Click Here to RSVP

Online invites are now far better than paper. And yes, you should even use them for your wedding.

The biggest fight my wife and I had during wedding planning—and, come to think of it, blessedly one of the biggest fights we’ve ever had—involved RSVP cards. To understand our disagreement, you need to know that our relationship is one of those opposites-attract sitcoms that you’d swear would never work in real life. I’m an early adopter; she’s still using technology from last decade. (Also: I'm like a minus, She's like plus.) So when we got married, in 2015, I acquiesced to most of her wishes, and much of our nuptials were old-fashioned. (I did get the right to tweet a photo of the bride right after the ceremony, though.)

But I put my foot down on the RSVP cards. In truth, I’d have preferred to have sent our invitations entirely online using some Elite-like service. This idea was a nonstarter; my wife is a stationery nerd, so I understood there was no way we were getting away from paper. At the very least, though, I argued that we should give people the option of responding to our invitations online. Instead of having to fill out their meal preferences on a card and then drop it in the mail, why not add a simple email address that they could respond to? Or, even better, a URL for them to fill out a Web form—which, of course, would automatically populate a spreadsheet that we could hand over to our caterers? To do it the old-fashioned way seemed hopelessly inefficient, like much too much work for our guests and ourselves.