Tell Me About It: A birthday not acknowledged

Adapted from a recent online discussion.

Question: I was somewhat surprised by your answer to a wife upset about attending her husband's best friend's wedding on the husband's 40th birthday (http://wapo.st/12qtQAV) - a birthday they thought he might not reach due to medical problems.

I went to a niece's bat mitzvah on my 50th birthday, and my niece wished me a happy birthday. We attended a cousin's wedding on our 20th anniversary, and they asked everyone to toast us.

In the case in the letter, since the husband was asked to make a toast, would it have been so hard for the groom to ask everyone to wish his friend a happy birthday, as the wife thought he should have done? It would have taken a very little bit of time and effort, and would have meant a lot to his friend. I think totally ignoring it was thoughtless, and the groom could have learned a lot from our niece when she was 13.

Answer: It's hard to argue with the idea that it would have been nice of the groom to say happy birthday.

But he didn't, so this couple had to make a decision: Hold a grudge because the best friend let the husband down, or move on?

Since it's an adult, it's a birthday, and it's not unusual for people to forget things on their wedding days, it seems like lunacy even to consider denting a long, good friendship over it. It seems that way to me at least, which is a disclaimer that goes with everything I write: just my opinion.

I also noted that when something is so important that they'd end a friendship over it, then they owed it to the friend to say how important it was - before the fact, not after.

It is common, though, for me to get letters like yours in response to a lot of problems: "But X should have done Y ... ," with X being someone other than the letter-writer. So it's worth spelling out here that I don't put much stock in the concept of "should." If the letter-writer could have done something to prevent a problem, then I'll say so, for next time. But in most cases, waiting to hear that someone else is to blame for your problem amounts to a decision to stay stuck in a place of indignation, waiting for justice to be done. I'm not a fan.

Comment: "I think ... the groom could have learned a lot from our niece when she was 13": Maybe he didn't think the friend would want to be singled out in front of a lot of people he might not know. The birthday couple had been holding a grudge about this for almost an entire year. That's insane.

A: Right - and that also reminds me about the bat mitzvah heroine:

(1) The niece might have been nudged by her parents, or,

(2) The niece regarded a birthday as important because a 13-year-old would think a birthday is a big deal.

Meaning, I'm also not a fan of "See? They did it, so why can't you?"