Dear Queenie,
My cousin asked me to be her maid of honour at her wedding and I said I would. Later I received a formal invitation to the wedding, but I never bothered to send back the RSVP card because I figured it was taken for granted I would be there because I had already promised to be the maid of honour.
Then –at the reception! – my aunt, the bride’s mother, scolded me for being rude not sending the RSVP card.
Queenie, was I wrong or was she?—Etty Ket
Dear Etty Ket,
According to the etiquette books, whenever you receive an invitation with an RSVP card you should return the RSVP card as soon as possible. However, in this case, as you already had promised to be the maid of honour, the RSVP card would seem to have been redundant. And, for your aunt to have used the occasion of the wedding reception to bawl you out for rudeness was in itself rude, in my opinion.
