Ghosts of Friendships Past

Sometimes I really struggle with what to write on here. I don't want to post exclusively about wedding topics, but it's hard not to think about it when it's coming up in less than three weeks. In less than three weeks. Yikes!

In a previous post I confessed to feeling offended by some of the RSVPs we've gotten. Especially when it comes to people whom we consider close friends. We still don't know why some of them aren't coming, and I'm wondering, will we be left to draw our own conclusions, or will something be explained at some point in the future?

When my fiance and made the guest list for our wedding, most of the names on the list came easily to us and it was obvious whom we should invite. Yet there were some people whose names I wasn't sure we should add. Some of those people are old college or high school friends of mine. In the end, I decided to include them in this day because it seemed like a great way to bring everyone together and have a good time. Now that I have their replies and I know that none of them are coming, I'm left wondering what to make of our friendships. Was I naive in thinking that it would be OK to invite these people to the wedding even though I haven't seen some of them in a few years? Was I wrong to focus on the togetherness part, and not the part that counts how many miles divide us?

In some ways, I feel like a fool for inviting these people to the wedding. I'm starting to think that I have a different opinion of these types of events than most people do. For some people, a wedding is an excuse to have a huge party and invite friends of friends of their parents'. For others, a wedding is meant to be an intimate gathering of immediate family members without cousins-twice-removed and business partners of their parents from 30 years ago. Deep down, I identify with the latter school of thought. In the case of my own wedding, my fiance and I fall somewhere in the middle of these two groups. Our wedding is by no means the bash of century, but it's small enough that it will feel intimate and hopefully not too overwhelming. I also think weddings are a reason for people to come together and celebrate something new and exciting. I don't subscribe to the thought that if you haven't seen someone in two years, you shouldn't invite them or go to the wedding. In fact, just last summer my fiance and I went to a wedding in Chicago for a friend of his whom he hadn't seen in at least four years. Did he scoff at the invitation when he got it? No. Did we go to the wedding and have a great time meeting his friend's wife-to-be and all their other friends? Yes! And it didn't seem like a chore that we couldn't wait to be done with.

I feel that I'm at a crossroads in my relationships with these friends who are not coming to the wedding. I invited them because I still considered them to be my friends, and I thought they considered me to be a friend, too. Someone who is important enough to them that my wedding is something they wouldn't want to miss. I realize that's not the case, and perhaps I am not someone they consider to be a friend. Maybe I'm an acquaintance to them or just someone they knew from some time in the past. I think it's time I let them go and focus more on my true friends who will be there to share this day with me. It's time to set free these ghosts of friendships past.

Here's to the future.

A through Z

Today I bring you the ABC's of Boston Belle:

A is for adoption; in this case, a dog. Two more months until we're ready to get one, and I want to adopt from our local animal shelter.

B is for my birthday, which is in less than two weeks.

C is for coffee from my new favorite cafe. I just wish it was located next to my office in place of the Dunkin' Donuts.

D is for dress—my rehearsal dinner dress. I still don't have one, but I'm waiting for one that I ordered online to arrive at work.

E is for earrings from the Sundance catalog. My new source for funky but pretty jewelry?

F is for Friday and the Fourth of July. Three-day weekend, here I come.

G is for guest book. Another wedding-related item I still need to buy!

H is for humidity. Bleh.

I is for ice cream. I can't get enough, especially when it's hot outside.

J is for all the junk mail I get. Why do I get so much of it?

K is for the kite my fiance and I have that we want to take to the beach and fly. The wind by the water is perfect for flying kites.

L is for long-distance friends. So many of my best friends live so far away from me, and I wish we were closer.

M is for meeting up with friends for dinner tomorrow night at our favorite restaurant.

N is for the nightmares I've had recently. What's with the freaky dreams?

O is for out of office, which I hope to be by 3 p.m. tomorrow.

P is for the pedicure I got today. I switched from bright red nails to bright pink.

Q is for how quiet it is in my house right now. It's the best.

R is for relaxing, which I hope to do this weekend (between writing thank you notes and shopping for new furniture).

S is for the giant strawberries I bought this weekend. They're sweet and juicy.

T is for thank you notes that I need to write for the shower gifts.

U is for unpredictable, which is how I would describe many of the people we invited to the wedding. Are you coming, or aren't you?

V is for vacation, which is coming up when we leave for our honeymoon.

W is for What not Wear, my favorite show. I'd love to watch the marathon this weekend, but I plan to spend more time outside and at the beach than on my couch in front of the TV.

X is for the letter x being the hardest to match a word or phrase with.

Y is for yay (I'm almost done with this list!).

Z is for zonked, which is how I feel after writing this. It's hard to come up with something for every letter.

That's Just the Way It Is

It turns out that I'm not the only one bothered by some of our friends' responses to the wedding invitations. In a way, I find it comforting that my fiance feels the same way I do. It makes me think we have a right to feel slighted by some of the responses. I tend to fly off the handle and have much more intense reactions than my fiance, so the fact that he's on the same page as me makes me realize I feel this way for a reason—and that it's OK to feel hurt because some of our friends won't be at the wedding.

This is the part of the planning that could reduce me to tears if I let it. I could easily start down the woe-is-me path and get lost in a fog of self-pity, but I have to remind myself that a lot of people I really want to see are going to be at the wedding, and it's hard to be sad when I know I'm going to see so many amazing people in one spot in the not-too-distant future. I'm trying to focus on the good and consider it the loss of the people who won't be there.

Declines with Regret

I'd like to think that the term bridezilla does not apply to me. For the most part, it doesn't. I'm not bitching out my wedding planner or screaming at my matron of honor about stupid things like sending me tri-colored swatches when I asked for two-color swatches or using peach-colored gift bags instead of butter-colored gift bags. That's not to say I haven't gotten emotional over some of the planning—but who wouldn't? A wedding is a big deal, and when you spend a lot of time and money on it, there are certain things that just have to turn out the way you expected them to.

Perhaps the most unpredictable part of the wedding is the guest list. We decided who's invited, but we don't decide who actually shows up. The response cards are being mailed to my parents, so my version of eagerly waiting for the mailman and tearing open the little off-white envelopes after he drops the mail in my box is actually me sitting in front of my computer obsessively checking my e-mail between 11 a.m. and noon to see if my mom has sent me an updated spreadsheet with the most recent responses. Luckily for me, their mailman comes early.

The first round of responses brought some obvious favorable replies. My brother and sister-in-law? I'd like to think they'd still come even if they weren't both in the wedding. My mother's best friend and her husband? They'll be there. My fiance's former roommates, the ones with whom we had a huge fight and don't really speak to on a regular basis (and never hang out with)? They're totally coming. They were something like the seventh and eighth people to say yes. Granted, we went to their wedding last summer and one of them is a long-time college friend of my fiance's, but given the fact that we don't socialize with them ever and essentially pretend like they don't exist...well, it's a little surprising that their speedy reply said they're coming.

As surprising as that "yes" response was, there have also been a few surprises with people who declined the invitation. Good friends of ours who live just 20 minutes away and whose destination wedding we attended several years ago will not be coming. One of my fiance's long-time college friends with whom he still keeps in touch has declined. There are others, too, like my fiance's friend and coworker who has been to all of our other friends' weddings and has traveled far and wide to get to them—he's not coming, either. It's difficult to know what their reasons are, but it's far more disturbing to me to have good friends decline our wedding invitation than it is to have people who are/were once acquaintances accept the invitation.

I'm starting to take it personally, too. Did we do something to offend these friends and make them not want to come to our wedding? Is it something about me that they don't like? After all, the friends I've mentioned were my fiance's friends first, so is this their way of saying they disapprove of me? It's probably something bigger than that, but still, I'm curious.

I wonder what their "no" responses mean in the bigger picture. Does this mean we don't have to feel obligated to attend the long-term college friend's wedding? Does it mean we're not as good of friends as we thought we were, and my fiance and I should save our postage during the holidays and skip sending them a Christmas card? Hell, are we even friends if they don't come to our wedding? I can justify being upset about this, although my way of dealing with it up to this point has simply been to say, "Strange," and shrug my shoulders. It's getting to me, though, and I'm starting to think that it's weird that I've been so calm about it. Honestly, I'm getting a little angry, but I don't know if I should be.

I knew not everyone was going to show up to our wedding. For the people we consider good friends, though, I feel like we're being more than gracious when we say we understand that they can't make it. I feel like we're being pushovers, like we're naive people who just shrug off the slight and get on with their lives thinking that nothing has changed.

These negative responses do change things for me, but I haven't told my fiance that. I wonder what he thinks?

It'll Come Back to Me

I took a short break from writing, and now I'm ready to get back to it. It feels like coming home after a long vacation. You know the feeling—the cab drops you off at your house, you walk in, it smells a little musty and closed-up, and somehow it's dinnertime but you've been existing in a different time zone and would prefer to go to bed rather than eat something. Nevermind the fact that someone has been cooking all your meals for the past week and the concept of eating at home, which was your routine before you left, now seems completely foreign. Which knife do you use to slice tomatoes? What does the oven need to be preheated to if you want to cook pizza? What's it like to drink a nonalcoholic beverage with a meal? You knew the answers at one time. And at one time, I knew what to write. Now I have to figure it out again.