Lucy Mangan: Ditch that wedding invitation you're dreading

Attending a wedding can be costly and stressful. Photo / 123RF

There was a brief time in my life when a wedding invitation dropping onto the mat filled me with delight. Friends! Getting married! Love! Flowers! A lifetime of happiness embarked on!

But now? Well, now people have gone insane. The invitations that drop through the door these days habitually comprise a sheaf of directions, instructions and gift recommendations seemingly designed to suck as much money out of me and joy out of the occasion as humanly possible.

Nationwide recently released a survey showing that the average guest at the average wedding will have forked out nearly £400 (NZ$919) for the displeasure of being there. This is a ridiculous amount of money (even if you do not, as I do, come from a family that believes you shouldn't spend triple figures on anything you can't live in or drive away). But it is now practically impossible to get away with less.

Often there are ruinously expensively preliminaries to the main event. Engagement party, hen party/stag do, celebratory meals, champagne and cocktail nights in between with people who couldn't make the official gatherings - the list gets more inventively specious every year.

Then there's the travel. To somewhere far, far away and necessitating the kind of rail or air fares you'd blanche at even if your mother was at death's door at the other end. There's the new outfit and another stab at buying non-crippling shoes for the day. The accommodation: choose between the distant B&B just within budget (as long as you don't count the taxi fare there and back) but replete with plastic undersheets on the beds and landlord you are pretty sure has bored peepholes in every room, and the lovely nearby hotel, a night under whose auspices costs more than your monthly mortgage payment and doesn't include breakfast.

The present: nope, too late, everything reasonably priced has gone. Keep to budget and buy a single linen napkin or keep your pride and shell out for something north of the decanter line. For people who have been living together for six years and merged two households full of stuff when they began.

Extortion is a strong word. But it's going to start turning up on people's gift voucher cards soon.

When you think how often this level of investment is demanded of you by people who could barely pick you out of a line-up (and vice-versa), it becomes even more absurd. Friends of friends who got a bargain on a massive venue and really need to fill it. Family members you last saw when you were doing your A-levels. 'Friends' you haven't actually met for a decade but who think they have successfully maintained hundreds of dollars worth of amity via Facebook. You haven't. Stop. DISLIKE.

So these days, a wedding invitation is not met with joy and happy anticipation of witnessing the union of two souls and reconnecting with scattered but beloved family and old friends. It is automatically plugged into a mental spreadsheet that involves both fiscal and wider economic considerations, such as the opportunity costs (an entire precious weekend lost to milling around with virtual strangers), the price of resentment (why must we all pander to this display of self-indulgence and thoughtlessness by brides and grooms? Why do normal rules of civility suddenly not apply to weddings?) and the invoice your sapped spirit will be sending for the sheer stress of it all.

Once the calculation is made, the answer is usually to pick up a pen and decline with thanks. I have a list of seasonal excuses. Summer - already booked our holiday at just that time, alas! Autumn - a dear but unspecified relative is having an equally unspecified operation and we are staying with him/her for the duration. Spring - my sister/best friend/dog is due to give birth that very weekend. Winter - another holiday. Such bad luck.

You then have to solve another equation, which runs roughly: degree of separation from couple multiplied by suspicion that they are attempting to run whole thing at a profit minus tweeness of invitation divided by amount of notice given equals the precise level of guilt to be felt about not going. Then translate that into the premium to be applied to the gift per centile from which you'd otherwise have chosen to mark their overinflated occasion. If someone could turn all this into an app I'd be very grateful. NoNupNoGo. Coming soon to an Apple store near you.

Until then, the old ways will have to suffice. Polite refusals. White lies. Outright deceit. Resentful attendance. Mutinous mutterings at the back. Heartfelt "Never agains" as the couple says "I do".

Mind the flowers. Have a lovely day, happy couple. And these vouchers from John Lewis. See you at breakfast tomorrow. Another £17.50 (NZD$40), I believe.

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