What's your timeline for throwing away wedding invitations?

[sockmuncher]

A relative dropped off her wedding invitation on Saturday morning.

I complimented the beautiful invitation. Then I copied the important details into my calendar and set the invitation on the side with the recycling.

We chatted on for a few hours & had a lovely catch up.

She has text me today to say she's been wondering whether to say anything or not but shes hurt the invitation was 'dumped' so quickly. It's got my back up, I appreciated the invitation and how beautiful it was but how long should I keep it for so it's been appreciated enough?

I'm not going to send anything back other than to apologise for hurting her feelings, but i have done this with every wedding / party invitation. Am I in the minority?

You’ll be writing and sending far more cards you think @sockmuncher when your child learns to write. Or will you only teach your 4 year old Whatsapp?
Small children love cards, we go to millions of parties, send and receive millions of cards and your house will have plenty of “clutter”.
Unless you are going to recycle all of those too and put them in therapy.

It’s really not. I have just had a baby as have all my friends. All sent thank you notes.

Invitations we get go on the noticeboard in the hallway (the date goes in my calendar on the phone, as does location as I can then use that directly for the satnav). And I take the invitation with me as it has all the details I need and can't drop in a puddle and stop working like a phone can! Invitation then gets chucked after the wedding.

It shows a bit of a lack of emotional intelligence OP, sorry. Even if you wouldn’t be bothered by it yourself (fair enough), most people would still recognise that binning someone’s carefully thought through card / invitation / whatever it is right in front of them would come across as insensitive and so they wouldn’t do it.

Why don't you tell people not to send them to you, that way they would save themselves the best part of £5.

What and they refuse entry without it? 🤣😂

Not OTT at all, if you're the kind of person who find attention to detail important (and also isn't willing to spend hundreds of pounds paying someone to design the invitations) this is perfectly normal. Maybe you're the kind of person who would happily send invitations with typos, maybe you're the kind of person who'd just pay someone else to do them. But no need to sneer at PP for caring that she did a good job

Actually in some instances yes. I attended a wedding where the couple had privately rented a house within a park that was open to the public

It was stated on the invitation that we had to show it at the gatehouse in order to get access to where the wedding was

Thank you! I'm a textbook editor so I will admit I care about font types, formatting and text position more than most! I don't think it's unusual to put at least a little bit of thought into the way your wedding invitations look though, is it? Otherwise why not just send a WhatsApp and save yourself the money?

Sadly you dont seem to value the fact that you have really hurt their feelings by binning it in front of them.

I’m afraid I find this quite worrying. Who can’t deal with having a piece of thin cardboard, no more than five inches long each way, in the house for just a few minutes to avoid offending someone they supposedly love? It’s the other extreme of hoarding.

You MUST have known this would cause offence. Your bewildered “But I told her it was beautiful; what more does she want?” comment was just bizarre. You thought it was so beautiful that you just couldn’t wait to bin it?

Instead of thinking “But why would I keep it?”, think about why you were so desperate not to keep it? What were you going to do with the space you saved by binning it? It’s not like your relative donated a huge piece of furniture to you, or even a bag of unwanted clothes. You can hardly have been sitting there thinking “What the bloody hell am I going to do with this?”, or pondering where to put that piano you’ve been waiting to get now that you’re so short on space.

I’d honestly take a good look at why having a simple wedding invitation in the house for a few minutes bothered you so much.

Jesus. That was so rude of you!

Really? Never heard of this.
Why? Bouncers at the church door? 🤣

Yes, definitely 👍🏼

Also, middle of nowhere, no phone signal. Where did you note down that address? Have you got the invitation?

I've not read the entire thread but I think it was a bit rude to do it right in front of her.

What's this madness though of people taking the invite with them to the wedding, I've never done this or even heard of it. How odd!

Its up to you when you bin them but maybe a little clumsy to do it in-front of the person who gave it to you.

Nope, just how it’s done. It’s an invitation, that’s what it’s for

People are weird about weddings, aren't they? I think most people would expect to cause upset if they threw away an invite in front of the giver. Some invites cost a packet, others take a long time to prepare.

I absolutely wouldn't keep any though (my own and maybe child's, in time, perhaps?) but none others and I really wouldn't want them on show in the house for months.

The only thing you did wrong was throw it in front of her, I think.

This is the kind of thing we all knew in the days before informative documents and decorative cards were regarded by some as clutter. What do you think a mantelpiece is for?

The timeline is not within minutes and in their company still..

Well, as I am sure you are aware, weddings held in Anglican churches are public events and any parishioner has the right to attend. Receptions are a different story and yes, sometimes guests are required to show their invitation to gain entry. In most cases you could drag a member of the wedding party to the entrance to vouch for you but it wouldn’t make you very popular.

Why did you bother writing the details down? They were already printed out for you, so you were just wasting paper. Just keep the invite until after the wedding. I would have been pissed off if I was your friend too. People often put a lot of effort in to the invites.

You were wrong to dump it on the recycling pile in front of her and moments after she'd given it to you. A lot of thought goes into who you're going to invite and the invitation itself, so I understand her disappointment at seeing it tossed aside like that.

I usually keep the wedding invitation on my pinboard until the wedding day.

You are so rude , I think this thread has made that pretty obvious.

Christ!

This is unhinged!

All that from someone not liking cards/invites out on show?!! 😂