Your boyfriend has been invited to a wedding, but you’re not. How big a palaver is this, and what do you do about it?

My boyfriend doesn’t want to invite me to a wedding–what options do I have?

The options available to you when your boyfriend doesn’t invite you to a wedding are: accept the situation graciously, accept the situation belligerently, reject the situation gracefully, or reject the situation angrily.

Reasons why your boyfriend has not invited you to a wedding

Let’s begin by working out the possible reasons why your boyfriend has not invited you to a wedding. Upon discovering which reason applies in your case, it will be easier for you to find a suitable response. Make sense?

Join me in this journey of discovery by understanding that here in the real world, away from gender politics and what sexual Marxists would like everyone to think, there are objective, quantifiable differences in the way men and women think, and the male brain means that your boyfriend might not have invited you to a wedding for any one of the following reasons.

It’s not his wedding

This obvious fact seems to elude many girlfriends. Given the tremendous expense of getting married, an invitation to a wedding certainly carries no automatic assumption of a plus-one. Unless otherwise stated, wedding invitations go to the specific addressee, and it is not up to that person to invite another person to tag along. If anything, doing so would be considered amazingly rude and could cause bad blood between the addressee and the couple.

It is a good idea to remember that the couple and their event planner have carefully worked out the seating arrangements, slaving over the niceties of who sits where for ages, in some cases, for weeks, so suddenly showing up with a plus one puts all that hard work to waste. Not cool.

So, your boyfriend got an invitation to a wedding which didn’t include an offer for a plus one, and he accepted the situation as a fait accompli. To his logical brain, that’s just how things are. He didn’t mean anything by not trying to get you invited and never even thought about it right up to the moment you brought it up.

(By the way–and this should be, as the British like to say, “bleeding obvious“–if it is your boyfriend’s wedding and you’re not invited, I think your relationship has deeper issues that you might need to work on. Just saying.)

He forgot to mention you

Girlfriends may find this a shocking revelation, and some may let it undermine their confidence in the relationship and rot in their soul like a canker in the heart till it saps away their joie de vivre and even endangers the relationship. Well, any of that is utterly unnecessary.

Here’s a secret for you ladies, and I hope you hold fast to it because it will save you a lot of fuss and heartache. Your boyfriend doesn’t care about the wedding. Other people’s weddings don’t mean much to men, period.

No, we’re not curious about weddings; we don’t want to see what the bride looks like. No, we’re not interested in what our friend said or did at the wedding. Nope, we couldn’t give a fig about the cake, only, yes, free booze!

The special case of an ex’s wedding

When an ex-flame is getting married, and he is going to the wedding, it is likely both parties still have unresolved feelings. In these circumstances, your boyfriend really (a) should not have been invited, (b) should not be going, and (c) definitely ought not to be going without you–but mostly, (a) and (b). If this weird edge-case is the case, I’m sorry to say, I think you should seriously consider moving on. Neither of the pair is really over the other, and you and the ex-flame’s groom could end up as collateral damage.

There are social problems he doesn’t want to deal with

Often, men get into sticky situations that they find hard to unglue. For example, there might be a problem because you’re from different religious, ethnic, racial, or social backgrounds, and he hasn’t quite worked out how he will deal with it.

Sure, he’s being a bit of a chicken by not squaring up to the issues and dealing with them, and it is definitely a black mark against his character, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. If anything, it affirms his love for you and his intention to try to stay with you. But that pusillanimous streak! I’m sorry, a real man stands firm. (If he has an inheritance of millions of dollars on the line, though, then maybe play the long game and give him the time and space he needs to sort things out, lol.)

He isn’t committed to you and would like to keep his options open

A man in love loves being with his lover. If he is looking for opportunities to get away from you, then it may be that the party is over, but he simply hasn’t found it necessary to inform you of that fact. However, before you conclude that this is where your relationship is, you need to pay close attention to other markers of this behavior.

• Spending a lot of time away from you, using work or “going out with the boys” as an excuse. Vital: this has to be a recent development, and it was not like this when you two first began going together.
• Unexplained absences. He can’t even be bothered to make excuses for his disappearances.
• He needs to take phone calls out of your hearing or too often replies, “I’ll call you back.”
• He is snappish and short-tempered with you or complains about anything and everything you do.
• Not wanting you to meet his friends and family, which is probably the single most important indicator of all.

I’d say that two or three of these markers are all you need to move on. Even if I’m wrong, is this really the sort of human being you want to be with??

What to do when your boyfriend doesn’t invite you to a wedding

Graciously accept it when your boyfriend doesn’t invite you to a wedding

Of the range of options available to you when your boyfriend doesn’t invite you to a wedding, gracefully accepting the situation with an “Oh, okay,” and letting it go at that is far and away the best advice I can offer–as long as his reason isn’t that you get on his nerves and he needs you only for sex.

Accept it when your boyfriend doesn’t invite you to a wedding, but do so unwillingly

I’m a firm believer in making sure your boyfriend knows the score. If this wedding invitation predicament gets on your sensitive parts, you should let him know. Being too accommodating is as bad as not being accommodating enough. Unfortunately, life is complicated like that, and most things are a balancing act where you have to navigate the middle path between two extremes.

Have a (quiet–no shouting, no histrionics) word with monsieur, explaining how not being included made you feel belittled and cast aside. Get him to explain what you just said because, as a man, I can affirm that plenty of times I don’t understand what women really mean, and it takes a couple of tries before their message is clear.

Reject it outright when your boyfriend doesn’t invite you to a wedding, but be graceful about it

I don’t typically counsel this approach, but if push comes to shove, then heck yeah. If you think he’s not committed to the relationship, reject all suggestions that he’s going to the wedding without you. Since this is the “graceful” track, deliver the ultimatum (“get me an invitation too, or we both don’t go, or we’re through”) calmly and without drama.

Be prepared to break up, though, because this may be what he secretly wants. However, why would you wish to stay with a man who really doesn’t want to be with you?

Angrily reject it outright when your boyfriend doesn’t invite you to a wedding

The same as the previous strategy, except that this time, you put on a bit of a “high-maintenance diva horror show,” intending to have great make-up sex afterward. It’s a plan, but in my honest opinion, not a very good one unless you two are absolutely besotted with one another and like the characters in the movie, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, and Salma Hayek), it’s your weird aphrodisiac.