Respondez, s'il vous plait

About this time last year, things were kicking into high gear in terms of wedding preparations. In particular, May was the month that we printed and sent out our invitations.

Now, the invitation is one of the earliest things that sets the tone for your wedding. Everything from the phrasing to the cardstock is supposed to indicate what kind of wedding you will have. For example, did you know that you're supposed to use the phrase "request the honor of your presence" if the wedding is in a church or other house of worship? This is only the tip of the iceberg in the secret codebook of wedding invitation etiquette.

However, none of other other wedding plans conformed to etiquette conventions that didn't suit us, so we started looking around for any examples of invitation wording that we liked. This led us to The Offbeat Bride, which had a lot of great ideas.

One that we especially liked was an RSVP card with the following options:

• accept with pleasure
• decline with regret
• accept with regret
• decline with pleasure

You know, the traditional options (the first two) really force people into particular emotions, and we wanted our guests to feel however they were going to feel about our wedding. Plus, if anyone chose either of the last two, we'd know where we stood with them.

Why we didn't do this: Amanda's mother, ever the voice of reason, pointed out that the whimsy in this might escape some of the people on our guest list, and could be confusing.

"Oh... do it again! I misunderstood."

What we did instead: We sent out a straightforward RSVP card. No one got confused, with one notable exception that justified this decision.