Patent's Charm School: Weddings!

It's wedding season! In fact, we attended a wedding this very weekend!!!

Weddings can be great fun, but for a guest, they can sometimes be a little tricky. I was a bride last June, so I spent a lot of time researching the dos and don'ts of wedding etiquette. And so, in order to make sure none of us make fools out of ourselves or do the wrong thing this wedding season, here's another issue of Patent's Charm School.

So you've gotten your wedding invitation ... what do you do next?

What is this RSVP card for? Can I use it as a bookmark in my John Grisham legal thriller??

Hey -- idiot -- put the John Grisham book down and send that card in the very instant you figure out whether or not you're going. Mark your calendar and put the invitation on the refrigerator door with a magnet. RSVPs for weddings are realllllly important. DON'T BE THAT ASSHOLE that the bride has to track down and call six times to find out if you're coming or not. You are not nearly important enough for that. If the bride has done her job, she'll have given you a pre-addressed stamped envelope to mail back the RSVP card. If you can't even handle sending the reply in said envelope, then you absolutely suck at being an adult and you and Peter Parker should hang out some time. Because you're awful.

I bet you one million dollars this f**kstick doesn't RSVP for weddings in a timely fashion.

What about a gift??? I got too many pairs of socks for Christmas this year -- maybe I can re-gift them?

The traditional response to the question of how much to gift is "cover your plate" -- as in, make sure you give a generous enough gift to cover the cost of dinner for you and your date.

HOWEVER, comma,

This old-school approach to gifting is WRONG and RUDE.

Haha this dude is all "say WHATTTTT?"

First of all, how exactly do you know how much your dinner is costing the hosts? Did you ask? Are you going to call the venue and root around for the details? Explain to me how that isn't rude. Someone has invited you to a hosted event, and you think your job is to find out how much they're paying for it? OH HELLLLL NO.

I'm sure your sister would prefer it that way.

Some weddings cost $20 per person. Some weddings cost $300 per person. There is absolutely no way of knowing what "covering your plate" will look like, so don't even try. I certainly wouldn't slap a couple twenties in a card thinking "this ought to cover it," nor would I stay home from my good friend's platinum gala because I didn't think I could afford to give the $500+ my presence there was costing them.

Remember -- weddings are a hosted event. If your rich uncle says "I'm taking you out to dinner!" and names some really expensive restaurant, you blush and say "wow, thanks!" You don't pull a few hundred bucks out of the ATM ahead of time so you can go Dutch on the bill like some kind of one-upping asshole.

Your goal isn't to make your presence at your dear friend's wedding net out to zero. If that were the case, then maybe the people who are a lot of fun and dance all night with the groom's grandmother should have to give less of a gift while the guy who sits in the corner getting drunk and occasionally insulting the bridesmaids ought to give more.

This guy better have written a fat check.

Give whatever you're comfortable with. If you can't afford to give anything at all, give the happy couple a card and nothing else. Unless they're jerks, they won't have any problem with this. And if they ARE jerks, well then aren't you happy you didn't waste a bunch of money getting them a wedding gift?!?!


Okay, I bought them that set of five toasters off their registry so I'm good on the gift. But what should I wear???

This one is not that hard, really. Just follow these few simple rules:

DON'T WEAR JEANS, NUMB-NUTS

Unless it's a very casual backyard wedding and the invitation makes it clear that jeans are acceptable attire, then JEANS ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE ATTIRE. I don't care if they cost $400 and they're a nice dark wash and they make your ballsack look amazing -- don't f**king wear jeans to a wedding like some kind of dumpster person. Nut up and put on some grown-up pants.

I copied and pasted the speech bubble from the last picture so the formatting would be the same and then I couldn't bring myself to change what it said.

But seriously, Bieber is a f**king shitbird.

DON'T WEAR WHITE, DIPSHIT

Once again, unless you're specifically instructed otherwise, do not wear white to a wedding.

There are a number of reasons for this. The old-school and WRONG reason is that "you don't want anyone to confuse you with the bride." The problem with this line of reasoning is that it leads people to think that as long as your outfit doesn't look anything like a wedding dress, you're good.

NOPE.

There are two real reasons not to wear white to a wedding. The first is about respect -- the bride is the only person who gets to wear white. That's just the way it is. Deal with it. There are plenty of other colors to choose from.

The other is simply a matter of practicality. See this picture from my wedding below:

Everyone was having a SUPER good time.

How long did it take your eyes to find me in the picture? Roughly .00001 seconds even though there are like 9 billion people in this picture? EXACTLY.

Now find the bride in this picture from Kim Kardashian's wedding:

Duhh, it's the ... errrh ... the one with the veil, which is ... that one there?

IF YOU WEAR WHITE, PEOPLE WILL SCAN THE ROOM LOOKING FOR THE BRIDE AND THEY WILL KEEP FINDING YOU INSTEAD. And after the second or third time this happens, they will really start to get annoyed with you, and by the time you leave the wedding, entire families will have been whispering about how rude and terrible you are for hours.

If your outfit is white enough that the eye lists it as "white" when scanning a room, then SORRY, you'll need to wear something else.

If you're going to be a laughingstock at someone's wedding, at least make it for something awesome like pooping your pants. Or sharting. I really need to include the phrase "sharting at a wedding" in this post so that anyone who Googles that phrase will find my blog. Someone already found us by Googling "sharted during pregnancy." That's just the kind of blog I'm running here.

DON'T WEAR BRIGHT RED, ASSHOLE

Weddings guests are furniture. You are not the one everyone is there to see. So don't try to be, either by wearing bright-ass LOOKATME red, or by wearing a skirt so short your ass-crack is showing, or by putting your hair in a giant mohawk for no good reason, or by getting a face tattoo a week beforehand so you can impress everyone with how badass you are.

Be furniture. Blend in.

I'm a little starved for attention. Is it cool if I make the wedding all about me?

Of course! Everyone loves when a friend or family member decides to hijack a wedding and make it all about themselves by publicly announcing a pregnancy, proposing to their girlfriend during the Best Man toast, making a long-winded and pointless speech, demanding a birthday cake, or having a large and public fight with their significant other.

JUST KIDDING! Nobody loves that!!! Be furniture. Repeat it with me now -- I am furniture. My job is to be furniture.

Furrrrrniture.

Can I bring my uninvited newborn baby to the ceremony and then let it cry the whole time including during the couple's vows? My baby is really cute and I think everyone will really like to see it!

That's all for today's edition of Patent's Charm School! I hope we are all now well-equipped to attend weddings without pissing anyone off. I mean sure, maybe someone will get mad at you for getting so hammered you throw up in the middle of the dance floor and then the bride's grandmother slips in it and falls and breaks her hip, and then you have loud sex with the Matron of Honor in the coat room while her husband tries to clean up your puke, but you can't change who you are and if they didn't want that to happen then they shouldn't have invited you.



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