Miss Manners: Crude practice to have guests request invitation

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My brother announced a few months ago that he was engaged. We were delighted for his happiness and thrilled to meet his fiancee, who is a wonderful woman.

We soon heard from family what the wedding date would be, but have not yet received an invitation. I assumed one would come eventually, but I was told by another family member that I was mistaken. Evidently what my brother and his fiancee have done is to post on their Facebook accounts the URL for a website where interested parties can submit a request for an invitation. If you do not submit such a request, then they will assume you do not wish an invitation and will not waste money and paper by sending you one.

Since I get on Facebook maybe once every six months, I hadn’t seen this announcement, hence my ignorance.

I guess I know what to do: If I want an invitation – and I do – then I’ll have to submit my name. It makes me feel weird, though. This is my brother! We have a loving relationship. Surely he must assume I would want to celebrate this day with him?

Do you think I would be out of line to just skip the online form and call my brother directly to let him know that I would very much like to attend his wedding? Or should I just suck it up and go to the sign-up website?

GENTLE READER: Admittedly, it is crude of your brother to require people to request invitations to his wedding. He also commits the common error of assuming that the entire world is on Facebook. Close, maybe, but he runs the risk of omitting any relatives or friends who are not.

But Miss Manners finds it astounding that you hesitate to let your brother know that you want an invitation. How difficult would it be simply to say to him directly, “Look, silly, of course I want to be invited to your wedding”?