Bride’s Adults-Only Wedding Drama Goes Viral After Family Flips Out
For one bride-to-be, the lead-up to her big day turned out to be a nightmare due, in no small part, to an unsympathetic stepmother. The original poster wrote a lengthy entry on Reddit on Monday, May 13, with the subject line: “Step-Motherzilla excommunicates me from my family.” The post has since generated some buzz (and much sympathy) on the platform.
“TLDR: my parents flipped out that my fiance and I decided we wanted an Adult only wedding which meant my 1 year old nephew could not attend,” the bride wrote. “They decided to pull out of wedding and excommunicate [me] from the family. [Stepmom] called my fiance’s mother and said horrible things about my fiance and her mother.”
The bride-to-be then went into great detail explaining how she and her fiancé had decided early on that they didn’t want to have children at their wedding. She then intended to tell her stepsister this fact over the holidays, but never really found the right time to have the conversation. Fast-forward to this weekend when the bride told her stepmother that though their one-year-old nephew in invited to the rehearsal dinner, he wouldn’t be allowed to attend the wedding itself.
“She seemed taken aback but then said that it would upset my stepsister and my father,” she wrote. “I said I would talk with my fiance, but warned that I couldn’t promise anything. That night we again talked about it and agreed that we didn’t want children at the wedding.”
The original poster then did her due diligence and called her stepsister the next morning to clarify that the nephew wouldn’t be allowed to attend the wedding. “I explained that it wasn’t because we didn’t love him, it was that if we open it up for him to attend then we need to open it up to my fiance’s side of the family which would put us at 13 children and ultimately not be what we were looking for on our day,” she wrote.
The couple even offered to pay for a babysitter so that her stepsister and husband could attend the wedding, but it was an offer that her future in-laws outright rejected. In fact, her stepsister and husband said they would no longer attend the wedding (even though they were both members of the bridal party).
In an attempt to assuage the situation, the bride-to-be told her stepsister that she “understood and respected” her decision. Nonetheless, within five minutes, her stepmother and father called in frustration.
“They say how could I do this to the family, my nephew is family,” she recalled. “I calmly explained the same things I had explained to my step-sister but they weren’t having any of it. They said it was different because my nephew was family. I replied that my fiance also had family, but because it was her cousin’s children it didn’t count in their eyes. They told me I was going down a wrong path and I was selfish.”
Her stepmother then announced that they would no longer speak to the bride-to-be again, and that she was planning on calling the other side of the family to tell them not to show up to the wedding.
“I was pretty shocked by their reaction but I stayed fairly calm and told them I was sad about their decision but I respected their choices,” the bride-to-be wrote. Her stepmother then threatened to call her future mother-in-law, which the bride-to-be didn’t fight against.
“[My future mother-in-law] would not tell my fiance and I what my stepmother told her but I could tell it was an attack towards my mother-in-law and my fiance,” she wrote. “The words she used were ‘that woman is a piece of work’ and ‘she was just plain nasty.’”
Now, the original poster wrote, she’s unsure of what to do, given that her wedding is this October, and so many members of her family are boycotting the wedding. Sympathetic commenters offered up their two cents.
“I don’t get it. They say you and her don’t appreciate family but are kicking you out? Are you not family?” one user wrote. “Look, I tend to think that family is love and care, not DNA. I had similar problems with my MIL when I got married, my husband was in shambles because he knew I was right but his mom kept on making demands that we simply didn’t want to or couldn’t do. Our decision was a little harsh at this point, and I know is not for everyone, but we decided that our wedding was to make us a family, so I was his priority and he was mine, and she only had two options: accept that it was OUR wedding OUR rules or ‘lose’ her [incredible] son.”
Added another: “I’m sorry. It’s your wedding, not your stepmother’s. You are not being unreasonable at all.”
Last December, a bride asked Reddit posters if her decision to ask a couple who had brought their children despite explicit instructions on the invitations not to if she was in the wrong. Commenters assured her that she was not being rude, despite what the couple (and a few family members) may have thought.
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