If you are considering inviting me to your wedding, your big birthday or your corporate event, I have only one request: do not sit me next to my husband. It’s not that I don’t like it, on the contrary, I’m one of those people for whom this corny Instagram phrase is true, I married my best friend. But when seated at a formal dinner, I’d rather sit next to your borderline racist uncle, the socially inept friend, or the cousin who wears a MAGA hat.

This weekend, two news items reminded me of the horror of having to maintain a polite conversation with the person you eat with every day. Broadcaster Dan Snow said in an interview that Harry and MeghanAt his wedding, he had Queen Camilla on one side and his wife on the other, “which was controversial.” Meghan insisted on North American conditions, so you sat next to your partner.

Meghan had, according to another report from the weekend, been traumatized by attending Pippa Middleton’s wedding, where the bride insisted on the “unusual request” of a “strict seating plan separating all couples present”. Not forever, of course, they were not all banished to a gulag of eternal celibacy, but simply for the time to eat a feast of trout and lamb washed down with a Dom Ruinart 2002 champagne. The cruel punishment of Meghan was to sit next not to Prince Harry but to Mirka Federer. Yes, Mirka Federer, the coolest and fiercest tennis player, married to the greatest player of all time, an ex-professional herself and mother of not one but two sets of twins. Who wouldn’t want to sit next to her?

According to Dan Snow, Meghan’s decision was born out of the difference between our two nations and the fact that “the posh British people couldn’t believe their ears.” I think he’s half right, but I don’t think it’s so much a US-UK affair as a classy battle against the rest. The White House, after all, separates married couples at formal dinners, while I think my antipathy to sitting down with my spouse makes me an exception, even in the UK.

Canvassing wedding etiquette sites, it seems much more common to seat couples next to each other. The Knot, which specializes in all things wedding, says “it’s advisable to seat couples together”, while an Australian wedding planner warns they should be “next to each other if they wish to engage in a ceremony.” respondent conversations” (emphasis mine). Social media responses call couples’ separation “weird”, with one woman saying “the thought of sitting next to strangers gives me a panic attack, I can’t think of anything worse” and one another saying she had never even heard of a couple. marriage that did this.

Even British etiquette expert Debretts avoids emphasizing spousal separation, suggesting “that it is up to the host to decide whether husbands and wives should sit together or apart.” The first is easier to organize, but the second gives both… a chance to meet new people.

When we got married twenty years ago, we had long and thin tables and the couples did not sit next to each other or opposite each other, but a few places apart. A friend of ours brought a relatively new girlfriend, a woman known only as “the squirrel,” who became angry when she saw the seating chart and took it upon herself to rearrange the place cards . They separated shortly after. Another friend’s girlfriend, a very handsome underwear model, was also horrified. This couple has arrived at the wedding scene. And the separation stage. And the divorce battle, so nasty, it made headlines.

And that doesn’t seem like a coincidence. The need to sit next to your partner is not a sign of a happy relationship but instead, a needy codependency that does not bode well for your future. We wonder how the woman who gets palpitations at the thought of not being able to hold her boyfriend’s hand on the salmon and shrimp roulade feels at the thought of going to work alone every day. One of my favorite parts of any party is the debrief with my husband when we exchange stories about the night’s interactions. At one wedding, I sat next to a man who had gambled away an inheritance, while he was fascinated by the woman who had taken out a restraining order against her own mother. I already know all his stories and instead of the drama of other people’s lives, we would have talked, sigh, about the kids or our broken washing machine.

I’m afraid this will make me as nervous and British as the royal family, so I ask my twenty-something American nephew and his fiancée what they have planned for their wedding next year. Reassuringly, they opt for the closest rules but not the closest for couples, because “it’s a chance to talk to new people”.

Maybe this will prove as controversial as it did for Pippa, but in the meantime he has to worry about today’s much more controversial wedding debate: do you ban phones from the ceremony and how the hell announce- you this news to your guests?