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Our daily workwear reports suggest one piece of work-appropriate attire in a range of prices.
There’s a fine line between whimsical but still work-appropriate, and downright kooky. I’m pretty sure this owl-print top from Brooks Brothers is on the right side of that line, but let me know if you disagree.
I would pair this with some dark trousers for a business casual look with a hint of playfulness.
The top is on sale for $173.60 (originally $248) at Brooks Brothers and comes in sizes 0–16.
P.S. If you like nature-inspired prints like this one, check out the UK brand Joanie — they have a Natural History Museum collection featuring blouses, dresses, pajamas, and more in sizes up to 22 (U.S. 26).
Sales of note for 11.5.24
- Nordstrom – Fall sale, up to 50% off!
- Ann Taylor – Extra 40% off sale
- Banana Republic Factory – 50% off everything + extra 25% off with your GAP Inc. credit card
- Bloomingdales is offering gift cards ($20-$1200) when you spend between $100-$4000+. The promotion ends 11/10, and the gift cards expire 12/24.
- Boden – 10% off new styles with code; free shipping over $75
- Eloquii – Fall clearance event, up to 85% off
- J.Crew – 40% off fall favorites; prices as marked
- J.Crew Factory – Up to 60% off everything + 60% off clearance
- Lo & Sons – Fall Sale, up to 35% off
- M.M.LaFleur – Save 25% sitewide
- Neiman Marcus – New sale, up to 50% off
- Spanx – Lots of workwear on sale, some up to 70% off
- Talbots – Buy one, get one – 50% off everything!
- White House Black Market – Holiday style event, take 25% off your entire purchase
Anonymous
Hit me up with your easiest, laziest, but still impressive looking Christmas dessert recipes? Cookies are already covered so I’m looking for something else.
Anon
Triffle or any dessert made by layering pre-made cookies and creamy stuff including tiramisu.
Anon
One of the best Friends episodes IMO is the one where Jennifer Anniston makes a trifle.
Anon
I love it. Custard, jam and beef sautéed with peas and onions!
anon
“It tastes like FEET!” love it.
OOO
My favorite trifle for the holidays: https://www.marthastewart.com/318066/grand-raspberry-trifle
Anon
What kind of bowl or serving dish do you make your trifle in?
How do you store it?
Anonymous
Not OP, but I make one similar to this: https://www.theculinarycompass.com/heath-bar-trifle/
And I put it in a trifle bowl. I got one as a wedding gift, which I put on my registry solely for brownie trifle at Christmas. Store it in the bowl in the fridge.
Bean74
Molly Wizenberg’s Winning Hearts and Minds Chocolate Torte. Super easy to make, and is actually better if made ahead and frozen.
https://orangette.net/2004/08/and-then-the-cake-came-forth/
I use Ghirardelli 60% cacao chocolate chips and whatever butter I have on hand, usually store brand. Always get raves about this cake!
Anon
This is a popular and impressive idea.
I am unusual in that I hate most trifles. Unless they are made from scratch or have really outstanding ingredients, they taste like what they are: box pudding with cookies.
Anonymous
I also despise trifles but couldn’t put my finger on why. It’s the soggy cookies. The OP did say easy though and those are easy.
Anon
I’ve never heard of a trifle made with cookies. I thought it was a kind of sponge cake (not very sweet) layered with whipped cream and jam. Booze optional.
Anon
I’ve never had one made with cookies.
Anon
Here is a recipe for trifle with cookies:
https://dinnersswerved.com/easy-four-ingredient-chocolate-trifle/
Anon
Pumpkin pie is so easy. I always do a frozen pre-made crust. Then all you need is the pumpkin purée, eggs, evaporated milk and spices. It’s a whole can of the purée and a whole can of evaporated milk so you don’t even need to bother measuring anything (you can measure spices or you can let your heart decide on them).
I make pumpkin pie (and apple pie) for my family’s Thanksgiving and Christmas every year and I always get compliments and credit for making something “homemade” even though it’s so freaking easy.
Libby’s also makes canned pumpkin pie filling so you only need that + the pie crust. It’s not quite as good IMO but it certainly does the trick (and most people probably can’t tell) and it’s even easier: pour filling into pie crust and bake.
Anon
The pumpkin pie recipe on the Libby pumpkin label is the best. This is the hill I will die on.
anon
+1000
Anon
I’m going to try this!!
PolyD
Add about a quarter cup of brandy and you will have a very tasty pie!
twentytwo
I use a can of condensed milk so that I do not have to add sugar. I also skip the crust and add a 1/4 cup of (in my case gluten free) flour and pour into buttered baking dish. The result is something like a pumpkin bread pudding. I serve with vanilla ice cream, and it is amazing.
Anonymous
I buy pies from a bakery.
The laziest thing I make, though, is a circa 1975 jello pudding pie.
Anon
I would like to hear more about it
ANON
Rice Krispie treats, but put a touch of peppermint extract in the marshmallows. Then melt white and semisweet chocolate (I also put the peppermint extract in the semisweet chocolate), drizzle on top, then sprinkle crushed candy canes on top.
NYNY
Poached pears are pretty, fancy, and made ahead of time. I’ve not used this recipe, but I totally would: https://susanality.substack.com/p/cranberry-rose-poached-pears
(Side note, Susan Spungen is an accomplished food writer, but also her sister was Nancy Spungen of Sid & Nancy fame)
Anon
I was wondering that as soon as I saw Spungen. Some names you only see in one context (Skadden, Spungen, what else?).
Anon
NYNY,
What would be as good non alcoholic substitute for the rose wine?
Anon
Not NYNY, but I’m seeing tons of recipes that poach them in water with sugar, cinnamon sticks and cloves added to it.
NYNY
Agree on making a flavorful syrup for poaching. Wine adds acidity, so I would add either citrus or something like balsamic vinegar or pomegranate molasses (not in wine quantities, maybe 1-2 tablespoons) to give that balance.
Anonymous
I use coconut milk per Donna Hay and it is delicious
Anon
Poaching pears is what has convinced me that canned pears are actually pretty good. Very similar outcome!
anon a mouse
It may be more work than you want, because it involves making whipped cream, but the Smitten Kitchen icebox cake is always impressive, and if you add a little peppermint extract to the whipped cream and garnish with crushed candy canes, it’s next level. The whole thing can be assembled in about 20 minutes, but you do have to make it ahead of time.
Anonymous
This sounds good! What do you use for the chocolate wafer cookies?
Anon
The Nabisco chocolate wafers are no more! Sad.
anon a mouse
Oh no! That’s a real loss.
joan wilder
This just made me super sad. My late mom always made this around the holidays. It got me sleuthing on subsititutes and I found a good article on options… https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/08/18/nabisco-chocolate-wafer-cookie-alternatives/
Anon
Sorry didn’t mean to make you sad!!!
Anonymous
The Smitten Kitchen homemade wafer cookies are pretty easy to make, though it does add more steps to this process. (Side note: do not use them to make a baked pie crust. It will fail.)
Damn Nabisco for discontinuing those cookies.
Anonymous
Pavlova if you want one big item, basil infused panna cotta with strawberries and balsamico if you want single portions.
Either way, something with fresh berries.
Anonymous
Cranberry upside down cake from Simply Recipes.
Anon
Get two rolls of cake from the store, like this:
https://www.kroger.com/p/dutch-apron-bakery-red-velvet-cream-cheese-filling-cake-roll/0003515733702?searchType=default_search
Cut one on an angle and attach to the other. Slather good quality chocolate frosting over it. Stick some mistletoe or other fake greenery in it, toss on a cranberry or two, dust with powdered sugar. Yule log!
Deep South
Panna cotta is great — it looks fancier than it is. I do not do molds for mine — I make in pretty wine glasses or sherbet bowls and we just eat it out of those. That takes all the work out.
Just sub 3 c half and half for the milk and cream and you don’t even mix those!
https://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-panna-cotta-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-200070?epik=dj0yJnU9OHJnVzNWSnByYW8ya1dSSEJWdnZlNkdvdEVyZ3VWb2omcD0wJm49aDhkTnQ3M1JaTGFUMjItWnRZdDJHZyZ0PUFBQUFBR1dEQi1B
Anonymous
I think this depends on what you mean by easy? But a few things I like to make:
– My favorite is Claire Saffitz’s Malted Forever Brownies which are easy but do involve melting some items together on the stove.
– The Kirbie’s Craving copycat Levain dark chocolate cookies
– Cinnamon rolls – I buy the pre made store ones and then I make the chai cream cheese frosting from the Half Baked Harvest recipe to spice them up
Anonymous
Nutella Christmas tree – slather nutella between two layers of puff pastry. Cut the puff pastry in the shape of a Christmas tree and cut strips/twist them for the branches. It’s super easy, delicious, and looks so cute! https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/256100/nutella-pastry-christmas-tree/
Pompom
Impressive looking? No, unless you decorate it. Delicious and easy and lazy? YES.
Buy a premade oreo or chocolate cookie crust.
Fill it with sliiiightly softened peppermint stick or mint choc chip ice cream, mounding it up a bit in the center.
“Frost” it with cool whip and crushed peppermints, candy canes, or Andes candies (optional).
FREEZE.
Slice, eat, repeat.
Anon
My family makes this candy-cane angel food cake every year. It’s an old recipe from Sunset magazine. It’s so easy and such a hit. As long as you have an angel food pan, you’re good to go.
https://www.sunset.com/recipe/candy-cane-cake
Anon
And you can totally use boxed angel food cake mix and skip most of the “assembling” that way. It turns out just as good.
AIMS
I don’t think this is too much per we, but I think ruffles put this over the line for me personally, whereas the owls are perfect as far as I am concerned.
jm
This exactly!
It's me.
I am so surprised that those relatively subdued ruffles would put this over the line for anyone. I would never give this a second thought.
Anon
I wouldn’t give it a second thought on somebody else but I am not personally a ruffle person.
Biggest balls in the room
Ditto. I’m all about a fun print, particularly under otherwise conservative suiting – but the ruffles, hard pass.
Anonymous
huh – normally i agree but i don’t hate these. i think part of the problem is that it’s done up to the top, it would look a lot better with a few buttons open
Anon
I love it! As a flat-chested pear, there isn’t any upper-body volume that I will turn away. Gotta balance out the hips. And OWLS!
Still: that is a lot of $ for polyester. At least it’s washable. May stalk for after Xmas sales.
Anon
I actually love this but I’m wearing a ruffly plaid top today.
Anon
Have more fun! I just ordered this as one of the more subdued items for my closet.
Anonymous
I had a blouse like this in the early 80s and loved it…i wouldn’t wear it now, though.
Anon
I still love an owl print blouse from JCrew years ago – some available on eBay/Posh
https://www.ebay.com/itm/134855351692?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20200818143230%26meid%3D3ff769c9b617415f8359cbec92dc1982%26pid%3D101224%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D5%26sd%3D175962038262%26itm%3D134855351692%26pmt%3D0%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D4429486%26algv%3DDefaultOrganicWebV9BertRefreshRanker%26brand%3DBrand&_trksid=p4429486.c101224.m-1
Anon
I love a dark background print. It’s on my DNA. My office job days are behind me (this would be very gussied up for my regular zoom meetings) but if I were still schlepping to the office regularly, I’d probably have bought this about 5 seconds after seeing it here.
Anon
200 dollars for polyester. Nope.
Anon
Also this. I know there’s a strong pro-polyester contingent here but it is not for me.
anon
+2. I will buy poly products on occasion, but I’m not paying $200 for a poly blouse.
Anon
Has anyone ordered from Halsbrook? I think they may carry items a step above my usual mall brands without being too $$$ while looking like many items would be OK at work. It seems to skew a bit older but not like what my nana wears.
Anonymous
It’s like a more expensive Tuckernuck aimed at 40- and 50-somethings, mostly preppy with some rufflepuff mixed in. They don’t lose returns the way Tuckernuck is prone to.
anon
I haven’t but I love their catalogs. I’m interested in people’s experiences too!
Mantra Magic
What’s your favorite sad movie when you need a good cry?
Anon
The end of Raising Arizona.
Anon
Steel Magnolias and Jojo Rabbit.
Anon
Hachi: A Dog’s Tale
testrun
Stepmom
An.On.
Iron Giant
Terms of Endearment
anon
Terms of Endearment
Anon
This one.
Anon
My mom and I used to call it Tears of Endearment.
ThirdJen
It’s A Wonderful Life – ugly crying the whole way through. “Sad” is debatable but I feel like half the theme of IAWL is “it’s good to give up on your dreams actually.”
Anon
https://www.thebulwark.com/there-is-no-mary-problem-in-its-a-wonderful-life/
Maybe you will love this essay as much as I do!
JD
I think It’s a Wonderful Life tries to reconcile how to be happy when your life has constraints you can’t overcome. Sometimes dreams become near impossible and you have to keep moving along.
Anon
The Fox and the Hound or Marley and Me.
My Catholic dad jokes that since WASPs love their dogs more than their children, those movies are such tear jerkers for my mom and me.
My Irish Catholic dad married into a quite WASPy family (high church Episcopalians) and 35 years later the cultural differences still make him laugh.
Anon
Can you explain high church vs low church to me? I feel bad not knowing this and I’m actually Episcopalian (but grew up in a tiny church in a blue-collar town where everyone else was some flavor of Catholic (but there were a lot of flavors due to layers of immigrants — Irish, Italian, and Filipino immigrants and their chldren and grandchildren’s families, all of whom went to the Roman Catholic church, an Orthodox Catholic Church, a “Slovak” Catholic Church, and a Greek Orthodox Church). And we had a mosque and a Reform Jewish temple. And some Jains. There were also Presbyterians and Methodists. We had what seemed like a 50/50 mixture of random white people and immigrants from various Commonwealth countries who had grown up in the Church of England (but this is in the northeast US).
Anon
Not the high-church OP, but my understanding is that “high church” refers in part to a formal liturgical style (smells and bells, as they say) but also has class connotations. I am a member of a liturgically traditional Lutheran church – think organ , incense, mighty fortress style hymn rather than guitar, video screen, praise music. Not sure that it’s high church per se but it’s definitely on that end of the spectrum.
Curious to hear others interpretations.
Anon
OP on this subthread — this is hysterical to me a bit. The church I grew up in was a lot of plumbers and teachers and municipal employees and apparently is wildly high church (only organ, only old-school things from the hymn book, an old congregation who still sang the old hymn book after it modernized in the 1980s). Incense just on Christmas Eve though.
I just cannot get in on the lite rock sort of service — I want to have songs from people mentioned in The Tudors, etc. Even if I am wearing a shirt with words and live streaming it at home over COVID, I want very OG church music.
Anon
In Catholicism, I think the class connotations might be reversed? I think of blue collar people as gravitating to traditional churches and services, and educated professionals as much more into a relaxed, chill, guitary kind of experience. Working class immigrants built the cathedrals where I’m from, and people with more money in the suburbs built the sprawling complexes that are hard to identify as churches.
I might not know what low church means though; I thought it meant austere Protestant style services in Anglicanism and I always associated “low” with the low countries, though maybe that’s a false etymology?
Anon
Anon at 9:25 here and A Mighty Fortress is one of my favorite hymns…
But yes, high church is usually considered to be very traditional (to the point that some may consider it stuffy). There’s no official designation between high / broad / low churches, but you can generally tell by the practices and style of the church. For example, the use of “smells and bells”, the organ, use of Rite I, traditional vestments. The churches themselves tend to be ornate and historic. My church has a constant vigil from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. My grandparents went to confession, didn’t eat anything Sunday morning until after church to ensure Communion was the first thing they ate that day, and didn’t eat meat on Fridays (their church was not Anglo-Catholic, but some more traditional Episcopal churches still kept these traditions). Basically, I think of high church as if the service / hymns feel like they could have come straight out of the 1800s (or even earlier). My mom doesn’t like when our church sings Morning Has Broken because she thinks its “too modern” – it’s not 100 years old and it was covered by Cat Stevens so therefore its inappropriate for church in her mind.
IME, there isn’t necessarily a class division between the types of churches but there can definitely be a cultural division. If you think of the stiff upper lip British stereotype, that’s pretty high church :)
Anon
OMG I miss Rite 1. As a kid, we only had Rite 2 once a month. Now it is every Sunday. Not a fan.
Anon
What is a vigil?
Anon
Raised Catholic but lapsed. I’m pretty anti church overall, but if I’m going to sit through a service for whatever reason (social pressure of some sort) it had better be organ and robes and stand up sit down kneel and sing. My idea of hell on earth is cringeing my way through some well-meaning but terrible Christian Rock. Give me the choir and a cranky old priest.
Anon
Same. If I wanted a rock concert, I’d go to a rock concert. If I see someone plugging into an amp, Ima need a beer.
Anon
I grew up in a poor community and the Catholic Church services weee super formal, or “high” It could have to do with having a lot of immigrants in our are, but no one was considered “high class” socially for sure!
Anon
I’m the anon who said there’s a class connotation. That’s my experience as a Protestant. The richer, Waspier churches tend to be high church and the more blue collar tend more evangelical/praise music. Can’t speak to Catholicism, which I assumed was the “high” church we are all emulating (while hammering our 95 theses to the proverbial wall).
Anon
20+ years ago my then 2 1/2 year old was obsessed with an old VHS copy of the Fox and the Hound. She asked for it all the time, wherever we were. Constantly. Only problem was that she pronounced it F$&@in’ Hound. Loudly!
Anon
A Monster Calls
Cat
The Notebook
Stepmom
Anne-on
My Girl, Swing Kids, Iron Giant, the beginning of Up or end of Toy Story 3 (honestly most of Pixar has at least one scene that will make you sob), or Stepmom.
Cat
Ohhhh I forgot the beginning of Up. I was not at ALL prepared for how that would sucker-punch me.
Anan
Yes! I went to see Up without my husband and then told him he had to go see it and he came back saying, “Why didn’t you warn me about the beginning!?!? I cried and cried and cried.”
Doodles
I just watched Up this weekend with my 6 year old. It’s been so long since I saw it. I sobbed through half the movie. I couldn’t stop after that initial 10 minutes. My kids were so confused. My husband just laughed. He does not get sentimental at movies. As I’ve been watching classic animated movies with the kids this last year, I have cried almost every time (Nemo, Toy Story 3, Lion King, The Good Dinosaur). Not so with adult movies.
Anonymous
Yep, first 10 or so minutes of Up. Every time.
Anonymous
The Shawshank Redemption. I ugly cry as soon as Brooks leaves the prison.
Anne-on
Also if you need a good, quick cry just watch the Sarah McLachlan animal shelter commercials, I’ll go from fine to ugly sobs in under 2 minutes!
Anon
God, I hate those and think they are so emotionally manipulative.
Anon
+1
Anne-on
They are SUPER manipulative but I do give her credit for giving the song to the organization for free, apparently it’s resulted in some of the highest donations ever.
anon
+1, anything that helps draw attention to animal suffering and results in more resources for them is a plus in my book.
Anon
Yeah – I am totally okay with these being “manipulative”. Anything to improve the welfare and life of these animals is okay with me!
Anonymous
They’re not manipulative; they just force people to confront an issue that is undeniably sad (animal suffering) and that they wouldn’t normally be thinking about….
Anon
I Dreamed of Africa
anon
+1 It’s my favorite Meryl Streep movie
Anon
She is amazing, but also not in this movie?
Jules
Out of Africa?
Anon
Different movie. This one has Kim Basinger.
Anonymous
Sweet bean, a Japanese movie.
ALT
PS I Love You
Up
Inside Out
Marley And Me
My Dog Skip
NYCer
About Time.
Davis
I’m choking up at this thread! Big Fish is mine. I just can’t watch that anymore!
Anon
Oh Big Fish. I saw that on a date and cried so hard my date was genuinely concerned.
anon
The Perfect Storm
Anonymous
Beaches
Senior Attorney
Charlotte’s Web. I watched it with my daughter when she was 5 or 6 and she was so confused to find herself crying over a movie!
A
I wouldn’t watch it over and over again but I am Sam made me sob.
Anonymous
Beaches.
Anon
Awakenings
Dancer in the Dark
Brokeback Mountain
Sophie’s Choice
Dear Zachery
anon
OMG. Dancer in the Dark. Just listening to the music after made me ugly sob.
Also came here to say My Girl, but looks like many had the same idea.
Runcible Spoon
Where the Redfern Grows
Old Yeller
Brian’s Song
Anonymous
Be gentle with me please. Trying to navigate first kid to get married without being the crazy awful parent.
Guest list being assembled and there is so far not a lot of consistency among who is being invited. Bride’s family, on both her parents’ sides, is small and pretty tight and are all included – aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, etc.
Son is including some of those categories on his father’s side, also relatively small, but not on my side – which is quite large. In other words, not all my sibs would be invited, although all his Dad’s would, as well as his future in law’s. All cousins and even some of their kids would be invited on his Dad’s side, but not on mine.
I know this is their wedding and I also know I will feel terrible at what feels like a slight towards some members of my family, who may wonder why their kids were not invited but other sib’s kids (his Dad’s) were – let alone the kids of those kids.
No family drama here; my husband and I married 30+ years. My family is large and dispersed but have always been very loving toward my kids. My husband’s family we’ve seen more of recently, mainly through weddings on that side.
I think it is truly a numbers game, and I get that. I just grew up with a system of beliefs that you treat everyone the same and I feel so awful on behalf of my sibs.
Any gentle words of advice on this? And advice on whether/how to frame up for my family?
Lifer
Do you honestly think your sibs will be upset?
How many are we talking about?
Are you able to offer to pay for the additional wedding costs to include them, if this is a numbers game?
Anon
This is sort of where I will likely stand (but Girl Mom, so I’m planning to pay for everything anyway). “I know that Dad’s side is tiny (it is) and my side is large (HUGE), but they will be so truly, truly touched to get invited. If they do come, I know that that is a burden on you, so here is this very large check to help indulge me on this and for which I am eternally grateful; please don’t worry about returning any of it if none of them come (due to family / elder care responsibilities).”
If weddings were private evetns, people would just elope and get married. But a wedding sets the tone for your married life and it is just better to set the most inclusive tone you can. Half of these people likely won’t come even, so I think that the goodwill benefit outweighs the cost; and the goodwill cost of not inviting could be quite high. Why risk it if you can throw $ at the problem?
Anonymous
No all of us care about relatives we don’t know and don’t see. I’d much rather have a small wedding where I can enjoy everyone’s company than invite my uncles I barely know
Lily
But what if your mom is close to her brothers, even if you aren’t (assuming no bad blood)? Wouldn’t you like your mom to have her brothers there, if it’s important to her? I just can’t understand the whole “it’s my wedding, all that matters is my comfort/preference.” So glad I don’t have people like that in my family.
Anonymous
My mother would never guilt trip me like this. And not caring about people I don’t know in no way translates to not caring about my guests.
Anon
Exactly. Let people have the wedding they want.
Anon
“People having the wedding they want” is why so many of us have distaste for weddings now. Weddings used to be a celebration of a couple that involved family and friends, and was a way for people to come together to launch a couple into their new life together. Now, it seems like if people just want a big show and don’t want to consider anyone else’s feelings but their own, that should be totally acceptable. And it’s not to me. I agree to an extent that a couple should drive the choices for a wedding, but I do not think it’s okay for a member of the bridal couple to do something that truly hurts a parents’ feelings and causes them to feel alienated, the name of “well, it’s my wedding so I get to do what I want.” I think the OP’s son is being really selfish here.
Anon
Is it even about the cost per plate? Sometimes the venue can’t accommodate it, so the engaged couple has to start from scratch. Sometimes it just optics: if she has 200 guests and he has 60, it looks like her party and not their party.
Anon
I was a bridesmaid in a wedding like this, easily 200 guests for the bride and under 50 for the groom. I heard the mother of the groom alternate between embarrassement and anger. Not a great way to start off your marriage.
Anon
So many of these. Just have a big party with your BFFs then.
Anon
My husband’s friends wanted this for our wedding. We met when living in different cities and certainly could have had the wedding in my home city. It would have been very easy for me to invite 150 of my friends and family, and have him invite however many people he wanted and probably 30 or 35 would have showed. But we had it in his/my new city, and aaaalll of the complaints rolled in about how awful and exclusionary I was for not letting him invite 200 people. (My family paid 100%, FWIW.)
What bothers me all these years later: the location of the wedding was a negotiation and a decision between us. I preferred to have it in my home city (and would have kept my guest list to about 60 family and friends, knowing how few of his side would be able to go). So we have it in his area, conditioned on keeping it small. Then everyone gets pissy and tries to renegotiate the deal to be even better for him. No….
Anon
My DH is an immigrant, and we met in college in our city. We had a small wedding specifically because we knew most of his family couldn’t come from his country. I didn’t want to have 100 of my people and 20 of his.
Anonymous
Are you prepared to pay for your huge family he isn’t close to be invited? You’re invited! He loves you! Please let that be enough.
Anon
I would be good with this if the attitude for everyone was – we invited you but we cannot invite the rest of your family, sorry. It just seems unfair to me to let some parents invite all their siblings and not extend that courtesy to all parents involved in the wedding.
Anon
Nope. It’s about the engaged couple and their special day. It’s not a family reunion and it seems only Mom here expects it to be one.
Anon
Let’s also not forget that even if it is a family reunion, “nuclear family” isn’t a transitive property.
Think of your mom. Her original nuclear family was her parents and her siblings. It then became her, your dad, you, and your siblings. So her idea of “nuclear family reunion” is going to be her, your dad, her siblings and their spouses, your dad’s siblings and their spouses, and maybe some cousins.
But your aunts, uncles, and cousins are your extended family, even if they are nuclear family to your mom.
So to our generation, “family reunion” might mean getting the siblings together from where they are scattered all over the country, finally meeting your little brother’s new girlfriend, all that.
Anon
If other people weren’t invited to the wedding, then it would be legitimate to say “it’s about the engaged couple and their special day.”
Once you decide to host an event, you absolutely do need to consider the needs and feelings of the people involved in that event. Ignore that at your own peril. Couples that want to do everything their way and don’t want to consider what anyone else wants – even their own parent/future MIL – should A. pay for everything themselves, 100% – if it’s all about “your special day,” and you are unwilling to compromise about anything, pay for the damn thing yourself, then and B. not be surprised if there are permanent bad feelings that erupt from their own selfishness.
Anon
Anon at 1:19 pm, I see that you are very strident about mandatory invitations. Worried you wouldn’t get any otherwise?
Anon
“Anon at 1:19 pm, I see that you are very strident about mandatory invitations. Worried you wouldn’t get any otherwise?”
I haven’t been invited to a wedding in years because fewer and fewer people I know are getting married. Most of my social circle doesn’t see the point in getting married, much less having a big showy wedding which is mostly about getting likes on social media.
I see you seem to be a bridezilla (or – knowing most of the people here – a wannabe bridezilla who will never actually make it up the aisle). Hope that works out for you! LMAOOOOO
Anon
Anon at 3:36, I am married and I get invited to weddings. Both are likely because I don’t behave the way you do.
Anon
“Anon at 3:36, I am married and I get invited to weddings. Both are likely because I don’t behave the way you do.”
Sure, Jan.
This whole exchange made you look pretty bad, just so you know.
Anonymous
Keep telling yourself it’s not your wedding. To your family, say nothing unless they specifically bring it up and then direct them to your kid because “it’s not my wedding…”
anon
I don’t think both sides need to be treated equally. A lot depends on who your child is close to. If I were having an event I’d invite both my parents’ siblings, but only my dad’s first cousins. I see them more and am closer with them. Who is paying for this wedding? If it’s not you, I think you need to just accept it. Also, it their lack of inclusion due to cost or space? If space, nothing you can do. If it’s cost and it’s truly only a handful of people, like 5-6, maybe you tell your child you’d really like to include them and offer to contribute toward the cost of inviting them.
Anon
Even if you aren’t paying for it, I still think you get to counsel your kid (once, privately) when you see the consequences of their actions in a way that it’s not apparent that they appreciate. It’s not the same about lecturing them, but I think you can talk to your kids and often owe it to them to talk to them while things are still in the planning stage.
Anne-on
Can you talk to your son about it? I think there will be fewer hurt feelings if the categories are the same (so all aunts and uncles invited, but not necessarily all cousins) and if you look at it as bride’s side and groom’s side, not bride’s mom’s side and bride’s dad’s side if that makes sense.
Lily
What does your son say??
I think you are right to be hurt/upset. Cousins are one thing, but aunts and uncles who your kid has a loving relationship with, not being invited… that’s just not right, if his other aunts/uncles and the bride’s aunts and uncles are. If my daughters proposed not inviting their aunts/uncles because our family was too big, let’s just say I would not be pleased. I think you should tell your son that if he goes through with this, he should expect his relationship with his aunts and uncles to greatly suffer. Not to mention the horrible spot it puts you in.
Who is paying for the wedding? Can you offer to pay for the extra guests? Are you inviting family friends you could possibly cut from the list to make room for your siblings?
I’m sure many on this s*te will say that it’s your son’s wedding, you are awful for even suggesting he invite your siblings, stay out of it, etc. etc. They are the same people who think it’s fine to pull out of plans at the last minute for “mental health” or who think it’s fine to financially abandon your ailing parents.
anon
Unless you are contributing to this wedding to the extent that you would be covering the costs associated with your wishes (catering, larger venue, etc.), I think you 100% keep your mouth shut.
Anonymous
What’s Junior’s reasoning for excluding these relatives? Money? Venue capacity? Doesn’t feel close to them?
Anonymous
None of my cousins on my mom’s side invited me to their weddings, there’s no drama, we’re just different types of people. No hard feelings on either side AFAIK. I did invite them all to my wedding but none came.
Anonymous
When I was getting married I read miss manners’ book on weddings. She said you plan a wedding by figuring out who would like to see you get married and then you figure out how to entertain host and feed them. That always resonated with me but most folks do the opposite.
Anyway I think you’re well within the bounds of politeness to gently explain this will be hurtful to your siblings. I really think aunts and uncles should be invited absent a falling out of some sort.
Anon
I think that this is the best take, especially paragraph 1.
Anonymous
Agree. Another etiquette tip I remember (maybe from Emily Post?) is that it is most polite to invite in terms of categories. Invite all aunts and uncles or none.
Cat
What’s the reason for the limit – is it money, venue capacity, or relationship?
Anon
Please let it go. “Treat everyone equally” is a recipe for disaster in a wedding because your definition of “equal” (invite all aunts and uncles) what suits what you want. However, “invite equal numbers from each side” or “only invite aunts and uncles you’re close to” is also equitable.
Anon
Great example of why equal =/= equitable!
Anon
Your son will live to regret not inviting your siblings. If you have to pony up the costs, do it. Quietly. This is family dynamics, not an opinion on cake flavor. It’s quite rude not to invite aunts and uncles. And you’ll suffer blame too. Son needs to grow up. Weddings are not just for Instagram.
Anon
+1
Also, this is why I eloped.
Anon
Co-sign that a wedding is a family event, like it or not. And it’s the foot you start off on with the in-law family, so it is better to get it right and scale the venue / budget accordingly than get it wrong at something that looks good on Insta.
Anon
This.
anonshmanon
Such an extreme take!
Anon
Really? I think that people understood small COVID weddings and elopements. But wedding pictures are more seen now and more widely shared. How will it be if Wife’s Aunt Stephanie and Cousin Will are at something but Hubby’s Uncle Ron is left out? And how weird will it be for Hubby’s mom to have these convos — in advance? after the event? If the wedding isn’t super-tiny, it is hard to leave people out.
Anonymous
Who cares? I wouldn’t. I don’t have a close relationship with all my aunts and uncles. If they choose to be really hurt about not being invited to my wedding oh well!
Anon
I’m not close with my aunts and uncles. We don’t live in the same state and I seldom see them outside of 1-2 Zooms or calls a year. They didn’t get invites, some saw photos on Facebook, and no one was angry.
anonshmanon
I can see how it’s more common and expected to invited direct aunts and uncles, and to treat family members of the same ‘tier’ equally, but there are also good reasons (money, actual relationship, inviting a similar number of people from both sides) to do it the other way. Ultimately, it’s their wedding, and there is too much drama and entitlement wrapped up in wedding planning already, that I tend to try and view these things with grace and give the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been not invited to several cousins’ weddings myself when I would have enjoyed going, and while one was truly small (15 people?), the other one was “small” (the photos looked like 50 or so people). It looked like a party that would have been fun to attend and I like my cousins a lot. So I get that part of feeling like you are missing out. I just don’t get the threatening, definitive language of ‘Your son will live to regret not inviting your siblings’. Like it’s a slight that will inevitably tear the family apart. Seems like an overreaction.
Anon
“Who cares? I wouldn’t. I don’t have a close relationship with all my aunts and uncles. If they choose to be really hurt about not being invited to my wedding oh well!”
I understand not caring about the feelings of your aunts and uncles. But you don’t care about your own mom or dad’s feelings? At all? Are you just assuming that – well, they’re my mom and dad so they love me no matter what, they’ll get over me doing this selfish thing that makes no sense?
Anonymous
I mean I don’t think that she means he’ll see that decision as a defining mistake of his life but more like, when uncle Bob passes you might be sad you didn’t see him at your wedding. Or when you introduce your wife to him it’ll be a little awkward and you’ll feel bad about it. I think that’s likely.
Anonymous
My parents wouldn’t view this as a selfish thing and wouldn’t be hurt
Anon
I don’t think it’s extreme… I’ve never heard of anyone not inviting their parents’ siblings to their wedding, unless 1) there was active estrangement or 2) they eloped or had an incredibly small wedding and many/most aunts and uncles didn’t make the cut. It would be really hurtful to me as groom’s mom’s sibling if all the bride’s parents siblings and all the groom’s father’s siblings were there, and I wasn’t invited. If you invite the majority of people in the same “tier” and leave out only a few, it’s definitely hurtful to those few.
Anon
It seems like deliberate not-inviting, which is just tricky to family, as there will be other wedding and funerals. Like if you have friends, if you not-invite people in, say, your senior year apartment and there hasn’t been a falling out or anything, it smarts when you may see these people at other weddings and reunions, etc.
Anon2
Agree. Minus some huge family drama, or a tiny wedding/elopement, aunts and uncles are automatic invites in my book. I also think first cousins should be invited to the extent that you’re able. Parents’ cousins, family friends, even the couple’s own friends can be pared down. We prioritized family over friends and I’m so glad — those are by and large your lasting relationships over a course of a life
Anon
Haha no. I have first cousins whose first names I don’t even know! Not a chance.
Anon
Same here. I have an aunt whom I have seen once in 40 years.
Anon
Same +1 I haven’t seen two of my three uncles in 30 years!
Anon
Same! I learned that a first cousin had the name X because I was conserving it for my child and it came up when I googled the name. I either only met them when I was under 10 or never, not quite sure.
I invited some aunts, uncles, and cousins to my wedding and not others. If I hadn’t seen you in 5 or more years, I wasn’t inviting you
Anon
Or OP isn’t contributing enough money to cover their plates and the larger venue required. Or the son has no relationship with these relatives and likely never will. OP said she has a large, dispersed family so the son might have minimal contact with these people. There’s zero reason to believe the son is cutting guests because he cares more about how the wedding looks on Instagram.
Anon
Glad someone mentioned this. The aunts and uncles can be very loving and wonderful people, but if they are geographically dispersed, it’s likely that Son really doesn’t have a relationship with them.
Some people also worry about seeking gift-grabby if they invite people who are unlikely to come.
Anon
The way people make up stories about others on this page and then attack them is truly special. WHAT in OP’s question suggested this was about instagram? lol.
Anon
IDK — I know what this is going after — lots of engaged couples get caught up in the . . . craziness of things and pretty parties and vendors and wedding websites and girls weekends and . . . it’s not really top of mind to think (if you are the bride) about inlaws you may still be meeting and (if you are the groom) about family dynamics of two families that are likely going to in your lives for decades now. Especially if you are younger and used to your parents running family relationships for you.
Anon
I referenced instagram. Meant it as a figure of speech rather than a hallucination of factual statement. My view of weddings is that it’s a public announcement of your commitment to your partner and you invite family because your families are joining. Family members attend so as to bless (in a non religious sense) the commitment and support it. The push for a perfect party (with resulting venue restraints) is an unfortunate distraction from the true requirements of public commitment.
Anonymous
Can you recommend a good butter churn?
Anon
I get what you’re saying. I think there are two schools of thought — your wedding is about *you* (and your preferences), or your wedding is a commitment that draws support and encouragement from a long legacy of family and friends. I believe the latter, and that in a loving family, your wedding celebration is about thanking and honoring your families of origin as you create a new family. It is respectful and prudent to allow your families to have input on the guest lists.
Anon
I agree with 11:27. Hopefully, marriages last and everything is unicorns and roses. But if they aren’t, family and friends are who you lean on. Or who steps in to help. Aunt Edna in your mom’s hometown is who may drive her to chemo if she outlives your dad. Cousin Bill may offer you some work when you lose your job. They’d all understand if you elope. But if you have a wedding and they never meet your wife, you may cut her off from half the people who could support her by accident. I think we want to err on the side of including when just starting out (and for me, the wedding invite list became the extended family xmas card list for inlaws and what I used for thank yo notes).
But if you are old enough to get married, you have to own your wedding guest list as also being your decision. So any anger or hurt at the relatives shouldn’t go to either side’s parents, regardless of who pays or doesn’t pay.
anonshmanon
I was thinking though that if you do it for the ‘gram, wouldn’t you want the biggest party you could afford? The more people are there the grander the reception will look, no?
Anon
For Insta, maybe bigger = better, but Cousin Crystal isn’t really camera ready, nor Aunt Kit with her giant mole. I get why people exclude relatives and pick others, but I don’t always agree with it. My cousin drove my Nan to most of her medical treatments and I owe her so much — I actually timed my wedding so that she could go (nurse working night shifts).
Anonymous
I think that if they cut down on guests they’ll have more money for the flowers and venue and food that photographs better. That’s the thinking.
Anon
To me, family is people who are there for you and support you. If the OP isn’t close with the family members, why do they need their blessing? I see your point about a marriage uniting families, but does it unite family members who aren’t already a part of OP’s life?
Anonymous
I agree with this. I think the size of the wedding matters here, also – it’s not them eloping, or having a 20 person, it’s at least a mid sized wedding. I would offer to pay the cost of the additional guests as well.
This is my controversial take on weddings but people who love you want to celebrate you. It’s not just about you. I think we’ve gone so far in our individualist focus that people feel like they can make any decision they want about wedding guest lists and ALSO that they feel that no one can be be mad about getting cut from the guest list because it’s “their” wedding.
The easiest way to build a community is to show up for people and invite them to show up for you. People like to be asked to show up for you – whether it’s helping you with a small favor or attending a big life event. When you repeatedly don’t let people show up for you, you are intentionally narrowing your community. In this case that seems like a strange choice to make given the other guests invited.
And from personal experience, I invited about 30 of my parents and my husband’s parents friends to our wedding and I’m glad we did. My parents friends are regularly helpful as they are local – one of their daughters babysits for us, one pair helped my dad navigate the local hospital when my mom was out of town and it took me a few hours to arrive, they have provided backup care for my son. And we return those types of favors back.
Anon
“This is my controversial take on weddings but people who love you want to celebrate you. It’s not just about you. I think we’ve gone so far in our individualist focus that people feel like they can make any decision they want about wedding guest lists and ALSO that they feel that no one can be be mad about getting cut from the guest list because it’s “their” wedding.”
Agree 100%
Anonymous
And the same people who think they can and should do whatever they want at “their” wedding are the same ones who throw fits about the guest lists for other people’s weddings.
Anon
This right here.
Anon
This!!
Anon
This is spot on.
Anon
Do your cousins you haven’t seen in decades love you that much? I doubt it.
Anon
Yeah that seems like fantasy land to me. People are just making up family relationships here that probably don’t exist in the actual example at hand.
Anon
Yes, this. Putting all etiquette aside (although etiquette is a good indicator of social norms), there is real value in fostering the opportunity for connection rather than simply always reaffirming already close connections. Weddings are one event where that can happen. On the flip side, Weddings are socially important in a way that a birthday party is not, so a non-invite says a lot. I think there’s a space for you to lay out the consequences for you and your son if he goes down this path that he may not realize.
Having been married for over 15 years now, having parental, in-law, and extended family/friend support has been crucial. some of the college friends we invited we have not said a word to since. Friends are crucial to your village and community, don’t get me wrong, but the point is you can’t really know who your community will be in 15 years, and keeping connections rather than closing them is worth it IMO.
Anon
+1
Anon
Lololol he is not going to regret inviting people he hardly knows. This is insane.
Anon
Good lord. Come on. That is so dramatic.
Anon
I grew up exactly like you — consistency and equality was absolute hallmarks. I would also feel like it’s a slight. If you’re not contributing to the wedding, there’s not much say you have in the guest list. If you are contributing, you could talk to your son and see if there’s a way to even things out a bit more, but you’d want to do that delicately.
If it were my family, I would make calls to frame it (since I know my sibs would be really sad and it would affect how they felt about the relationship), and just be honest: “It’s truly just a numbers game — we’re a much bigger family and far away. I hope you don’t take this as a comment on the relationship, and you’ll be missed.”
Anon
If they’re close there’s no way to say that and salvage the relationship.
Anon
If I said that to any of my siblings they would never speak to me again. And if they said that to me, I would never speak to them again. I wouldn’t mind being told that the kids were calling the shots on the guest list, that would be fine, but “you’re not invited, but missed” would be a no-go.
Anon
You know your family best, but I would really ask my kid: what would you say to Uncle Ben when you see him? When he gets his first xmas card from you both or a baby announcement? And if you can’t have this convo, how do you think it will be for me?
I don’t get if men / boys get these relationships because I find that in SO MANY families, the women manage the family relationships. The men don’t burn bridges so much as they just fail to maintain them to the point that there is nothing left (from what I see in my family and particularly with my in-laws). But I feel that as women, we see this and we see off into the distance over the decades.
Anon
But what if he hasn’t seen or heard from Uncle Ben in 15 years? Then does Uncle Ben deserve to be invited, at the expense of a wedding guest that your son actually knows and cares about?
anon 123
I agree with this take–how long has it been since kid has seen Uncle Ben? Heard from him directly (not through the OP)? What kind of relationship do they have?
I don’t think an Uncle Ben who last talked with the engaged person a decade ago and didn’t even bother to reach out to engaged person when passing through their city should be prioritized over someone who cares enough to stay in touch with the person getting married.
Anon
Same here! If OPs kid doesn’t end up inviting the aunts and uncles, I’d just tell them the truth “it’s kid’s show, I thought I raised him better than this, I’m hurt and wish you were invited, I tried everything and couldn’t influence the decision. I’m so sorry, feel feel to disinherit kid if you’d like.”
Anon
What a terrible attitude you have! This is a complete overreaction.
anon
Ha, my mother actually talks like this about me to my aunt and uncle. It comes off badly and they’ve actually asked my parents to stop calling them. If anything, my uncle now checks in with me more often since he realizes I don’t have parental support.
Anon
No, this is appropriate. It is horrendously rude to invite all aunts and uncles on three sides, and then exclude a few on the fourth side
Anon
Yea this is a great way to throw your kid under the bus. Great parenting here.
Anon
Nope, kid threw himself under the bus. It’s not covering for him.
Anon
I’m the one who suggested the “you’ll be missed” thing, and these responses are totally right — it was bad advice on my part! Do not say what I suggested! Sorry I missed the ball on this one.
Anon
I agree with you that everyone should be treated equally, and that barring an estrangement it’s unusual to not invite an aunt, uncle or first cousin to a wedding. I would offer to cover the extra cost of inviting your siblings and their kids.
Anon
I (bride) went through this same exact issue with my parents in the lead up to my recent wedding. In fact, my parents could have written your post, but with my mom and dad reversed. On my mom’s side, I invited aunts, uncles, and cousins. On my dad’s side, I invited aunts and uncles, but no cousins. My thinking went like this:
1. I wanted my wedding day to be about spending time with people I have close, ongoing relationships with, and I’m just not close with the cousins on my dad’s side of the family. They’re dispersed throughout the country; we only see each other at weddings and funerals. I didn’t want to spend my wedding day feeling like I needed to make small talk with cousins I barely know.
2. My cousins on my dad’s side of the family have lots of young children, some of whom are poorly behaved. Having a child free wedding could have solved that problem, but would have prevented some of my best friends (who have kids but live out of state) from being able to attend.
3. Inviting my cousins, their spouse, and their kids on my dad’s side of the family would have totaled about 40 additional invitations. Hosting that many additional people wasn’t in our budget. (DH and I paid for the wedding ourselves.)
4. Related to point three above, I might have been more willing to invite cousins on my dad’s side if my parents explicitly offered to pay for the additional guests and child care for the wedding. Is this something you would be willing to do?
I know some of the above points might sound harsh, but at the end of the day I didn’t want my wedding to be a family reunion disguised as a wedding. Have you talked to your son about this? Perhaps it would help you to understand his perspective.
Anon
+1 to the invite all aunts and uncles but no cousins (or make a few exceptions to cousins you’re close with but not all cousins)
Anon
Cousins are very different from aunts and uncles though.
Anon
This is the way.
Anon
A wedding is a family reunion and a college / high school homecoming. Ditto funerals. Just how it is.
Anon
Yeah, honestly it’s the best part.
Anon
For you, maybe. You don’t get to decide that for other people.
Anon
+1:16. Why do we keep having to say that not all families are the saaaaaaaame.
Anon
I…didn’t? I just said it was the best part.
Anon
Because clearly it’s important and matters to the groom’s mother, and that should be good enough reason for the couple to invite them
NYCer
+2. I would encourage your son to invite all the aunts and uncles, but only the cousins that he is closer with. I think it is a bit odd to invite some, but not all, of your siblings unless there was family drama, estrangement, etc. And definitely puts you in a weird spot.
Anon
I know everyone is arguing for aunts and uncles over cousins, but if you want to sustain family bonds into the future, I’d actually argue that it’s more important to make sure that the cousins continue to be close than that the aunts and uncles be there. As someone who’s a little older, I’ve seen how families lose touch once the older family members die off and cousins move around and get busy with jobs and spouses and kids. If I were an aunt or uncle, I think I might be happy to give “my spot” to a member of the next generation if it meant those family ties were more likely to be sustained.
Anon
This!
Anon
I agree!
anon
+1 I’ve been seated at the one table of friends at a 120 person wedding where 108 of the guests were family. It was uncomfortable and honestly not very celebratory.
Anon
I kind of want to know more about this wedding… or maybe not.
Anon
I was at a similar wedding once. Bride had 1 table of family and 2 tables of friends. Groom had maybe 4 or 5 tables of family and 1/2 of a table of friends. It worked for them and I believe they paid for everything themselves (both came from families where money was tight, so I can’t imagine there was much to contribute). It was a ~80 person wedding.
Anon
I think you can bring it up to your son only, but also would come in more with an ask of why than a request. My husband and I had a firm rule of no guests at our wedding that either of us had not met before, which worked for us as we are relatively introverted, had a moderate sized wedding, and were together long enough that we had many possible times to meet all the relevant family and friends. Even so, my in-laws asked my son to include some further flung relatives and friends that my husband had not seen or heard from in over 10 years (and offered to pay for them). We both found the request annoying, he directly said no… but it still gets referenced from time to time among us privately with an eyeroll.
Anonymous
So no one got to bring a date you hadn’t met? How inconsiderate to your guests. I’d eyeroll right back.
Anon
Not inconsiderate at all. Some of us didn’t want randos we had never met and might never see again in our wedding photos alongside our grandparents, childhood friends, and people who actually meant something to us.
Just out of curiosity: have you actually had a wedding of your own?
Anonymous
Indeed, and I’ve now been married for 12 years. But apparently there are two camps: those who feel their weddings are “my day” and those who feel that this is a celebration they are hosting, which includes making their guests feel comfortable. I belong to the latter camp, so there were absolutely “randos” there who were important to MY people and helped them enjoy their evenings. Did they all stay in my life? Nope! Did we get a great story about my friend’s date who turned out to be terrible? Yep!
And, for the record, it’s not like every guest will always be great to have in the photos just because you’ve met them. My BIL’s multi-year girlfriend is in my photos, but they’re not a couple any more…..
Anon
One of the randos at our wedding ended up becoming my husband’s best friend’s wife. We’ve been so happy she came on what was their second date.
Anon
ok when i got engaged, this is how it worked – (and i should add that my parents were generously paying for the wedding, but DH’s parents contributed some too). My parents made a list, my in-laws made a list and my now DH and I made a list. We chose a venue based on that number. Then my MIL wanted to add more people to her list bc my parents’ list had more people (my family ( both sides) is much larger than DH’s), which caused a lot of stress bc venue had already been selected. fortunately by the time my SIL got married (10 years after DH and I), and she married someone with a very large family, even though my in-laws were paying, my MIL had matured and realized they couldn’t tell them not to invite half the family. if the bride and groom are paying for it exclusively on their own then it is their wedding…otherwise it’s not.
Anon
I’m navagating this with both my daughter and my son this year. Yeah, my family is huge and messy and because they are older, not really as close with my kids as dh’s family which is small and neat and local. It’s hard. I did offer to pick up additional costs as necessary, and spend some serious hours neogiating. My daughter married into a huge family with multiple branches and levels of relationship and was fine with including my siblings. Son is a little more relucant, but there is still time.
Bette
I come from a very large, geographically dispersed family and inviting different configurations of family is really common.
My parents are from Europe with siblings spread out across the continent, Australia/NZ, and the US. I have 10 aunts and uncles and 40+ first cousins. I’d say we are all pretty close considering the distances. Regular family reunions in home country, active cousins group text, etc.
That’s just a lot of people and $. In my family, it’s common, especially if the couple are paying, to curtail the guest list. Frequently it’s limited to only the family in the country of the couple getting married, or all European family.
No hard feelings result and everyone understands logistics are real and funds are limited. As one of the oldest and most affluent cousins, I still send a gift and a loving note even if i wasn’t invited.
I’d say, just chill. offer to kindly pay for the added guests (and possibly the larger venue) and accept if the answer is no.
Hot take, but I think people are actually less pearl clutch-y in real life than online and your family will understand what’s happening.
Anon
What’s the logic? Do they just need to cut people to make the numbers on the venue they want? Is it cost? Is it that they have no relationship with the people they’re not inviting? Do the non-invitees live farther away? How many people are we talking relative to the size of the wedding and how likely is it that they’d actually show up? And the most important question of all: who’s paying for this wedding?
If it’s just an issue of cost and a few more people on a large guest list where many people live far away, I might be inclined to ask your son to invite them and assume that most of them will decline the invite. If they do say yes, then be willing to kick in some additional funds to cover the cost. But if the issue is that they can’t fit in a venue that might be the only one that easily works for their location and dates, then I understand why they have to make some difficult decisions. If they make them on the basis of who they’ve actually been in touch with recently, that’s not unreasonable. It’s hard to make the numbers work for a wedding, and I’d never resent someone deciding to invite the relatives who have actually made the effort to stay in contact more closely.
Anon
I do think it matters WHY he’s not including your family – is it cost? space? he doesn’t want them there?
Also – is he the first cousin on this side to get married? If he’s not there may be some sort of precedent already set by other cousins and it’d be “easier” to follow that. For example: my dad has 40 first cousins and invited the ~20 or so he felt close to. My friend has a similar amount of cousins, and their family rule is that you don’t get invited to weddings until you’re 25.
Also – how many aunts / uncles and how many cousins does he have? If it’s like your husband has 1 sibling and you have 4 I think all aunts / uncles should be invited. However, if your husband has 1 sibling and you have 10 that might be different. How far is ‘dispersed’? Is it your brother lives in another country and your son hasn’t seen him in 10 years or is it your sister lives 3 hours away and your son only sees her on holidays?
I generally err on the side of inviting all family members unless you’re estranged (like my one aunt and uncle are awful bigots and my mom doesn’t even speak to her sister anymore, so I’m not inviting them).
Anonymous
some ideas:
Do you know if the numbers issue is a cost issue or a space issue? If the former, if you want your entire extended family there, offer to help pay.
If you are worried some of your family will feel slighted, offer to host an engagement party or separate celebration where they can all meet the bride.
I am also interested in how this list got generated. Typically, you have a # of guests and then source invitees from the families. Did your side of the family (eg parents of the groom) get something like “we’ll have space for approximately 80 guests on your side- could you send us a list?” If so, then it’s on your (the groom’s) side of the family to sort out who to invite.
Anon
In my family there’s no such thing as inviting all the siblings on one side to a wedding and not inviting all the siblings from another side. So that means if the bride’s mom and dad get to invite all their siblings, then the same goes with groom’s mom and dad. And there would never be a situation where the groom’s dad got to invite all siblings but the groom’s mom did not get that same privilege. Yes, that makes weddings bigger/more expensive. But it seems fundamentally unfair to me that one parent gets to invite all their siblings and another does not.
Cousins, however, are a different deal, because there are so many of them and in my family, most cousin relationships are not that strong. I have cousins I have only seen once or twice in my life. I was okay with my mom inviting her siblings to my wedding – she grew up with them – but we drew the line at inviting all the cousins because that was 20+ people I had not spent any kind of substantive time with.
IDK – we prioritized inviting family over family friends or people with less-close ties. I would rather have my mom’s siblings at my wedding than coworkers, or not-that-close friends, or my parents’ friends (unless I was very close, like an uncle/aunt relationship, with my parents’ friends). This situation is strange to me and would not happen in my family without causing a LOT of drama, and lasting hurt feelings that would not mend easily.
Anonymous
Hope no one marries in who isn’t interested in mindless conformity
Anon
We definitely aren’t thumbs-up on having people join the family who are petulant and selfish, and only care about themselves! We did have one cousin who married a girl like that. He came to his senses fairly quickly and she was gone within three years. His new wife has some sense of how to act toward other people, and have empathy, and we just love her.
Anon
Wow. Just… wow.
Anon
You sound like an awful, bitter person.
Anon
The “awful, bitter people” are the ones who will hurt their mom’s feelings because they don’t want to invite her siblings to their wedding. With the excuse of “well, but it’s MY DAY.” I honestly can’t think of anything more selfish. I hope you people who are saying this aren’t surprised when your mother/parents don’t seem all that interested in providing free child care for you when you have kids of your own.
Anonymous
If some, but not all, of your siblings are invited, there are going to be hurt feelings. I think you dont have to invite some cousins, and that’s OK, because relationships between cousins can vary greatly.
This probably doesn’t help OP, but for others planning weddings, I did invite all my aunts, uncles, and their spouses and ended up being very glad I did. My dad was one of seven children, and my mom one of six. Ages were such that my dad never lived in the same house with his youngest sister! But, I invited them all because it’s what you did. Fast forward 30+ years, and my dad is gone as well as some aunts and uncles. My mom isn’t an easy person, and can’t keep a friend. But, her siblings and my dad’s siblings all maintain some type of relationship with her. Even if it’s just a phone call a few times a year, I’m glad that my elderly mom still has these ties. A wedding is just one day, but you are contributing to the ties that bind you together.
Anon
“A wedding is just one day, but you are contributing to the ties that bind you together.”
This. Weddings are great. Marriages sometimes don’t last. When marriages fall apart, your blood relatives are still your relatives. I would rather please my own family than make my in-laws happy, but I understand that can be a difficult perspective when people are young and in love and don’t want to make waves with their future spouse or their family.
Anon
Not all of us have close or consistent relationships with blood relatives though.
Anon
Not surprising, considering how some of you act. I doubt you have as many “close friends” as you think, or at least, you won’t have them for very long.
Anon
How will they even know? I have no idea who my cousins’ other cousins are. It’s kind of shocking to me that you’re old enough to have adult children and need advice on how to get over this.
Anon
You need to stay backed off, Mom. I get it, but you’re not getting marrried. The young people are getting married, and they want the size of wedding they want. It doesn’t get to double as a family reunion for you. Stay all the way out of it. Your siblings are grown ups. They can handle it.
Anonymous
OP here – was busy for a couple of hours and came back to a blizzard of replies. First, this lets me know there is a reason I’ve been twisting and turning on this – it’s not an easy answer.
Many of you asked about money. I deliberately did not include that in my post as I did not want to be the person who thinks if we pay for it, the quid pro quo is control over the guest list.
I have not digested all of these yet, but I really like the idea of talking to him and seeing if, once the list if final, we could offer to pay for those on my side who it would be really awkward to not invite, based on who else is invited.
I appreciate those who provided thoughtful and helpful responses – it means a lot.
Anon
I think you have the right idea about money: paying for it doesn’t give you control, but you can only ask to invite extra people if you’re willing to pay.
Anon
Have you asked your kid what the thinking is? Understanding their reason seems like a very important first step in deciding how to react (if at all).
Anon
So, I realized pretty early on that I could have a 20 person wedding or a 300 person wedding and absolutely nothing in between.
I’m the “connector” friend and relative, I probably have 20-30 friends I am in touch with on a biweekly basis and another 20 or so friends that I am in touch with on a monthly basis. This isn’t even including those people who would typically be “b list”. Most of those friends have partners. Then, you have my family. Then you have my boyfriend’s friends and family. Next thing you know, it’s a 300 person wedding.
Anon
So I always say that anyone is entitled to make their own decisions or set their own boundaries, but they have to accept the consequences of those decisions.
So, your son can decide to exclude your siblings but he has to accept if that he does that, that may change or end his relationship with those people. Or, he may have to deal with you being upset with his decision.
Anon
This would create a rift in my family. I have a super tight, old school European immigrant family. You invite by categories of people. So, if bride invites all aunts and uncles, then groom does too. And it doesn’t matter whose side has more people. This paradigm follows what one of the previous posters said nicely- weddings are about the bride and groom sharing their commitment with their families. The idea of self centered brides and grooms making it all about them is off-putting to me. Because of my tight knit family, I’m super close with all of my aunts, uncles and cousins. Yes, I get along better and am closer with some over others, but absent a real estrangement everyone gets invited. Cutting things off by category is the way to go so no one has hurt feelings. You do not want to start off married life with some of your in-laws/relatives feeling slighted.
We actually did have some family members recently have weirdly exclusive events (e.g, invite all cousins on both side and their cousins kids except one specific family of cousins – and there was not falling out with this particular family; or invite all aunts and their kids to the rehearsal dinner but exclude the uncles (aunts’ siblings) and their kids from that event), and the excluded people were well aware that they were left out and quite hurt. Since then, the excluded family members have decided not to invest in those relationships anymore since the exclusion overtly showed them how the hosts really didn’t care about them.
If the difference in number of people is not staggering and does not make the venue unworkable, offer to pay for the additional guests.
Seventh Sister
I would talk to your son about the guest list to try and figure out what’s going on. Figuring out who to invite is never a fun part of weddings, and he may have some sort of explanation why he wants Aunts 5 and 12 and 8 as opposed to the others. He may be truly clueless OR he may have thought a lot about this and only wants certain people. T
FWIW, some of my family members would go out of their way to find fault in the guest list (I think my mom is still disappointed I didn’t invite her cousin I had never met) and others would just shrug and move on.
Anon
I just got married last year and my family struggled with this as well. Both my husband and I have family that is dispersed around the country and abroad. We invited all aunts/uncles from each side, and actually most of them could not end up making the trip. They appreciated the invite. Then (and I don’t care if this is gauche) we ended up having a “B-list” of invitees who didn’t get a save the date but were invited when those family members responded that they wouldn’t be able to make it. This made our family happy to get invites, and our non-traveling/not-as-close friends happy to be able to join in the celebrations.
Anon
Looks like my holiday plans are going to be quieter than I thought due to early pregnancy and so much illness around. Any good historical fiction book recs for me? I prefer books that don’t switch character perspective every chapter.
Anon
Phillips Gregory’s The Plantagenet and Tudor novels. She has published a recommended order of reading.
Anon
These are wonderful reads.
anon
I like the Maisie Dobbs series from Jacqueline Winspear. And the Verity Kent series from Anna Lee Huber. Both take place in post-WW1 England.
Anon
Philippa Gregory is the best. And if you like regency romances then Georgette Heyer forever.
Anan
Any time period in particular?
Pauline Jilette- News of the World was pretty terrific- I want to read more of her stuff, set in post Civil War America
Ballad of Love and Glory by Reyna Grande, set during the Mexican American War.
No recent, but I still love:
– Pachinko
-When we were Orphans
– Susan Kay’s Legacy, about Queen Elizabeth
Anon
Open to any time period! My tastes are pretty varied and I like most historical fiction. I’d be especially interested in books set in medieval Europe or in central Asia. The only books in that genre I really haven’t liked are Maisie Dobbs and Hamnet.
Anon
Constellation of Vital Phenomena isn’t classic historical fiction (I think it’s set in the late 90s) but I learned a lot about the history of Chechnya and it’s a beautiful book.
Anan
if you’re into middle grade fiction, The Inquisitor’s Tale is a fabulous book about three children in medieval France on a mission to stop the burning of the Talmund.
It’s non-fiction, but A Stranger in Shogun’s City is an account a a woman, after surviving three failed marriages goes to Edo for a better life. Fascinating.
Anonymous
Wolf Hall-trilogy by H Mantel
Anon
I love Paula McLain’s books about Hemingway’s wives – The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin. The Paris Wife got more hype, but I actually thought Love and Ruin was even better. There’s also a good HBO movie about Hemingway and Gelhorn that you can watch afterwards.
Lady B
All the Light We Cannot See — then you can watch the recently released show on Netflix
The Perfume Thief
The Paris Bookseller
Flying Angels
Anon
Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
Milton Steinberg, As A Driven Leaf
twentytwo
I love Georgette Heyer for lighthearted regency fiction. I think there is a bit of character perspective switching in many, but it isn’t every chapter. Heyer is close to Jane Austin in wit, but more fizzy and silly with plotting.
PJ
Sharon Kay Penman – early medieval
Runcible Spoon
Burr, by Gore Vidal
Plus any other historical fiction by Gore Vidal, they are all super interesting!
Anon
PhilippA
Anonymous
How much should I give my assistant on a gift card?
I’m in a JD-preferred role at a firm. My role doesn’t require all the things an assistant typically does for someone practicing law. The only thing I use her for is to file my expense reports (and I’m super grateful that I don’t have to do that!). I’ve only had two expense reports this year that I remember, but it might have been as many as four. Is $100 ok? More?
Anon
Does she support anyone other than you, or are you just particularly low maintenance? $50 to $100 seems fine if you are one of several people she supports. But if you are her only person, are grateful for her even if you don’t lean on her a ton, and you can afford or would like to be more generous, $200 or $250 would be lovely.
Anon
My company doesn’t permit cash gifts and I actually think that’s a way for people to feel slighted. X assistant got $ and Y got $$ etc. I’d get an actual physical gift and take the dollar amount out of it.
Anon
I am in-house and gave mine $100 but others seem to give $50 or less. One year, we took up a collection and I was very surprised when some lawyers only contributed $20 or $25! If you can afford it, I would give $100 but I think $50 is also ok.
Anon
$100 sounds right if you share her with fewer than about 8 other people.
Cat
$100 is fine assuming as a JD-preferred role that you are not making associate level $$.
anon
I’m surprised at these high numbers! This is a person who seems to have spent maybe 4 hours supporting you this year. That, to me, isn’t significant gift category. I probably wouldn’t even think to give a gift or, if I did, it’d be on the level of a bottle of wine or cookies or a very small box of fancy chocolates.
That said the right answer is probably in your firm culture, not what people on the internet say.
Anon
It all depends about the culture. I would do a $15-20 gift card for someone with only a few interactions.
Anonymous
I’m hosting a casual brunch on the 30th. About 15 people. It is come and go and I’d like to have crock pots / finger foods instead of “food is ready let’s all sit down at the same time!” but enough food that they feel like they ate a real meal. Two attendees prefer gluten free (but not celiac, they’ll eat the egg part of quiche even if it touches the crust). Any suggestions? Totally open to good Trader Joe’s or Costco options – I would love for this to be a low key meal!
Anonymous
I like the TJs version of the Starbucks sous vide egg bites.
Anon
Celiac here – the TJ’s pao de queijo is a great finger food. Meatballs are an easy crock pot option. Costco also has frozen gluten free BBQ wings that are delicious in the air fryer (“Take Out Crispy Wings” in a black bag).
Anon
Meatballs are almost always made with breadcrumbs or flour to bind them (keep them from falling apart). I’d be very careful with store-bought meatballs.
Anon
Yeah that was my first thought when I read the suggestion. I love meatballs! Who doesn’t.
Maybe try Lil Smokies mini sausages in bbq sauce rather than meatballs, OP. They’re gluten free.
Anon
I make my own meatballs! It’s not hard. I chop up half an onion, a pepper or 2 if I have any, and gluten free pork panko (or crushed up chicharrones), then cook in a pan with the meat and seasonings. Once browned, put in a crock pot to marinate in whatever sauce you desire! – the celiac suggester
BlueAlma
Shrimp cocktail. Filling, fancy, easy to make a couple hours ahead. Or just buy. Double check the c sauce is gf
Runcible Spoon
shrimp salad
hummus with carrots, sliced peppers, and celery sticks (and pita chips)
crock pot meatballs
Cincinnati chili
baked spinach-cheese squares
donation ideas
Hello! I am finally in a financially place to donate more in support of causes I care about, but could use some suggestions for specific organization. Specifically, I care about:
-women’s education (domestic & international)
-education access
-reproductive rights (looking for a rec other than Planned Parenthood) / maternal health
-environmental/climate change
-orgs that help underprivileged communities build personal finance skills
If you have any organizations (doesn’t have to be tax deductible as long the work is being done) you’d recommend I look into, please share! Located in the US if that matters.
Anon
Check our your state or region’s ab0rtion fund.
Sunflower
Look at CAMFED, the campaign for female education in Africa. They’re rated four stars on Charity Navigator and they do amazing work. https://camfed.org/us
Also rated four stars at Charity Navigator is the Center for Reproductive Rights, which does nationwide litigation related to reproductive rights. They represented Kate Cox in the recent Texas case. https://reproductiverights.org
Anonymous
I used to work in the environmental/climate change NGO sphere and the only org I will donate to is Sea Shepherd, they’re doing the hard unpopular work, most other orgs pander to money and mostly just do lip-service. I still work in the climate change field but in a technical capacity and seeing it from the other side has only strengthened my opinion.
Anon
What state are you in? Donating locally is always a great idea!
Anon 2.0
This! The more local the better. It helps your money be directed to the cause itself and no the administrative costs.
Anon
This! I donate a bus pass per month via my city’s Food Not Bombs because transit is a huge unmet need in my community and FNB has the ability to get to people that the local social services don’t (longstanding trust issues).
Your local library will have a direct support org/foundation that funds programming and perhaps early literacy. Public libraries are essential services that constantly have their funding in jeopardy.
Your community may have different but just as urgent needs. Look and ask around your IRL circle and I’m sure you’ll get some ideas.
Anon88
National abor tion fund! I donate to them instead of PP
A.n.o.n.
+1. if you look for “[a word] fund [state]” you can find any for states particularly close to your heart. or the Natl Network has links. I’m in IL but from IN and donate mostly to IN or whatever state has recently done the stupidest thing re: reproductive freedoms as I know it’s needed there.
EE
For education access, if you have any connection to NYC, I have a very special place in my heart for Advocates for Children of New York. Wonderful people who are doing the hard work of making school accessible for students who would otherwise fall through the cracks (i.e., kids with disabilities, immigrant kids, kids in foster care, etc.).
Anon
I really like funding a few teacher projects through Donors Choose. It’s such a nice way to have a direct impact.
anon
Along the same lines, your local public school district may have an educational foundation that directly administers grants. I donate to both our local org and donors choose, and the direct classroom impact is great.
joan wilder
On environment/climate change, I was incredibly moved by reading Braiding Sweetgrass this year, and started donating to Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
AbortionAnon
For abortion causes, I second suggestions to find and support your local abortion fund.
I also think some of the more innovative work is being done by groups like Online Abortion Resource Squad, where your money goes a long way:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/oars
Reproductive Justice orgs like URGE
urge.org
your state repro policy or grassroots org (if you name your state i could get more specific).
I would mostly avoid large national orgs – they do great work but are mostly funded by large grants from private foundations already.
(Source: i work in the field but not for any of the groups listed above)
AbortionAnon
OH and if it doesn’t have to be tax deductible I would expand to direct giving to a state legislative candidate in a tight race in your state or a place like Run for Something, SisterDistrict, or the States Project!
Anon
Our daycare funds scholarships for kids who couldn’t otherwise attend and would welcome donations for that. Benefits moms of course too (since many moms stay home due to not being able to afford daycare).
Anon
Guttmacher Institute is one that I like to support.
Monte
Fistula Foundation. Cannot say enough good things.
Anonymous
Doctors without borders for international – women and reproductive health relevant.
LawDawg
I am a fan of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights. Even though I am no longer religiously affiliated, it is so important that someone make it clear that not all religions are anti-abortion.
Anon
Here’s several good abortion access funds–the article is slightly dated, but they were vetted at the time as doing great work.
https://nymag.com/strategist/2021/09/texas-abortion-ban-2021-where-to-donate.html
Also, ten good NY charities:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/giving-tuesday-10-new-york-charities-worth-supporting.html
Runcible Spoon
Check out the KIND fund, which provides desks to school children in Malawi, funds high school scholarships for girls in Malawi (where high school is not free), and funds the factories (and thereby provides the jobs) that construct the desks within Malawi.
donation ideas
Thank you all for the suggestions! I’m going to look into them and figure out my donations. Yay for putting some more good into the world!
Anonymous
I’m tired. I’m tired of politics – more so than I think I felt in 2017, 2019 ish. Tired of taking on unpaid/admin/emotional labor work at my firm. Tired of going to fancy dinners when I don’t care about the cause to make small talk with my colleagues. Tired of condescending men who are starting to respect me only because I am making more money than them, and they can’t take credit. I feel like I used to be willing to bill 2000 hours a year and now I can barely scrape by 1650. I am still young – 35- but the burnout or whatever this is, is real. I’m not fatigued in the sense that I can’t get out of bed or need to take a nap, just “over” a lot of things.
I don’t want to burn bridges but also want to just say no to a lot more in 2024. Anyone get through a similar time like this?
Anonymous
I suspect this may be what burnout or depression feels like for a highly motivated and highly achieving person who is used to accomplishing a great deal at a very high level.
anon a mouse
What do you do for fun? How do you fill your cup? When I start to feel burned out I find it helpful to look toward something good and not just away from something draining. Can you figure out what will help reignite your energy and then draw some boundaries around that? That might help you at work too – you can’t do the minor networking event because you have something else to go to.
same same
I’m 38, and I’ve been feeling the same way. Like sure, I CAN do this thing. Or I could just not. But I’m a type-A gunner, so even “not” doing the thing still yields decent results.
I just got a promotion at work, and I’m struggling to feel excited about it.
I just completed a huge project that took over my life for 6 months, and I just feel detached from it. Everyone told me it was a huge success, congratulations, etc., and all I could think was that I’m glad it’s over. I feel zero ownership, very little pride, or even a sense of relief… just detached, like I’m watching a movie of someone completing a big project.
I took the DASS test recently, and it was the first time that I opened it up and didn’t immediately close it, rolling my eyes that it was too extreme and therefore not relevant. I scored in the “severe stress” category, but normal range on depression and anxiety. This is actually helpful to pinpoint the differences, so you might try taking it to see exactly which negative feelings you have.
In my case, I do think it’s burnout. I’m still able to get out of bed, I do still find joy in my hobbies, I’m able to maintain a reasonably healthy lifestyle, etc. But I’m generally irritable, I have irrational reactions to small inconveniences, and I feel overwhelmed by any new information or stupid question.
In sum, yes, I feel similarly. I’m hoping that taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays will help, but I am also seriously evaluating the things I’m chasing, because this negativity is NOT sustainable.
Anon
What do you want?
I realize that is an existential question that requires serious thought but it will also drive your best options moving forward. My suggestion would be to take a week or two off (and yes I know that is easier said than done; on the other hand, at 1650 you are not buried in work and could probably do three weeks’ worth of work in one if you buckle down, which would then give you some time off. Go somewhere warm if you can afford it, sleep, do something that feeds your soul (whatever that looks like for you), and write down what you want your life to look like in six months, 1 year, 5 years. Then start working on what it takes to make your life look like that.
I obviously have no idea what your work situation looks like and it might be that you can carry on 1650 long-term, but one thing to consider is whether that is true. At my old firm (I am now in-house) they might have put up with that for one year for someone who had been a rockstar but it would not be sustainable long-term, in which cae you should either address your lack of motivation or start looking for an exit.
Good luck.
Anon
I really suggest you read the book Burnout, by Nagoski, or listen to a podcast or two whee they are guests (Nagoski are sisters).
I agree with the poster above that in law firms, especially women, especially younger partners, you are asked to do so much more labor and nonbillable firm service work than similarly-situated men, you are navigating gender politics and so much sexism (even in the most woke firms, there’s microaggressions every day–“Oh–I had no idea you liked basketball, and I invited your client with me to the game and just…forgot you!”, etc. ) It’s exhausting.
It’s OK to say No more often (within reason). It’s still biglaw–you do have to play the game a bit. But burnout is real, and sometimes it takes the form of apathy or just not being able to get the energy to do a thing. Burnout is insidious and hard to get over. It’s physical (it can make your bloods/labs go haywire!).
I’d also think about doing an energy or time audit. I’m sure you already bill in .1s, but…think about, as the poster said above, what fills your cup. Schedule vacations in advance and arrange for coverage, and build a bench of senior associates and counsel who can handle most things (they won’t steal your clients!). Block non-negotiable weekly time for a hobby. You need to do what makes you happier, if this year didn’t reasonate for you.
Someone else posted this earlier this week (thank you!), but take a look at YearCompass (just google it). It’s a self-audit, free that helps you reflect and set better goals for next year. I loved it. Can’t wait to do it over break.
Hugs–this time of year is rough in biglaw. Hang on and then think about how you can work your plan for next year to make things better!
Anon
Adding to the wedding thread, I am wondering about the ettiquette regarding who pays for the wedding these days? Son and GF are now discussing marriage as both are close to graduating college and grad school. Our income is close to 200K and we are professionals with an only child. GF family has real money. I expect them to want to fund a wedding with all the bells and whistles. What are the general expectations of the groom family now? If you want to tell me that it is too early to think about this, don’t. This is the place for general musings and questions.
Cat
Totally family dependent. My parents paid 100% for my wedding and didn’t expect anything from my husband’s parents other than the tradition that they host & pay for the welcome party / rehearsal dinner. That night has crept in scope to almost being a mini-reception (think – open bar and food for all out of town guests for a few hours) so can cost more than you might think if you’ve got a lot of travelers on the guest list.
Anon
Following, as a mom of three boys! My wedding was very traditional; parents paid for most of it, DH’s parents paid for flowers and rehearsal dinner. We didn’t do a brunch or other activities. (We did stay at the hotel with our guests and saw each other at breakfast the next day, but everyone paid for their own meals.)
Anon
I would say it’s actively a bad look for parents to contribute different amounts to their own children’s weddings these days (i.e., contribute all or more for daughters’ weddings than for sons), but there’s no expectation that both families contribute at all or the same amount as each other. We as a couple privately and separately set a budget we were comfortable with, and then both sets of parents independently gave us a dollar amount they were able and interested in contributing without knowing the budget, though I suspect my parents at least were able to guess the ballpark number.
Anon
I think that we will do (2 joint kids, one step kid, 2 girls and 1 boy) is give all kids $X to get started with and say that what they don’t spend on a wedding they should spend on a house, but they will all get the same and an urging to spend as little as possible on a wedding and as much of it as possible on a house, even if the house comes before the wedding and before a SO. But who knows really. What I don’t want is for one kid to say, not get married and expect a ton for a house or one to expect two weddings to be funded or someone to marry someone with big fancy plans to expect that to be funded for just them. Like if we died before they got married, they’d just fund their wedding out of their $ and probably spend more wisely because it is their $. Spending others’ money is where IMO things get crazy.
That said, I will absolutely fund a funeral costs for me and DH and any other family who dies (a funeral is a family reunion also, to the point of knowing now that some family members will go but can’t afford to fly or for a hotel and funding that, and also families need to eat in their grief and funding means for the days of being in town).
this!
I love this idea! I grew up in a traditional household, and my mom and MIL wanted a large, traditional wedding. Husband and I are much more practical, but assumed we’d have a large, traditional wedding as well, given the culture. My parents gave me a generous budget and told me that whatever I didn’t spend on the wedding would go to my brother. Given the relationship with my brother, that was a huge motivator to spend all the money on a big wedding.
We had 300+ guests, so cake and dinner for all those people cost a lot. We also paid for the bridesmaid’s dresses and groomsmen’s tuxes, along with some lodging costs for the wedding party, since we got married right after college and our friends had limited funds.
When my brother married a few years later, he ended up blowing through the budget that his wife’s family set, so my parents covered the additional amount. They decided to give me a check for the difference to make things equal. This was completely unnecessary, but my parents had the funds and wanted to spend the same amount of money on each kid. They spent more on grad school for my sister, but less on her wedding, so I think that also factored into the decision to give me a check to balance out the total amount on adult decisions for each of us.
Now that we’re older and we’ve all made different choices (grad school for me and a doctorate for my sister, kids for my siblings vs. I’m childfree, owning houses in LCOL vs. renting in HCOL, etc.), I think the lump sum to spend on life choices is the most equitable. Not getting married? Great! Here’s $$. Want a tiny wedding and a downpayment on a house? Great! Here’s $$. Going to grad school and then a huge, fancy wedding because you and spouse make lots of money? Great! Here’s $$.
Anne-on
+1 – this is the best and sanest way to do it. Plus, paying for the wedding yourselves means you can shut down the random requests for the way you ‘must’ do things from relatives.
Anonymous
Yeah, I really resented that my ex-fiancé’s wealthy parents paid 100% of his sister’s fancy wedding but didn’t plan to help us at all, even though they knew I would personally shoulder the entire cost of the wedding because I was raised by a single mom who can barely support herself (I later found out that their son also thought this was fair because the bride’s side should pay, and even though he had promised to split the cost of the wedding with me he didn’t actually plan to pay a dime). They also had a long guest list that they did not offer to help pay for. His mom begrudgingly paid for flowers after I told her I wouldnt have any flowers because I couldn’t afford it and I don’t care enough about flowers to sacrifice on something else. She said she would be embarrassed for her friends and family to come to a wedding with no flowers. If the wedding had actually happened, I’m sure she would’ve been embarrassed by a whole host of cost cutting measures.
AbortionAnon
In my social circles, many/most couples paid their own way, maybe with some gifts from parents as available (but like, $5k gifts, not $50k gifts).
I always found it so absolutely insane to imagine a woman’s family should pay. So bizarre and outdated and sexist and heternormative and ugh. Just gross.
Anonymous
YES x1000000 to your last paragraph.
Anon
I think of it like this is a party that the bride’s mother hosts and pays for (and it is a big life event for her). It’s at her convenience and in her town. The groom’s family, if not local, rightly hosts the people they drug away to the bride’s town the night before b/c those people are hungry and from out of town. That makes a certain amount of sense to me actually, if we think of the whole of human existence, when people got married out of high school (so all $ was the parents’ $), and not the last 50 years.
Now, IMO, the wedding-industrial complex is truly insane. And with people so saddled with school debt and how prevalent divorce is, makes no sense to spend $$$ on.
I do think that as more and more kids are only kids, they will have no aunts, uncles, or cousins any more to invite to anything and it will be 100% friends and dad’s fifth wife Shirley who you are only just meeting now for the first time, so even if you’re not close, you are still going to be stuck with some people you have to invite to your wedding.
Anonymous
I wrote about my wedding below but that’s how my mom saw this. A party she wanted to throw in me and my husband’s honor. It was her way of saying “Anons dad and I are happy about this marriage.”
We had good jobs and we’re 30 at the time but we had just bought a house when we got married and there’s just no way we could have thrown a fancy wedding for ourselves. In my experience fancy weddings are mostly paid for by parents unless the folks getting married are much older.
test run
This is how it tends to go in my social circle as well, with the exception of friends who had large traditional Indian weddings. We put together a wedding budget assuming we’d pay for the whole thing (including rehearsal dinner and welcome drinks), but my husband’s parents ended up giving us a gift that covered about a third of the total cost.
An.On.
This is how husband and I did it, but we were also mid-30s when we got married and thus fairly decently established with savings, etc. We had a small wedding and never asked for funds, but all the parents made separate offers/gifts (food/hosting/cash, etc, no strings attached). I have no idea whether my parents gave equal amounts to my siblings’ weddings – it’s none of my business – but I would be very surprised if it wasn’t equal.
Anon
OP here. Yes, it seems outdated to me as well. And that’s why I am asking if this is still the norm. Also, her family is well-off and more traditional.
Anon
My 2012 wedding followed traditional payment guidelines. Parents paid for the small but nice wedding (~$15k), in laws paid for a rehearsal dinner (~$1k), we paid for our own rings, honeymoon and dress/suit.
Anonymous
My parents offered to pay $20k or for the wedding, whichever came first.
I married an only child from a fairly well off family. They hosted a very nice engagement party, paid for a very nice rehearsal dinner and gave us a check for $10k for our wedding gift/ I think technically it was meant for our honeymoon. They had like 15 guests total at our wedding (small family, out of state).
Anne-on
Very family dependent. I’d talk with your son early on when you know they are getting engaged to let the know what you are comfortable contributing. I’d say the most important thing (much like the college fund discussions!) is to let them know early how much you can contribute, and then understand that it may mean you have less say in the arrangements.
In my experience with friends who got married in their late 20s/early 30s, the couple contributed a significant amount of money themselves. It was usually 30-40% (or more) funded by the couple, 40% brides family, 20% grooms family (often as a lump sum or lump sum plus hosting a rehearsal dinner). There are sometimes ‘bequests’ made by various family members – grandma’s antique ring may be used to propose, the godmother/grandmother may pay for the bride’s dress, a family friend may offer to contribute towards the bar bill, etc. Those were (in my experience) treated like nice surprises but not expected, and the funds saved were usually reallocated towards a honeymoon.
Anonymous
Our parents split the cost equally and that was mostly driven by me saying from the start that DH was getting just as married as I was, our guest lists were pretty much equal, and both families got about equal amount of say in planning the wedding events. Now granted, DH and I didn’t have a big wedding and I believe the costs altogether were around $5k in 2009 when we got married (we were so young :D). So in our situation we are not talking big money here and much more casual situation than A Wedding. Being 21 helped with my lower standards as well :). I also have a very good relationship with my in-laws. Both sets of parents were/are solidly comfortable middle class. Personally I still think this is the most logical way that isn’t steeped in weird patriarchal tradition.
On the flip side, my parents paid for another one of my sister’s wedding/wedding reception 100%. They are just generally more traditional…and her in-laws were super cheap. Like, her in-laws invited us all to a rehearsal dinner and then we all paid for ourselves, which was so awkward and my husband still brings up 12 years later. LOL
My youngest sister just got married and it was definitely the biggest/fanciest Wedding of the three of us. They planned it for a long time and wanted A Wedding, and were older and planned on paying for more of it themselves. I think my parents paid for some of it, my sister and her husband paid for some of it, and I heard that her in-laws said that they were going to pay for a little of it but I’m not actually sure they did. It was very much specific expense driven, vs. a percentage, if that makes sense. Like her in-laws paid for the rehearsal dinner (which we did not get asked to pay for ourselves once we got there, LOL), my parents paid for the morning after/gift opening brunch.
So all that is to say, I think it’s pretty family and situation dependent. It went three completely different ways with the same set of parents + their three daughters.
Anonymous
Our 2016 wedding cost about $35k total — my parents paid around $20k and my husband and I paid for the rest ourselves. My husband’s parents helped him out with the ring and they paid for and arranged the rehearsal dinner, and I don’t know how much those cost.
Anon
My son is way too young to get married, but we plan on offering a flat amount – likely $25k-$30k – as our contribution to the festivities, in total. So rehearsal dinner, wedding, honeymoon, all of it. Or, they can use that money as the down payment for a house.
If someone – my son, his intended, that person’s family, etc. – wants a big blowout wedding, someone will have to figure out how to bridge the gap between our contribution and what they want to do. The same way we’re offering our son a flat amount per-year for college and if he wants to go to a college that costs more than what we’re offering him, he has to figure out how to bridge that gap. I was not given very much in my life and value what I have because I had to work for it. My son has been raised with those values, and has had to work for what he has. If he meets and wants to marry someone who is accustomed to being given whatever they want without working for it and putting skin in the game, A. I wish him all the very best of luck with that situation and B. I’m not responsible for how other people raise their kids, and certainly am not responsible for living up to other people’s expectations of what I “should” contribute to a fancy wedding.
I’ve known people who ended up working years longer than they planned because they got sucked into paying escalating expenses for an increasingly-more-elaborate wedding that spiraled out of control. In some cases, people pulled money out of their retirement accounts to fund wedding expenses, which to me is absolute madness. We are upper-middle class and have plenty put away, but my husband and I both have chronic health problems and may not be able to work well into our 60s, so we need to plan well and comprehensively for the future. I had an inexpensive, sensible wedding and am still married two decades later. I never, ever would have asked my parents or my in-laws to compromise their financial future to pay for my wedding, and I sure hope whomever my son ends up marrying doesn’t expect us to do that, because they’re going to be disappointed with the answer I give if they ask.
Anon
I mentioned above that both my daughter and son are getting married this year or next. We gave the same amount (several 10s of 1000s) to each of them for wedding expenses, with no expections of what expenses they will pay from that. In addition to that we picked up some expenses for my daughters wedding that were small … ie, I paid for a bunch of the table centerpieces because I found exactly what she wanted on FB marketplace on a weekend she was out of town, I paid to dryclean her dress after the wedding, a few other small expenses. We also gave the best man/maid of honor a few hundred to defray expenses related to the bachelor/bachelorette parties.
We paid for their college education and therefore saved for that and not the weddings. My husband comes from a culture where people open wedding savings accounts for their daughters the day they are born and my bil is pretty appalled that dh didn’t do that. Both my kids wanted to pay for their own weddings and had no expectations that we would gift them money but were happy that we did. I have no idea how much either wedding is ended up costing in total.
anon
Elopements are really really popular these days. We eloped in 2022. Earlier this year, one of DH’s colleagues announced he eloped on their group chat of old colleagues (all guys in their 30s). DH chimed in that he did too, as did two other guys on the thread. So something like 4 out of 10 guys in this friend group had eloped in the last two years.
And part of the reason we eloped was that I had three friends from law school who all had also eloped and they all seemed very happy about it.
Anonymous
My parents paid for my wedding but it wasn’t that it was expected. My mom told me she wanted me to have my dream wedding with everything exactly as I always pictured it…when my daughter got married. This, she explained, was her show. It was lovely she and my dad paid for everything but my dress. But no, that money was not up for grabs for other purposes. They threw the wedding they wanted with the money they chose to spend at that time. I saw it as an incredibly generous gift, with a million strings attached but not an obligation.
Anon
I think that if the bride’s family is paying for the bulk of the wedding, there is still an expectation of the groom’s family paying for the rehearsal dinner and the bar. My husband’s parents were already dead when we got married, so there wasn’t any contribution from them. My parents paid for most of it, and we paid for the rest of it. It was small, simple wedding. No bridal party, no rehearsal dinner. If bride’s family was paying, Anon, I’d at least offer to pay for the rehearsal dinner and bar!
Seventh Sister
My parents gave me a flat amount for my wedding which worked out to about half of the total sum, my spouse and I paid for the rest. This is my tentative plan if my kids get married.
My in-laws insisted on hosting and paying for the rehearsal dinner and honestly, were huge pains the ass about it. They insisted on a particular (not-very-good) restaurant that had a hard cap on the number of guests, which meant I was very glad that a couple of the bridesmaids/groomsmen had spouses that couldn’t make the rehearsal dinner.
Anon
My husband and I paid for it 100% ourselves. Made is very easy to do things our way.
Anonymous
Do you have a recommendation for an app or program specifically geared toward women who want to build muscle? I’ve followed Holly Baxter before but she’s a bit too intense for me: I have kids and a full time job so I can’t dedicate 3 hours a day to working out. I may end up going back to her program but wanted to see if there are other suggestions. I have access to a squat rack and a full weight set and dumbbells.
Anon
Get Mom Strong. It’s not just for postpartum, there are a bunch of programs including an advanced level (though I think the non-advanced ones are still legitimately hard). I’ve tried a couple others but I keep coming back to this one because it’s been so effective for me without a huge time committment.
Anon88
Caroline Girvan’s Iron program is great and on YouTube
Anonymous
Caroline girvan on YouTube is my jam
Anonymous
A lot of people like New Rules of Lifting for Women.
anon
I liked Strong Curves, and still follow its “formula” more or less of how to structure a full body workout.
strong lifts 5x5
I did the Strong Lifts 5×5 program for a while. It’s time efficient because it’s focused on core lifts and some accessory work, but since each set is quite intense, you don’t need to do a million reps.
Anon
The wedding thread has me curious – do most of you live near your extended family (aunts/uncles/cousins)? How often are you in touch? I was surprised to see so many people feeling obligated to invite everyone. I never get invited to family events out of state and certainly wouldn’t expect an invite.
My mom was 1 of 4 and my dad 1 of 5. I’m in my 30s, and I have aunts and uncles I haven’t seen in 20+ years since I was a child at our grandparents’ funerals. Consequently, I’m not close with any cousins.
My mom’s siblings live all over the country: northeast, southwest, CA, midwest. My dad’s sibings are in the northeast, Pacific NW, and FL. There’s no “family home” or central gathering place on either side. This doesn’t seem strange to me. We aren’t estranged, we just live all over and don’t really keep in touch besides liking posts on social media or a few calls a year. Now I’m wondering if this scenario is unusual?
Leatty
I grew up with my entire extended family within 45 minutes. I was extraordinary close to one side of the family (which was small) – we got together for every birthday, holiday, and spent time together outside of those events. Between the cousins scattering across the country and several of the adults passing away, it’s really just occasional text messages now. The other side of the family was a more superficial connection, although we still got together when I was growing up. The cousins have since scattered across the country, and since we were never close, our communications are limited to well wishes on the birth of a child or short conversations at a funeral.
Anonymous
Normal to me! My extended family is thousands of miles away. They do not get invited to events.
Anon
I don’t live near them and am not close to them but still think it’s standard to invite them to major life events like weddings and funerals.
Anonymous
I think it’s a flavor. I don’t see my family much and they are almost all in a 3 hour radius.
Growing up, I lived 20 minutes from my grandparents and aunts/uncles on my mom’s side and <1 hour from everyone on my dad’s side. Extended family was my parents’ social circle so we spent a lot of time with them (all holidays, quarterly birthdays, pool weekends etc).
Anon
i do not live near my extended family. i have family who live everywhere from seattle to california to atlanta to Philly to DC to NY to Boston, etc. all were invited to my wedding and my sister’s wedding. all also flew in for my mom’s funeral. growing up i saw many twice a year, but now i might only see once a year or every other year. my dad and mom are both 1 of 3, but both grew up close with a set of first cousins, so to me growing up there wasn’t much distinguishing between my first and second cousins.
for thanksgiving this year we were at my dad’s house (my mom passed away in 2019) and we hosted my mom’s two first cousins and their families. there is some estrangement with my mom’s siblings, which makes me sad bc they were a big part of my childhood, but they were terrible to my mom. DH commented that his parents would never host the relatives on the opposite side.
DH actually grew up living closer to his extended family than I did, but his parents did not make maintaining family relationships a priority vs. we all try to fly in once a year for a jewish holiday. this will probably change with my kids’ generation because we are more dispersed now than we were. we used to mostly all be up and down the east coast so we could drive which made it easier, but now we are everywhere.
Anon
I’m not super close to my aunts, uncles or cousins. I guess that’s unusual. My mom has siblings she doesn’t talk to, so I don’t see that side of the family. I would definitely not invite all my aunts/uncles/cousin to my wedding.
NYCer
My mom is one of 5 and my dad is one of 4. I grew up within 4 hours of most of my extended family, though everyone is more scattered now. My mom’s side of the family got together more regularly while I was growing up (many Sunday dinners, etc.), and my dad’s side more often only on holidays. I invited all of my aunts and uncles to my wedding – and cousins too FWIW, though the cousins didn’t all come which is fine.
Anon
I live (and grew up) with all of my parents siblings (and all grandparents, when they were still alive) being ~20 minutes away or less. My dad’s sister and her husband lived two houses down from us, so my cousin is more like another younger brother to me – also, my aunt and uncle met because my uncle and dad were friends, so our two families are quite close. I grew up seeing my mom’s parents 2-3x a week even though they lived about 20 minutes away.
I am VERY close with my dad’s other sister and her husband – they now live about 45 minutes away from me but I see them at least 1-2x a month, if not more. They couldn’t have kids, so my brother and I are very close with them (and will eventually be the ones handling elder care).
My mom’s siblings are similarly close and I probably see them quarterly + most holidays. I enjoy them, but they’re a bit more formal so we don’t do the random get togethers that I do with my dad’s side.
Unfortunately, most of my cousins have left our home city, aren’t great at communicating, AND spend most holidays with their inlaws. I’m still pretty close to a few of them, but others I regrettably just see at occasional holidays + weddings. My cousins’ lack of “showing up” has actually become a bit of a point of contention among my entire extended family…
Anon
Yeah, I was just thinking about this too and I think this is what’s influencing people’s responses. I haven’t seen one of my uncles in 15+ years and have only met his kids (my cousins) once (they’re 15-20 years younger then me and live far away). I have another set of cousins I was closer with growing up (but still weren’t local), and am regularly in touch with their mother, but haven’t seen the cousins very much since we dispersed all over the country as young adults. I eloped so the wedding issue didn’t come up, but if I were to get married today, I would invite my aunt and the second set of cousins, but probably not my uncle and the first set since I don’t know them at all and my uncle can’t travel, though maybe I would have give him a courtesy invite?
Cat
Family is scattered across the country, but everyone is invited to all the first cousin weddings and generally attends, though maybe just the actual blood relative attends vs. bringing the whole family of 4-5.
anon
Geographically dispersed on both my mom and dad’s side. We generally get together for big life events (weddings, funerals) and whenever we travel within an hour or two or each other. On Dad’s side, there are some strong genes and we all grew up with at least one or two experiences of renting cabins together so there is a lot of shared experience and stories (uhm, generational trauma) within the group. On mom’s side, we didn’t have that same overlapping childhood, so it’s not the same level of pick back up with someone you haven’t seen in two years.
Chl
It is really interesting to hear about different family dynamics and assumptions. My parents are each one of 6 (so are my husbands parents) and many lived within a couple hour drive for our childhoods so we knew many of our cousins well. There is also a contingent where a couple aunts moved away and had kids that are maybe 10 years on average younger than the bunch. I think I have 25 1st cousins total. Our unwritten rule for weddings has generally been you invite all the aunts and uncles and 1st cousins but not their children. It is not considered rude for a cousin to decline the invite if travel is involved and frequently cousins will come alone and not with their spouse or kids and we have a grand old time. There was one wedding where finances were tight and only the blood related aunts /uncles went and it was so unique that it was fine. Picking and choosing who to invite based on who you were close to would be frowned upon but sometimes those people might just decline to come and that’s ok
Anon
I don’t live near any extended family. I grew up knowing which US states I had cousins in (my primary use for my United States placemat) and we did a gift exchange at Christmas that I always looked forward to. Cousins tended to visit maybe every other year. I can count on one hand the number of times we went to visit my mom’s siblings growing up. They were several states away and it was just too expensive.
Now as an adult, I have one sibling in the same state but a 4 + hour drive away (Californian life!), my other sibling lives a 4 hour plane ride away. My kids know their cousins from childhood get together from when Grandma was still with us, but they don’t really know the plane ride away cousins.
I really hope my kids can stay closer together as adults, but this stuff happens as people move around for jobs or whatever.
Anon
When my husband and I got married 20+ years ago, it was more or less a planned elopement. My mom and siblings were there, as well as a handful of friends. We were trying to keep it to 30 people because we just didn’t want a big wedding.
In the days before the wedding my mom would occasionally say something like “my sister is probably not going to be able to make it for the wedding” and I was like “I didn’t invite her!” And I then had to ask my mom to please stop inviting people to my wedding. She said “but they’re family.” The truth is, they’re family I barely know.
When you’re trying to have a small wedding, you have to make some pretty strict distinctions about which friends are invited, and it is really hard to figure out where the cutoff is. I didn’t want one of those precious spaces going to an aunt I hadn’t seen in 15 years, and who had never met my husband to be.
Maybe that’s how the son in the earlier post feels. No one needs to have guests forced upon them if they don’t want that large of a wedding.
Anony
My extended family is scattered and I wouldn’t say I’m close to them/regularly talk, but when we do get together the dynamic really clicks and we have a great time.
Anonymous
No and almost never. My mom was 1 of 4, though I didn’t realize I had an uncle on that side until I was older (drug issues). I don’t even know where some of that side’s cousins are now and wouldn’t recognize them if I passed them on the street; there was some issue and my mother stopped talking to them, but I was too young and don’t really know why. My aunts/uncles/cousins on my dad’s side still live in our hometown, but I live about 8 hours away and only go home once or twice a year and only seem them every few years, if that. We did invite most of them to our wedding (not the cousins I don’t know where they are) but only about half came, which was expected. Same thing on that side–not estranged, just don’t really keep in touch. One of my cousins is still pretty close with my parents, though.
Anon
This resonates with me. I’ve met an aunt once in my life, never met her kids, and wouldn’t recognize any of them walking down the street. We live on opposite coasts. My father similarly has only seen her once in 40+ years (the time I met her), and I can’t imagine inviting her or her family to anything, nor does she invite me.
Senior Attorney
My mom had 5 brothers. She came to California from West Virginia as a young woman and didn’t have much contact with her family after that — long distance phone calls were very expensive and so was travel. We did a family cross-country road trip once when I was a kid and saw them all, and as I got older some of the brothers visited, but most of the contact was with the one brother who also settled in California. We were much closer to my dad’s one brother who lived an hour away — growing up we had most holidays with them and their kids and my paternal grandmother. We went to the paternal cousins’ weddings (and they came to my first one) but weren’t even invited to any maternal cousins’ events.
Anonymous
We live all over, but until my generation, essentially everyone in my father’s extended family lived in the same place. Those generations still live there. It was a very big deal that my father moved away, to NYC of all places. A very big deal. I am still surprised when Google tells me there is someone with my last name living somewhere else, but they are all younger people.
Anonymous
My 22 cousins are scattered across the country but everyone gets invited to weddings. We treat weddings like family reunions. I think there are two reasons for this: my grandparents are Catholic so marriage is a big deal, and most of my aunts and uncles have the means to pay for a 200 person wedding.
Anon
I’m the OP, and this is an interesting point about wedding sizes corresponding to faith. My dad and his family were raised super Catholic by immgrant parents: Catholic school, altar boy, everything. He and his siblings are all very lapsed due to the s3x abuse that happened in our city. He’s disclosed physical abuse from the nuns at school, and sadly I wouldn’t be surprised, if some of them experienced more than that. I’ve been to many 200-300 person Catholic weddings for friends I grew up with, but not for our family as they all essentially left the church as adults. My parents got married at City Hall, and all but 1 of his siblings left the state as soon as they could, so we’re not close with any of them. I think of the 5 of them total, only 1 even had a wedding. It was, indeed, a large Catholic mass and reception when I was very little.
Anon
My maternal aunts and uncles all live very far away. In the close to 40 years my mom has lived in our state, only one of her siblings has ever come to visit. We used to go visit them every summer. I’ve gone to all of my cousins’ weddings. I eloped, but I doubt they would have come to mine and I probably would have invited them banking on them not coming. I have fond feelings towards all of my cousins and do have a good time when we’re together, but we’re not close at all.
Anon
I’m not close to my cousins in the sense that I’ve never once texted or called any of them (I have 19 first cousins), and similar for my aunts and uncles (though one has texted me a few times!), but we celebrated holidays and milestones together growing up.
Now, we most often see each other at weddings, and have a great time catching up. I love that we all are invited and make efforts to attend, despite living all over. So I don’t think it’s weird at all to invite family even if you only see them sporadically throughout the years. There is still a shared history, and a link to the same people and places.
anon
It all depends on the specific relationship. My mom has two siblings, one of whom moved a few hours away when I was little, and we get together maybe every couple of years, but are not that tight knit. The other sibling has always been close geographically (for a while in the same high rise, now about an hour away) but we see her just as rarely. On my dad’s side there is a big clan, and one of my uncles we are particularly close to, through living in the same city, then 5 hours apart, and now again closer. Others do their own thing, and also relationships shift over time. Others are more distant relatives (twice removed), and we can only see each other maybe annually, but there is a lot of love there. Same with a few of my in-laws, who are very hard to travel to, but whenever we manage to see each other it’s lovely.
Anon
I don’t how relevant my experience is but I am sharing because I think it’s important for people to realize all families are different . . .
I have zero cousins, three uncles, no blood aunts (two by marriage), and no living grandparents. Two of my uncles live in England (where my father is from) and out of their two wives, I have met one once I think? I am not sure I even remember the other one’s name. I have seen the UK uncles a combination of four times in my life? I haven’t seen or talked to my mother’s brother in almost 30 years. Every once in a while my mom drops some nugget about some long lost great great aunt by marriage in Switzerland or something but these people are 100% strangers to me. No one is toxic here. We just aren’t a close family.
I had living grandmothers growing up. One in England who I met once? The other who lived in AZ (we are mid Atlantic) and who I saw maybe once a year for a bit then much less as I got older. She was unpleasant and had untreated and mental health issues which didn’t foster a close relationship between she and my mom.
TLDR: none of my extended family has ever lived close to me and some not ever in the same country. None of these people would be invited to my wedding and none of them would be upset about it! Lol
Anon
OP here: very good example! Families all look very different. I only ever knew 2 grandparents. My dad’s parents died very young before I was born. My mom’s parents both died by the time I was 10, and they lived 1500 miles and 2-3 plane rides away from us. I met them maybe 5 times, although my grandma called me on the phone. We weren’t estranged by any means, they just lived in a rural area with no jobs, so my mom and her siblings all scattered as family farming wasn’t a desireable or economically viable life path.
Anon
To me this is unusual but also seems very usual for Americans. This is not the norm for most immigrant cultures in the US that I’ve known or observed. There’s a greater value placed on family. And even distance doesn’t matter. My mom has a *weekly* zoom with her sister and two cousins (they’re sisters). They are in CA/Israel/Amsterdam/Melbourne and picked a time that worked for all 4 years ago. All haven’t lived in the same country since they left the home country 30+ years ago. They even each try to have their grandkids over at the time of the weekly call so that they can show them off to each other! The families in all four countries are invited to each wedding.
Anon
OMG this is so sweet. My mom talks to her sister every day even though my aunt is often not sure who many people are these days (incl. her husband).
Sasha
Both my parents both came from large families and all of my aunts/uncles/cousins live in maybe a 5 mile radius. I didn’t realize how unusual this was until I got older. The culture I grew up in places a very strong emphasis on physical proximity of families, so everyone stays very close. I see a side of my extended family probably once per month–my mom’s side more often than my dad’s.
For the wedding question specifically, the expectation is that all aunts/uncles and 1st cousins are invited, but cousins’ children typically are not. To not invite an aunt/uncle/1st cousin would be considered an intentional slight and would cause major family drama.
Anon
I am not super-close to my aunts and uncles but my mother has four siblings and they are super-close. They talk multiple times a week on group chat and travel to see each other frequently. I didn’t grow up seeing them often because my mom’s family is solidly middle class (in some cases lower-middle) and flung across the country, and traveling with kids is expensive. We did have several times when people drove 18 hours or more to attend a family gathering, but that could only happen so much.
For me, letting my mom invite her siblings to my wedding would be about her happiness, not my own closeness to her siblings or how I felt about the situation. My mom really loves her siblings. It would be very sad for her to be at a major life event and not have them with her. People’s mileage may vary in these situations but there’s no way, as a bride, I would have wanted to be sitting at my wedding, looking at my mom and knowing she had sadness inside because her siblings weren’t there. That would have felt awful.
Anonymous
We live on the same street as both my brothers and their families, and one of my nieces. The only way to be closer is if we lived in the same house! And it’s great!
Anon
I LOVE this! I grew up like this and it was really great. I plan on moving to either my parents’ neighborhood or a nearby neighborhood (walking / biking distance) when I move back to the burbs.
Anon
Not only do all of both sides of my family live in the Philly area (some city, some suburbs), but we all also live on the same “side of the river”. I grew up seeing extended family most days of the week.
Anon
Oh, and to add my dad is one of 3 and my mom is one of 4. 9 cousins.
Anonymous
My family is exactly as you describe. We recently had a chance to move to 45 mins from my favorite uncle and his family and I’m tickled to live so close to family!
Meanwhile, my husband grew up with 3 aunts within 10 minutes and was a feral ’80s child climbing trees and getting into typical country kid scrapes with a pack of cousins. Children were disciplined or loved on by any of the aunts as if they were their own.
Caroline
My mom and dad are each 1 of 4. I thought that thread was interesting because while I would want all of my moms side first cousins to come I don’t really have a relationship with the dads side. I went to some of their weddings but not all, mainly because they live in a different country. But even when I went I was invited as part of my family – they didn’t individually invite me. I haven’t seem them in 5 years, and although we have a giant whatsapp group, haven’t talked to them individually. I’m not even sure if they like my instagram posts. I don’t know their husbands names off the top of my head, forget about being able to recognize them.
All that being said, my dad would probably be sad if I didn’t invite them to my (hypothetical) wedding. So that will be interesting if the time comes.
Anonymous
At one point in my early 30s my brother and three of my cousins all lived within a five minute walk from my home. My mom and dad were seven minutes down the road by car and we were always joking about traffic, snacks, gas and rest stops in order to get there.
No one is walking distance anymore but most are still very local. I’m so sad that my dad keeps talking about moving to Florida. I really do see moving away as a huge betrayal, for better or worse. My mother lost her mind when I moved one town over, I’m literally 12 minutes from her house and five minutes from her store. I have a cousin with a drug problem ( had to be away from people who triggered her) and an aunt who had money problems ( I think they literally moved to the cheapest town in America or something. I hear it’s awful) so those people left town but baring major issues like that I think people have a sort of obligation to stay with family if they care about them at all.
Anon
People can move for jobs, education, their spouse, the climate…there’s plenty of reasons, and I don’t see that to mean that they don’t care about their family.
My sister moved from the East Coast to the mountain west for an exciting job opportunity, and while I miss her, I’m happy she’s doing what she loves.
Anon
I’ve been downvoted to h3ll before for expressing this opinion before, but I 100% agree that family SHOULD stay nearby. I think that’s how we’re meant to live.
Anon
I would never say this out loud, but I do judge people who settle down near neither spouse’s family.
Anon
What about people who come from rural/economically depressed/otherwise undesirable areas?
Many towns have dramatically changed. As American manufacturing left, there’s a lot of once booming towns with few jobs and rapidly shrinking populations. Should people be stuck where they’re born?
Anon
I’ve always viewed it as “closest big city / metro area”. For example, my grandmother was raised on a farm in bumblefck, about half of her siblings stayed in that area and about half moved to Philly (90 minutes away, biggest city).
My grandmother was the oldest of 12 and somehow became her mom’s primary caretaker in her later years – she was still close enough to be helpful.
Anon
My mom is from the rural midwest. She left for college. When my grandpa was dying, we spent the summer there. It was 3 hours to the closest hospital…in a town of 6K people. The closest city with a 100K+ population and a college was a 6-7 hour drive. It took us that long to fly there.
Anon
And I judge people who never live anywhere besides the 5 mile radius from where they grew up.
Anon
Just because I came back and settled down in the same metro area where I grew up doesn’t mean I never left…
I was gone for 7 years and came back in my late 20s.
Anon
Even now, I live in my home metro area but I’m 13 miles away from the town I grew up in…
Anon
+1000
Anony
… and I silently judge people who settle in their hometown. To each their own.
Anonymous
Venting because I can’t IRL. My pastor and church choir director think it’s perfectly fine for someone who is still testing positive for COVID to sing in the choir with a bunch of elderly and otherwise vulnerable people as long as it’s been 5 days since the onset of symptoms. We are officially a nation of sociopaths if we can’t even make an effort to keep people safe in church.
Anonymous
I really don’t understand is why even test yourself if you’re not going to change your behavior in any meaningful way?
Also, I agree that it’s really, really dumb and unkind to sing in a church choir when sick – with Covid or otherwise.
Anon
I agree it’s bad form to sing while sick with anything, but by day 5 of Covid I was asymptomatic and that’s not uncommon. I wouldn’t assume the person is still symptomatic. OP just said they’re still “testing positive” not “running a fever and sneezing all over the place.”
Anon
One of the crucial challenges of this pandemic has been how poorly symptoms correlate with infectiousness. It would not have been this hard if people just needed to lie low while running a fever and sneezing all over the place! In fact all that’s needed is to have replicating virus and be breathing all over the place.
If someone knows they have it, the least they can do is not actively spread it in a high risk environment.
anon for this
I get it, and I’ve been on the more conservative side, but that’s officially what the CDC says as long as symptoms are improving and the person has been fever-free for 24 hours.
Anon
Such a joke. To my knowledge, they’ve never presented one shred of evidence that that approach is safe. Their own data showed a median of 8 days of testing positive at the time they made the 5-day rule.
Anon
No, you are supposed to mask from days 5 through 10 if going out in public.
Anon
“Regardless of when you end isolation
Until at least day 11:
Avoid being around people who are more likely to get very sick from COVID-19.
Remember to wear a high-quality mask when indoors around others at home and in public.
Do not go places where you are unable to wear a mask until you are able to discontinue masking (see below).”
Anon
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/isolation.html
Anon
Yeah I get that this is not supported by science, but it’s hard to fault someone for following CDC guidelines. The CDC is to blame here, imo.
That said, I was at a birthday party recently where someone was talking about it being her first day out of Covid jail (she said it was day 5, but from her description it was really day 4 – CDC says symptom onset is day 0 and not day 1) and it definitely made me nervous so I feel you OP. I didn’t catch it, fortunately.
Anon
Ffs, even as flawed as it is the CDC does NOT advise that people can go sing in a church choir on Day 5. They are literally pasted and linked in this thread. Please stop spreading false information.
Anon
It’s wild to me how personally some of you take things that are absolutely not personally aimed at you. Please calm down.
Anon
I am personally sitting here sick with COVID because of people like this. The colleague whose desk is closest to mine thought they were fine to come into work unmasked on Day 5, did not tell me they had been out with COVID but said they were just “on PTO”, proceeded to infect me, and now I am isolating in hopes that my immune-suppressed family member does not catch it. So you can eff right off with your advice that I not take this personally.
Anonymous
That was a political decision, not grounded in any science. The rationale was that people wouldn’t stay home at all if they were told to stay home longer than 5 days, and that it was more important to get doctors and nurses back on the job quickly than to protect their patients against infection.
Anon
This attitude is why I left the church. Far too many instances of the church putting favored leadership or members first, the institution itself second, god third, general society fourth, the Catholics fifth, then poor members within and all those heathens at the other denominational congregation across town dead last.
Anonymous
There’s been zero mention of Gaza at our church, and really feels like a case of politics above religion. They were all over Ukraine, but don’t seem to care about Christian’s being snipered in a church.
Anonymous
omg that’s horrible
Nora
Saw this Q on Reddit and wanted to bring it here – if you had to fire someone for poor performance, is it better to do it now (before the holidays) or in January?
January could be better because you can let them have a nice holiday first, and anyways you can’t really job search in late December. Before the holidays could be better so that they don’t spend too much over the holidays, and maybe can start updating their resume etc
Anon
I think January 100%. But also hopefully you have this person on a PIP and it won’t be a surprise.
Anon
+1
This should not be a surprise regardless of when you do it so they should already be updating their resume etc.
anon
I was the OP two weeks ago who fired someone, and I scoured AAM for relevant thoughts. People were pretty split down the two sides. I didn’t have any influence over the timing, since it was the end of that person’s probationary period and they were not able to perform their job (I am still discovering how many errors they made even on the admin-level tasks, this was not an admin job).
But yeah, most importantly it shouldn’t be a surprise for them. Performance goals should be clearly laid out and a warning must be given that performance needs to improve.
Anonymous
A probation can usually be extended, and in this situation I would do that if possible.
I just demoted someone in early December, but it wasn’t a surprise and avoided them going onto a pip so that lessened the blow ever so slightly.
Anon
January. No one is hiring now anyway. Give them as generous a severance as you can.
Anon
I was fired the week before Christmas once and it was awful.
Anon
January. Getting paid for the extra 2-3 weeks is helpful. No one is hiring now. It will make Christmas horribly stressful – money has already been spent. Lastly, it enables them to have “January 2024” as the end date on their resume, not December 2023. Just optically, it makes them look more recently employed.
Anon
100% January.
anecdata
My company has recently had layoffs, and another expected round coming up in January and fwiw, if I were going to be impacted, I wish I knew now. I could spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s revising resume, reaching out to network, etc – and also have that “vacation” time to mentally process, and enter January feeling ready to search (it would also clear up a lot of mental bandwidth that right now is going to “think through work plans for 2024”. 2 caveats are – I am financially prepared for a layoff, I might feel really different if 2 weeks pay at the end of December was the difference between making rent and not; and also, being part of a big public large layoff isn’t awkward to tell your great uncle when he asks how the job is going, in a way that “actually I just got fired” is.
Anon
If you are in BigLaw, and you are put on a PIP due to hours, but there just isn’t enough work, how sincere is that? I get that there is a sense that quality workers will always be overworked, but it seems dishonest to ask that people make work appear for themselves or divert projtlects away from a rockstar who is known to do a good job.
anonymous
Given the circumstances, I’d view the PIP as instructions to start job searching.
Senior Attorney
Absolutely.
Anon
+1 it’s a nice heads up to find a new job.
Anon
It isn’t sincere at all and is a way to force someone out either because (1) there is legitimately not enough work but they do not want to admit that; (2) they are not happy with the quality of the work but it is easier not to assign anything and then terminate for lack of hours rather than addressing the work quality issues; or (3) they are unhappy with the associate for some other reason, sometimes legitimate and often not.
If it is you, document, document, document that you are asking for work and not getting any. Also, see if you can find out whether others are busy (which is harder for remote workplaces).
Anon
Yeah, but any of those reasons are true, documenting isn’t going to help you at all. They still want you gone. Playing gotcha with them doesn’t change that.
Anon
This. Playing gotcha would just make you out to be a difficult person and a poor fit/not a team player.
Anon
Documenting is helpful when they fight your unemployment claim by arguing that you essentially quit
And yes I have seen law firms try that.
Anon
Shouldn’t the answer be, don’t quit? How can a firm argue someone quit when the firm terminates them?
Cat
serious- they don’t do those for funsies. They want you to take the hint, find another job, and leave without them having to do an actual layoff.
Anon
It’s a layoff without needing to announce a layoff. Job hunt as earnestly as possible.
Anon
PIPs are rarely about actually improving performance. I have used them that way in the past – it means the performance needs to improve or else – and in one case the performance actually did improve at least for a while – but it doesn’t sound like you have any way to actually improve in this area, so you should absolutely be looking for a new job now.
Explorette
We are in a weird environment for law firms right now, and my firm in the last year did a whiplash on people, that included putting those with low hours on PIPs, but calling it a performance issue. I think it is an attempt to reduce workforce without saying you are reducing workforce. So, if you want to stay with your firm, the only thing you can do is get your hours up asap. Cold call partners in other offices to ask for work, call the rockstar associates who might be able to delegate some work to you, do everything you can to get your hours back on track. If you don’t get your hours up, you will be let go. If you don’t think you can get enough work to get your hours up, start looking for a new job now.
Anon
My almost 23 year old daughter is very likely to get engaged soon. I’m super happy for both of them – we like the boyfriend a ton. But reading all of the above is making me realize how complicated it’s going to be just getting her married. She wants a backyard wedding with like 15 people. It could really be beautiful that way. But I have a very dramatic sibling who makes everything about her, and I can already envision her trying to be the center of attention of a 15 guest backyard wedding.
Fun times ahead! Not.
Anon
I think a small backyard wedding makes it less complicated. Congrats to her :)
Anon
Likely why Jesus’s first miracle was making sure there was wine at the wedding in Cana.
Anon
The wine would certainly help me, but will only make the attention seeking behavior that much worse. Haha
Anon
So you don’t let it be about your sibling! This is about your daughter, her partner, and what they want.
Anon
So you don’t let it be about your sibling! This is about your daughter, her partner, and what they want.
Senior Attorney
Well, then. You have your answer!
Anon
Maybe she wants a backyard wedding with 15 people because your sister is not on that guest list. I’m being serious, not sarcastic.
Anon
Entirely possible! I was reading above the You Must Invite Aunts and Uncles stuff a thinking yeah no, there is no way I’m going to do that to my kid on her day. But it is going to cause no end of drama when sibling doesn’t get an invitation.
Anonymous
As long as no other aunts are invited you’re fine. That was the point. If we’re talking less than 20 people total you might get away with scraping even that rule.
Anonymous
Well you can practice now not making your sibling your daughter’s problem!
Anon
You’re borrowing trouble! Deal with dramatic sister when you need to, but don’t waste your energy worrying about her now. And yes, if the answer is you’ll only have peace if she’s not there, then suggest she not be invited.
Anonymous
Hurray for your daughter and those plans are wonderful! I’m a huge proponent of that type of a wedding. It’s really up to your daughter, but do you have to invite parent’s siblings? We drew a hard line on attendance at my small wedding – grandparents, parents, our siblings. That was it. No aunts or uncles or cousins. If I were to do it now, I’d add my nieces/nephews and my best friend – but wouldn’t change anything else at all. The simple and small attendance greatly simplified things. I even had cousins visiting on vacation from out of the state who were down the road at my grandmas and they weren’t invited or in attendance and it was no big deal because the guest list was very specifically small.
Anon88
FWIW one of the most relaxed and enjoyable weddings I’ve ever been to was a backyard wedding with 15 people.
Anon
I hope we can pull that off! I’m willing to throw some $$ at landscaping to make it extra pretty.
Anonymous
fair warning i said this also and then wound up inviting 80 (and we expanded past the backyard to a local mansion we rented)
Anon
I had a 30 person wedding in a park with a reception in a private restaurant room. For the few who complained about not getting nvited, we said “we have a 30 person limit”. That shut down the complaints.
FWIW, we invited very few family members. No aunts/uncles.
Anon
I love this. I’m much closer to my friends than my extended family. All these comments about how you MUST invite your family and you are BETRAYING your family if you don’t is bonkers to me.
Anon
Agreed! The restaurant physically could only accomodate 30. The hard and fast limit was helpful to us!
Anon
Same.
Anon
I also had a 30 person wedding. I can’t believe anyone would clutch their pearls that I didnt invite aunts I hadn’t seen since I was 11 years old! But those people need new things to worry about, I think.
Anon
It’s interesting the onus is on the niece/nephew to invite the aunt/uncle who they doesn’t know because it’s the parent’s sibling and it means something to the parent. Why wasn’t it on the parent to build a relationship with their sibling and their child? Why didn’t the parent build that bond throughout their child’s life? It’s hard to believe the parent’s sibling bond is that strong…
Anon
As a bride whose wedding was nearly upstaged 20+ years ago by my dad’s second wife, please do not let this happen to your daughter. Keep your dramatic sibling far, far away at all costs. Protect her day; demonstrate that your allegiance is to your daughter; do not invite crazy people.
Anon
That is absolutely why I’m worrying about it now. I will absolutely not I let that happen :)
No. Considering, I’m quite sure we will not be inviting aunts and uncles.