** YES, WE’RE FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK; NO, YOU CAN’T COME TO MY WEDDING.

Dear darling readers,

I am getting married in 73 days. (And no, before you ask, I swear I’m not one of Those Brides neurotically counting down the days—it’s just that I get asked this question literally every time I see a certain chipper fellow from Quality Control, and I have to be prepared with the official answer. Because if I’m not, he asks me to guess. And then he also asks if my dress still fits. He also, by the way, refers to me primarily by my wedding date: “Ten ten ten!” I really am not kidding.)

Since we’re already talking numbers, I’m going to give you a few more.

Seven months ago, my future husband proposed to me, in the exact spot he first asked me to be his girlfriend in 7th grade; for you equally un-mathy people out there (I am WITH you!), that means we’ll be celebrating 12 years of forehead kisses & weird faces & late-night driving dates four days before we celebrate our first wedding anniversary. I know, right?

A few more numbers, and then I swear I’m done.

Four days after we got engaged, we made it Facebook official.
Two months later, we started planning.
And 140 is the maximum amount of people our wedding venue—a gorgeous historic theatre—can comfortably accommodate.

Somewhere in between the Facebook-official part and the “we have a really specific limit for our venue” part is where things start to get tricky.

See, darling readers, when you’re planning a wedding, you become embedded with this urge to share your glee with people. You want to shout from the 420-character-limit rooftops about how you’ve found your vendors, announce the day you find THE dress, discuss the delightful experience of making registries with your beloved—the whole nine yards.
You call upon your already-married Facebook friends for recommendations and to share links (people, there is a whole ‘nother blog’s worth of OMG to express over the sheer amount of bridal blogs out there; it’s like a left-hand sparkler grants you an all-access pass into the world of DIY everything & other people’s wedding photography); you post engagement pictures; more or less, you involve all 770+ of your Facebook friends in your wedding planning, never thinking twice about it.

Until, of course, your fantastic invitations arrive—and if you’re a typography/word nerd like me, you swoon over them three times more than any normal person—and you go to update your status, all, “Mrs. Almost-Bride is perched at the kitchen table, addressing invitations and listening to Pink Floyd.”
And then, one near-perilous second before you update, you stop to think; is it REALLY a good idea to broadcast this to the world?

In all honesty, darling readers, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it—that is, until I received a comment on my wall a few weeks ago.
To understand the context of said comment, the friend who left it was a friend from junior high and early high school—as in, we were friends then. The last time we hung out, we were both sporting Sonic uniforms and going home to our parents’ houses every night. The most we’ve hung out since then was the night each of us confirmed the other’s friendship on Facebook.
So, in short; not close. Barely acquaintances.

You can imagine my surprise when she posted on my wall, asking if I’d sent out invites yet; answering honestly, because we hadn’t, I replied, “Nope, not yet!” and left it at that—only to have her return with, “Oh good, because if I don’t get one, I’m gonna kick your butt!”

Consider my butt kicked.

The modern world is a magical place where social networking loops more people into your life on a daily basis than you’d ever be able to keep up with face to face; the problem, however, lies in events like weddings. Suddenly, people who you haven’t seen in person since you were 17 are assuming they’re invited, based on the sheer fact that you’re Facebook friends.

My dear, darling readers, I am ghost-blogging today to tell you that simply isn’t the way things roll. Yes, I will happily comment on your pictures from vacation (even the weird passenger seat self portraits—we’re Facebook friends, after all, it’s what we do); I will tag you in notes; I will have delightful wall-to-wall conversations about the splendidly superficial things in life.

But please, please please please, don’t make things any more awkward than need be by assuming and/or flat-out asking—on Facebook, in front of hundreds of strangers—that you’re coming to my wedding, or if you’re invited at all.

I’m asking you, oh friends of brides, on behalf of all my fellow Facebook brides, to remember that anything posted on a Facebook wall is the same as running up to someone & shouting at them in front of a silent crowd; even if you only intend for one person to hear it, everyone gets in on the fun.
This goes double for weddings, especially in cases where you’re very, very conscious that feelings can/will be hurt when people find out they’re not invited.

Will it happen anyway? Of course. But does it need to happen on the Book of the Face? Absolutely not.

So, with that said, dear darling readers—have you even been caught in a situation like the one I mentioned, whether as the “OMG CAN’T WAIT FOR YOUR WEDDING” commenter (who didn’t end up invited after all) or the bride on the other side?
Especially for all my already-tied-the-knot girls out there, how did you handle walking the line on Facebook between sharing your excitement and being conscious that not everyone reading would be invited to the big day?

-Ghost Blogger