convenience and I didn’t know it, weren’t so much about making bank for the future as they were about celebrating how much better that future was going to be now that you were spending the rest of it with the one you love. The fact that you had a room full of people willing to celebrate your moment with you is far more important than what those people left behind when they went home.
I once attended a wedding at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I don’t know how much it costs to have your wedding there, but you have to pay for security and the package came with its own event planner, so I’m betting it ain’t cheap. but not for a moment did I worry about how the happy couple would pay for it. Why? Because that wasn’t my problem. My job was to dress up in clothes I hate, eat yummy food, talk to people I don’t know, dance around a little, hug some girls and the occasional dude and take advantage of the open bar. Where I do all of these things is the couple’s decision, not that of anybody they chose to invite. You, as the getting married ones, make those decisions ahead of time and should be well aware of what the costs are. If they’re so high that you need to rely on gifts to cover them, it’s time to scale shit back a tad.
And it’s not like you’re the first person to ever get a crappy gift. It’s happened to all of us. Thing is that most of us are levels enough above subhuman cuntwagon to be cool about it and move on. I hope you can figure that out before wedding number two, or you won’t have to worry about cutting anybody from the guest list.
