"You're schmoopy"

-Via Facebook, a truly amazing ad that was apparently in the Harvard Magazine. The hotel defended itself, kind of, by claiming this not at all the same photo as its inspiration.

-Via Prudie (sorry, JTL), we now know of a new trend in bridezilladom: you're-not-invited announcements. As in, rather than knowing you're not invited to an event on account of, you weren't invited to it (that is, if you're even aware of the event in the first place), the hosts will notify you, unprompted, that you didn't make the cut.

I agree with Prudie that if this is a thing (if! although as the letter-writer indicates, there's some evidence that it is), it relates to social media, on so many levels. If you get married, friends you haven't spoken to in years may still feel close to you, because they've been following your status updates or photos... even if there's no way they were going to invite you to their weddings, once actually sitting down and writing a guest list. And if you post photos of your celebration - and if there are 8,000 such photos, why not all? and perhaps in dozens of installments, such as to dominate the news feeds of everyone who hasn't yet hidden your updates - then by a certain point, even people who would have not wanted to go to your thing in the first place will on some level wonder why they were left out. (Not unrelated: the couples that get all lovey-dovey before an online audience, an audience knowing, on one level, that this is inappropriate and insecure, yet on another, experiencing a pang of irrational envy. The human psyche, never as straightforward as all that.)

In the past, there simply wasn't the same opportunity to feel excluded from events one had nothing to do with. But this mostly comes down to a more timeless and genre-independent fact of life: There will always be those who assume an invite from them is the most sought-after piece of paper imaginable, and that the kid who sat next to them in freshman biology will quite possibly never get over the hurt of having not gotten one. And there's apparently, via one such forum, a converse of this - invitees afraid to decline, for fear of hurting the couple, because a 'no' from this uniquely vibrant individual would in fact ruin what would have otherwise been a delightful celebration.

And yes, from these two items above, I'm starting to see where the women who want lifetime-monogamous-commitment-to-dude but not "marriage" are coming from.