Dear Miss Manners: I’m trying to help a friend who has a sick 18-year-old daughter. The young lady has many serious medical issues, and the family has a lot of medical debt.
My relatives are rich — many are millionaires. It's been 10 days, and only three people made small donations. I'm annoyed and dumbfounded that these rich people have not donated or responded to my appeal to help my friend. I've never asked these people for anything, ever.
Should I send out another appeal email in a week to give them another opportunity to be kind and generous?
Your desire to help your friend is admirable. Your notion that you should have easy access to other people’s money is not.
Do your rich relatives know your friend's daughter? If not, did you plead her case to them, while pointing out that you had never asked for anything before, and will not make a habit of it? And are you aware how often rich people are besieged with requests for money? (For that matter, everybody is. All the time.)
Yet Miss Manners hopes that everybody who is able to spare some money will use it to help others.
So rather than just hand it out to whoever asks, prudent people do some research, then decide where their money would be most effective. Therefore, they tend not to be distracted by the barrage of requests for people or causes they know nothing about.
Your friend's daughter is likely in that category. Making a repeat appeal is more apt to annoy your targets than to inspire them to give you money — unless it is an oh-go-away pittance.
Dear Miss Manners: A good friend of my daughter has invited her and a plus-one to a weekend of wedding events. My daughter’s boyfriend can’t go, and she wants me to go as her plus-one. I know this friend, but we’re not close, and the venue is in a rural area 2,500 miles from us.
Is this a nonstarter? What are the rules of “plus-one?”
Plus-one is a strange modern convention that delegates to a guest the power to choose another guest.
Miss Manners understands that this might be convenient if, for example, a guest needs help to attend. It also relieves the hosts of knowing the names of the partners of friends who are close enough to be invited to their wedding.
So be it. Weddings used to be where single people met one another, often inspiring other weddings. But now it also relieves unattached guests of having to socialize with strangers, as they have brought their own dates.
Sorry for the ramble. The answer is yes, you may go.
New Miss Manners columns are posted Monday through Saturday on washingtonpost.com/advice. You can send questions to Miss Manners at her website, missmanners.com. You can also follow her @RealMissManners.
© 2024 Judith Martin
