Wedding Invitation Wording for Gay Couples – 5 Takes
1 Dec
Invitation wording has been harder than I expected for some reason. We’re just ordering our invites online (they aren’t something that falls high on our priority list so we’re going for simple, cheap, and already addressed since both of us have terrible handwriting), so I’ve been trawling through option after option for wording suggestions.
They seem to fall into three categories: super-religious—
“We request the honour of your presence as we celebrate the love we’ve found and are united for eternity in Christ”
Way too cutesy-
“Our course is set, it’s full speed ahead; we’re sailing toward, the day we’ll be wed!”,
or fairly straightforward (we’re going that route).
The difficulty has been deciding how to actually word a few key points. First: parents. Both of our sets of parents are divorced. Mine have each remarried, while Lynn’s mother has a long-time partner and her father is currently single. Some of them are contributing to the wedding financially, and all of them will be present to support us and help out, so we want to acknowledge them. But listing all of those names is ridiculous, so we’ve opted for the generic-but-inclusive ‘together with their parents’ line.
Then there is the murky so-called etiquette code of what you are being invited to, exactly. I read something that told me an invitation requesting “the honour of your presence” is for a wedding in a church, which isn’t the case for us, so it’ll be “the pleasure of your company” which is more what we’re hoping for anyway. We’d rather enjoy the pleasure than the hono[u]r, in the end.
And finally, the part that took the longest to decide: what to call the thing. Should we call it a wedding? A commitment ceremony? A ‘celebration of our love’? Our ‘special day’? I was worried that some of our relatives might be offended by us calling it a wedding, but then I realized that I would be more offended by anyone having that reaction. Since it is a wedding, that’s what we’re going to call it. Anyone who has an issue with that fact can choose not to come, but I don’t want to make things more palatable for any closeted bigots in the family—especially at our expense (both literally and emotionally). Honestly, this is one of those things that I think we worry about a lot but that in the end probably isn’t a big deal at all. Straight people ask people to “celebrate their union”, watch them “get hitched”, and all sorts of weird permutations and no one wonders whether they’re having a wedding or not. I need to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt and try to assume that they’ll have no trouble understanding our invitations, either.
After that, the rest was pretty straightforward: date, time, and location. So, putting it all together we got:
Together with their parents
Emily Kate and Lynn
request the pleasure of your company
at their wedding
on Saturday, the twenty-seventh of February
two thousand and ten
at four-thirty in the afternoon
(address)
I had no idea that “honor” signified a church ceremony. I like the wording you chose, nice, simple, and direct. Honestly, if people are offended by using the word wedding, I wouldn’t want them to come.
I think using wedding/marriage is the best way to go if that is indeed what you would like your ceremony to be called. That way all those people who love and support you know exactly how to refer to the event, instead of saying commitment ceremony and unintentionally offending.