Dear Prudence,
Three times in the past year, my boyfriend and I have been verbally invited to weddings but never received formal invitations. In one instance we were told the verbal invite was the save-the-date, so we made travel arrangements to their international destination wedding location. We only realized we weren’t invited after we saw the formal invitation posted on another friend’s fridge. I’m not sure how to handle this. I understand that weddings are expensive, and I would not be insulted if we had never been invited; however, telling us to book our flights and then failing to actually invite us is expensive on our end, too! I also feel like it creates a weird tension between us and the newlyweds when we see them after the invitations go out.
We recently went out of town with a couple who verbally invited us, and we couldn’t have a casual conversation about their upcoming wedding without seeing them tense up. At this point, we knew the wedding was only two weeks away, so we had long assumed we were no longer invited. My boyfriend says I need to let it go because they probably didn’t mean to do anything rude, but I’m having a hard time. How do I reset? Is there a way to kindly point out that this impacts us, too?
—RSVP