There are so many formalities involved with wedding planning, and when you deviate from the standard path, things start to get a little messy.
As a reminder, my brother is getting married a short six weeks after I am, which, while it provides its own set of hurdles, has been a relatively smooth process.
My brother called me the other day to ask when he could send his save-the-dates. He didn’t know when I was sending mine.
“I’m not sending save-the-dates,” I told him.
And before this conversation, I had not thought about the implication of one sibling sending save-the-dates and the other not.
Mikey and I decided very early on we weren’t going to do save-the-dates. It’s an added expense for a pre-invitation. When my mother got married, she told me, they weren’t even a thing. That alone was enough to sell me on the idea that I could get by without them.
So, when we were setting budgets and talking about necessities, we just thought that regular invitations would suffice. I’m not saying I regret this decision; I’m just saying I probably wouldn’t make this decision again if I could go back.
But we can’t go back. We can only go forward.
Don’t get me wrong, I get why people send them. It’s a helpful reminder that someone is invited to the wedding and allows a lot of time for people to plan. It’s just when you have to plan a wedding, and one half of the couple lives on the salary of a journalist, you really need to find ways to cut corners. So, a pre-invitation seemed silly when we were just going to send regular invites.
The closer we get to the wedding, however, I noticed how much of a misstep this might have been. Suddenly, I have people wondering if they aren’t invited, and I have people who will eventually get a save-the-date from my brother and not from me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and there is not much I can do. I’m already late on ordering invitations, and I could send them out earlier, but then I risk people forgetting.
It’s a fine line that I’m walking between too early and too late, and perhaps if I thought to send save-the-dates, I wouldn’t be in this predicament.
