Is it Rude to Not Go to a Wedding? 6 Reasons Not to Go to a Wedding

When you get to a certain age, you start to get a ton of wedding invites. Which is exciting—yay, everyone's getting married!—but this time can also be super stressful. You have to figure out how to travel to most of these celebrations, book a hotel room, find something to wear, AND buy a gift. Attending every event you get invited to can be a huge drain on your finances and just on you in general. So how are you to decide when it's okay to say no?

There are a lot of good reasons to not go to a wedding, from being short on cash, not knowing the couple well, to even just hating going to weddings in general. Here are 6 situations when you don't need to attend if you'd rather not.

You live in L.A. but your pal is getting married on the picturesque island of St. Lucia. Which sounds incredible...until you realize that just the flight out there will set you back over $1,000. When couples decide to have destination weddings, they do realize that not everyone on their guest list will be able to make it (or, at least, they should). If attending a wedding will put you in a not-so-great financial hitch, it's more than okay to decline and send a sweet card with a small gift instead.

Paid time off is precious. While you'll likely be able to make long weekends out of some weddings for a little rest and relaxation time, you don't want to attend so many nuptials that you are completely out of vacation days, or worse—get into the red. Plus, you need to be able to take days for yourself and recharge where and when you want to...not just in cities where your friends are getting married. Remember it's totally fine to do you, even in the midst of a crazy year of weddings.

Weddings are special events at which people you truly care about should be in attendance. If you haven't spoken on the phone or seen the couple who invited you (or at least the person in the couple to which you're close) in a long time—and you get the feeling that this trend will continue—you don't need to go. You don't want the last time you'll ever see someone to be at their wedding.

Again, this is all about the level of friendship and your relationship with the person in the couple who you're friends with (or related to, in some cases): You may live on opposite coasts so never meeting the spouse-to-be is just an unfortunate consequence of being long-distance close pals. But, more than likely, you've never met the friend or family member's other half because you're just not that tight anymore.

When you've been invited to a 500-person wedding and you're not super close with the people who invited you anymore or you'd have to stretch your budget to attend, you can bow out without hurting anyone's feelings. Basically, if you feel like your invite was sent in order to pad the guest list, it probably was.

Maybe you've realized you don't really want to be good pals with someone anymore—or you never liked him/her to begin with. Wanting to skip someone's wedding is a clear sign that you're okay with letting that friendship fade. (Though, RSVPing "no" to a wedding in order to "send someone a message" is super passive aggressive and definitely NOT recommended!) 

At the end of the day, if you feel like it's not necessary or that there's just simply too much going on for you to handle going to a wedding right now, that's totally fine.