RSVP No Longer Has Meaning

I write this post and genuinely wonder if other wedding and party planners have experienced the same thing or whether my social circle consists of ill mannered or at best forgetful social inepts.

I have this week witnessed the death of the RSVP, that traditional abbreviation which demands social etiquette when receiving party or event invitations - for those of you who don't know (which apparently includes the majority of my wedding guests) this means 'Reply S'il Vous Plait', or 'Reply Please'.

The RSVP is so deeply ingrained in wedding tradition that when you order invitations it is ALWAYS already there, in its little place at the end of the wedding details, and all you need to do is insert your reply details and wait for the flood of responses which enable you to move on to the next step in your event plan - ie finalising table plans, the most potentially explosive (and fun) part of the organising! It also allows you to finally meet with your venue and pinpoint costs, menus etc. So those four letters are pretty damned important really, aren't they?

Lovely fiance and I are having a pretty small wedding, and we have space for fifty for the sit-down wedding breakfast. We therefore have an A-List of fifty potential guests, who have all received invitations, and a B-List, the contents of which is shrouded in secrecy, and from which a guest will be selected to receive one of the coveted all-day invitations in the event that a negative RSVP is received from an A-Lister. It all sounds very complicated, doesn't it? But basically it means we need to know pretty sharpish if anyone from the A-List can't attend because we need to get another invite out to fill that place. Anyone left on the B-List once the fifty places are filled will get the consolation prize that is the Evening Invitation. As a result we can't send out any Evening Invitations until the all-day places are filled.

Our RSVP details gave the guests a variety of options for replying s'il vous plait. They had our home address, home phone number or (how out there we are technically) lovely fiance's e-mail address. I expected (how wrong I was) to receive by return of post a small pile of cards stating the intentions of my older A-List guests, plus a couple of phone calls or emails from the more hip and technically adept crowd. I sent the invitations out 3 weeks ago now and so far we have received two emails and two cards. The number of guests covered by this is eleven.

Taking stock, lovely fiance and I were able to add family who we knew would be attending to the list, but we are still left with more than ten people who might or might not be coming, and whom we don't see often enough to pre-empt. One of these is an old friend of lovely fiance, who we invited along with his wife and two children (to add to the eleven other kids on the list, more of that later as the horror of having so many gradually dawns on me). When lovely fiance followed up our invitation (why should we have to? why? why?) with a telephone call, he said he wasn't sure yet if the kids are coming. Er, excuse me? Lovely fiance then pointed out that we need to know ASAP because the kids non-attendance would free up two more places for other people. It still took him another two days to inform us that yes they are coming after all.

What strikes me about this is that he obviously thought it would be perfectly fine to just turn up on the wedding day without the kids, without having the courtesy to let us know. At sixty quid a head (halved for the kids) I would have been absolutely savage at such an occurrence. Am I missing the point here or are people just incredibly rude?

To check out whether lovely fiance and I just have a lot of ignorant friends or if this is a more universal phenomenon, we ask lovely fiance's recently married younger sister, whose wedding was a showcase that all inferior brides-to-be, such as myself, can only aspire to. Weddings as fabulous as hers just do not happen to people like me. She says our situation is not out of the ordinary. She only managed to circumvent the RSVP issue herself because she learned from her own best friend, who apparently had to ring up her entire guest list after having sent out her expensive invitations to confirm numbers. What a waste of time and money! Lovely fiance's sister received a stack of lovely RSVP cards through the post - and why? Because she had the foresight to enclose a stamped addressed envelope with each invitation. I am outraged at the decline of social wedding etiquette and basic good manners. But at least I now have my guest list finalised.

We live and learn.