FROM DOG- SITTING TO GIVING BLOOD: HAVE WE REACHED PEAK WEDDING LIST MADNESS?

Ten years ago, Tanya Gold famously lost a friend by criticising her wedding gift list in print. That list was nothing compared to today’s horrors, she says…

THERE IS A NEW breed of wedding gift list in town, and it’s even more awful than the old kind, which just begged for kitchenware. Last week, the registry website Prezola hit the headlines for its new category of ‘social gifting’. It seems to be for people who have enough White Company and Le Creuset in their lives, but still want to emotionally bully their friends.

I didn’t used to believe in virtue signalling, but Prezola, by itself, has changed my mind. ‘ The new feature,’ says the blurb, ‘means guests can promise to do something for you and not just buy something to celebrate your special day.’ The insinuation is that just buying expensive gifts bespeaks materialism and a lack of imagination, even if the couple seeking ‘social gifts’ exhibited both of those things the moment they headed to Prezola. I would argue that they have – and this will be completely lost on them – no social gifts at all.

I lost a friend over a wedding list 10 years ago, and it wasn’t nearly as awful as this. When I saw her list – expensive, tasteful household goods – I wanted to tell her that it’s ghastly to ask people to pay to furnish your house, but in your taste, because theirs isn’t good enough. You shouldn’t treat people as blank cheques and call it friendship. But I was too frightened to tell her to her face, so I told her in print, in an article in The Guardian – and we haven’t spoken since. When I got married, I didn’t have a wedding list, for obvious reasons. Instead, I have a lifetime’s supply of china and glassware in my kitchen.

Her list seems mild now. Since that day, I have been asked to contribute towards a honeymoon – is my share an upgrade on the Gatwick Express? – and another friend asked me to buy her a fashionably distressed £600 sideboard. I love her, but I’m not furnishing her house. I’m not her dad. But no one has yet suggested that I clean their house, or wash their car, or donate a body part.

Suggestions for social gifting include promising to dog-sit ‘when you jet off on your honeymoon’ or lend a hand ‘decorating the spare room’. ‘I promise to take part in a beach clean-up,’ says one pledge card. ‘I promise to give blood.’

There is so much wrong with this, but being coerced into handing over blood – perhaps you can’t afford the Le Creuset, so the bride will generously accept your blood? – is a fair summary of it.

One bride, quoted in The Times last week, was moved to tears by her virtue as she pondered her list of social gifts. ‘One was invite an elderly neighbour, which just made me cry, I thought it was so lovely.’ I felt sorry for this elderly neighbour, who might imagine she was invited over because her company was valued. Instead, she was seconded into the needy pantomime of someone else’s life.