“RSVP: The Four Letters That Strike Terror Into the Hearts of Humankind”

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Let me tell you about the single most dangerous phrase in the English language, right up there with “I’ve got a great business idea” and “The doctor wants to discuss your test results.” It is four letters, one little punctuation mark, and it comes at the bottom of every fancy piece of paper or every digital notification you will ever receive: RSVP.
 
For those of you who skipped Latin class (which is most of us, because who wants to learn a dead language when you could be learning how to program your TV remote), RSVP stands for Répondez s’il vous plaît. This is French, and roughly translated it means: “PLEASE ANSWER, OR WE WILL SPEND THE NEXT THREE MONTHS THINKING YOU HATE US AND ALSO WE WILL BUY TOO MUCH POTATO SALAD.”
 
Now, on the surface, responding to an invitation sounds easy. Someone asks you to come to their wedding, or their barbecue, or their “casual evening of interpretive dance and tax law discussion,” and all you have to do is say yes or no. How hard can that be? Well, if you are a normal human being like me, it is impossible.
 
First there is the YES dilemma. If you say yes, you are making a promise to show up at a specific place, at a specific time, wearing clothes that are probably not your sweatpants with the pizza stain on the knee. This means you have to plan your whole life around this event. You have to figure out transportation. You have to buy a gift. You have to think of things to talk about, which means you will spend the week beforehand memorizing facts about weather patterns and the history of Tupperware, because you know for a fact that you will stand there silently holding a glass of warm soda while someone looks at you expectantly.
 
But saying NO is even worse. Because saying no sounds like you are saying: “Your event is terrible, I do not like you, and I would rather stay home and watch paint dry than be in the same room as you.” Even if the real reason is “I will be busy sitting on my couch staring at the wall and wondering where my socks went,” you cannot say that. You have to invent a polite excuse. So you say things like: “I unfortunately have a prior commitment”  which sounds very important, but your prior commitment is mostly just existing in your own house. Or you say: “I’ll be out of town” which is technically true if “out of town” means walking to the shop three streets away to buy crisps.
 
And then there is the worst category of all: THE SILENCE. This is what 90% of us actually do. We see the invitation. We think, “Oh, I must answer that.” Then we put it aside, or we close the email tab, and suddenly three weeks have gone by, and the day of the event is tomorrow, and now we definitely cannot answer, because if we say yes now they will say “WHERE WERE YOU THREE WEEKS AGO WE COUNTED CHAIRS ALREADY,” and if we say no now they will say “YOU HAD THREE WEEKS TO TELL US AND YOU WAITED UNTIL NOW YOU MONSTER.” So we just pretend we never saw it at all. We become invisible people who never received anything. We live in a world without invitations, which sounds peaceful until you realise everyone now thinks you are either dead or legally missing.
 
The people sending the invitations have no idea what chaos they are causing. They just want to know how many plates of food to make. They think RSVP is simple. They do not understand that for us, it is a moral crisis, a test of character, and a psychological puzzle that we are not equipped to solve.
 
So here is my official advice: if you invite me, assume I am coming. Or assume I am not coming. Or assume I am coming but will be wearing pyjamas and bringing my own snacks. Just please do not make me write back. Because if you do, I will spend four hours drafting the perfect response, delete seventeen versions, and eventually send nothing at all.
 
RSVP? I’ll get back to you on that. Probably in the year 2037.

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