I didn’t want to have a stranger at this small event. There were going to be 11 of us. It was bad enough that my husband’s parents would be there, but I didn’t want to have to worry about integrating a complete stranger into the group for four days.

PS If you don’t go to the wedding, you definitely don’t have to send a present.

But on the flip side, if the response to a polite “can I bring my girlfriend?” is “I’m really sorry, but we just don’t have the space or the budget for more guests,” the asker needs to handle the “no” graciously. The guest shouldn’t bad-mouth the couple for being “cheap” or “selfish” or “anti-singles,” or try to bully the couple into making just one exception for them.

Riiiiiight. Got it.

Frankly, I’m not sure what all of the fuss is about. I doubt most potential +1s, especially guys, want to come to a wedding where they don’t know anyone else. Wedding crasher legends aside, a rubber chicken dinner and limitless cheap champagne is hardly that much of an enticement for sitting through a long ceremony, followed by endless toasts and PPT slideshows of embarassing childhood photos and then having to do the funky chicken after (not that we had bad food, drink, speeches or dance music, of course).

In short, if your connection to the bride or groom and their families and friends is so tenuous that you would feel uncomfortable going without a date to back you up, I’d suggest sending regrets. As Twistie and others have pointed out, an invitation is not a court summons.

I was thrilled to have an excuse not to go because it was the marriage of the 18-year-old son of a friend to another 18-year-old whom he had dated three months. She was not pregnant. Their church was letting them marry. No six-month waiting period; no pre-marital counseling. I just couldn’t support this marriage, but didn’t think it was my place to voice my opinion. So I was glad to be able to decline with a good reason: I would have an out of town guest that weekend.

Sadly, but not to my surprise, the marriage ended two years later.

Oh, and before dinner was a given at weddings, breakfast was a given. Since weddings were held almost exclusively at churches, any member of the congregation was free to attend the ceremony, but only invited guests got fed. But the reason members of the congregation of that church (and that church ONLY, not their friends and dates) were allowed was because they were members of that congregation and thus welcome at any ceremony held in that church. If the wedding was held at home (and there were circumstances even back in these days, which were long, long, long ago where that was allowed), then only the people the hosts (the bride’s parents) specifically invited were allowed to witness the day, and only those people got fed.

Again, if you feel uncomfortable attending a wedding for any reason, it is your option to simply refuse the invitation and send a gift or a congratulatory note at your discretion.

Me? Even when I was seriously dating Mr. Twistie I was invited solo to several weddings. I attended them because I loved the couples, and made conversation with guests whether I knew them going in or not. It’s not even that I am so terribly comfortable in social situations where I don’t know a lot of people. I have been known to have a minor panic attack at the thought of walking into a room of people I don’t know and making small talk. But I cared more about the couples involved, so I sucked it up and went and had the best time I knew how. Guess what? That time was usually great. As a fundamentally shy yet gregarious person (and yes, that’s a weird combination, I know), I have found that 85% of how the party turns out for me depends on my attitude going in.

But whether I’m shy or whether I’m not doesn’t change the fact that it is the right of the hosts to decide who comes to their party. And that doesn’t change the fact that because an invitation has been extended, I am not obligated to accept it. I am only obligated to respond in a polite manner to the invitation as given, whether I choose to accept or decline.

Twistie is right: you as the guest have the power to decline if they haven’t extended an invitation to your real or imaginary other-half-of-the-evening.