"Wedding Planning Shifts to a Cousin's Appearance"

The "lovely bride" and the hairy guest.

Original column: Dear Abby, April 19 2024

My take: The LW’s son, who has a “very professional” style, is about to get married. The LW’s “hippy” niece, “Meadow,” who is “kind and sweet and loves everyone,” is “heavily tattooed and has several facial piercings and thick underarm hair.”

Meadow wanted to come to the wedding, so she has been invited. Now, though, the bridegroom tells the LW he’s nervous that she’ll be “a spectacle” and will distract attention from his “lovely bride.” He’s worried that she will attract comment, and he will have to defend her. “How,” asks the LW, “do we handle her presence at the wedding?”

Abby says Meadow can’t be uninvited at this point, though the LW, to her minimal credit, didn’t ask about that. To avoid “upstaging” the bride, Abby says the family should seat Meadow somewhere in the back of of the hall.

That’s what “kind and sweet and loves everyone” will get you: a nosebleed ticket.

As to the groom’s concern that he may have to defend his cousin, Abby says that if someone comments on the niece, the LW should “explain calmly that [she] is there because she's family.” This, presumably, is so the ill-mannered person who comments on one of the other guests will hear: I know, we didn’t want her either, but we had no choice.

As an alternative, I suggest the groom say “This is my cousin, Meadow! Let me introduce you!” Then he can seize the guest’s arm, drag the guest over to Meadow’s side, make the introduction, and leave them to chat.

A marriage continues a family into the next generation, so unless cost is a factor, and the wedding has to be small for that reason, relatives who “love everyone” and actually want to come, totally, absolutely belong there.

Before we tackle the groom’s fear of “a spectacle,” let me say that I dress on the conservative side, myself. The counterculture and I are seldom mentioned in the same sentence. But I swear: Even I would “embrace the hippy lifestyle,” as the LW puts it, if it would put an end to this evil preoccupation with appearances that seems to infest so many weddings. After all, wasn’t this one of the things the hippies were against? A “bourgeois” concern about how things look?

And finally, can we spike the whole concept of “upstaging” the bride? Spike it, and bury it deep, so it will never see daylight again?

A bride who understands her wedding as an opportunity to command the center of attention and be admired by all should be reminded that the wedding is, first and foremost, an occasion when she and her fiance will get married, and any invited guests are there to witness this life-changing event and share in their joy.

This goes double for a groom who feels the same way, but says he’s only mentioning it on behalf of his fiance.

This is not a new topic, about how weddings look v. what weddings are for. Miss Manners, for one, has been banging on this drum for years, til it’s hard even to write about it without sounding sort of tired. But some people, apparently including other advice columnists, still haven’t gotten the message, so Advice Obsessed has no choice but to make the point again.

Chance this letter is fake: This one is so bad, it actually might be. But that wouldn’t change anything I wrote, because Abby’s answer is as bad as the letter.