Gifts Should Be Returned For Now
Dear Miss Manners: An hour and a half before my daughter’s wedding was to have taken place, we were notified by phone that the groom was too ill to make it (due to a severe case of cold feet).
The couple is now in counseling to determine the cause of the groom’s “cold feet,” and my daughter is attempting to come to terms with this devastating rejection. As you well know, this will take an undetermined amount of time, but each claims to love the other and wants to work through the problems.
If this is possible they will marry at a later date; if not the relationship will terminate. But in the meantime they are in a state of limbo. What in heaven’s name should we do with the gifts and cards at this point? Many of them are still unopened!
Gentle Reader: Well, don’t open them, for goodness’ sake! Not only would you get those awful plastic peanuts all over the house, but you’d only have to wrap the presents up again so that you can send them back. Miss Manners presumes that your chief desire is to do the right thing, and wedding presents must be returned when a wedding is canceled, not just postponed to a definite later date.
But she presumes you also have a great desire to minimize your daughter’s embarrassment, and this, too, is best accomplished by returning the presents. You want to signify that the engagement is over, so that the guests do not stay tuned to see what interesting development is going to happen next.
If and when the couple do marry - and surely your daughter is going to check the temperature of the gentleman’s feet over a long period of time before risking another public disaster - your relatives and friends can send those presents back or, if they have returned them by then or given them to other brides, find something else.
In the silver-lining department, Miss Manners notes that the message you send back with the presents is not the same as the obligatory letter of thanks when the wedding has taken place and the presents are kept. The accompanying note - and you can even send it for her - need not gush over the particular item, or even say what it is. It should merely express general thanks for their kindness and state without explanation that the wedding has been called off by mutual consent.
Dear Miss Manners: I am a single professional woman who travels for both business and pleasure often alone, by choice.
A few years ago I invited a friend along. It was her first vacation in some years and it was heaven for her. I, on the other hand, was miserable! I found that we had different concepts of time, food preferences, side trips, etc. I went along with nearly all of her preferences, thinking it was a once-only event.
Now it seems she thinks our vacations will all be spent together. I have made plans for a trip and have not told her, not wanting to admit I prefer my own company to hers. She is not taking the hints I drop and is becoming insistent regarding arrangements.
I do not want to hurt this person’s feelings, nor lose her friendship, but I am at a loss as to how to gently explain to her she is not welcome on MY vacation.
Gentle Reader: Miss Manners suggests that you stop agreeing with your friend’s premise that you are lifetime vacation companions. This is what makes you feel so embarrassed about going alone that you are resorting to obtuse hints (or blatant hints to an obtuse friend, which would get the same lack of result).
The realization that what you are doing is neither rude nor unfriendly will enable you to say outright, in the most cheerful, friendly way possible - with no explanation at all, because it is the most natural thing in the world - “No, this time I’m going off alone.”
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate