The Reasons behind RSVP

You have a party, a bbq, an event, you put RSVP by a specific date and time in the invitation, you give those invitees a number to call, an email to respond to.  Usually its fairly simple either you are attending or you have other plans.  Yes or No, sometimes a maybe, or I might be late.  It pays respect to the hostess, she needs to know how many people are attending for food, appetizers, floor space for sleeping over and such.  If there are any plans afterwards, if we don’t know you are going we will leave without you.  Oh well, you had the chance to RSVP for more than a week, you received the invitation way in advance, we’re adults now, we shouldn’t have to keep hounding and asking ‘are you going?’.  Hey, we might even change the after party plans, how would you know?  Hmm, well if you RSVPd you’d know we were heading out earlier and where we’d end up at.  Even when I was collecting the RSVPs for my wedding and didn’t get RSVPs back from some folks, I was ready to write them off and not have ‘extra seats’ in case they decided to show, others preferred to call and hound them.  Oh well!  I am not one to hound, but I will let you know either way.  I really think with the technology that we have these days it is easy to ‘respond very promptly’ if you are attending with a firm YES or if you cannot make it with a NO, no need for laziness or forgetting, we have those email reminders, calendar popups.  And I don’t need an entire paragraph of why you can’t attend either, just a simple Yes or No will do, thank you!