Despite her aunt having traveled from across the world to attend, a French woman asked Reddit users if she was wrong to exclude her from her post-wedding festivities.
Over the course of her wedding weekend, a French woman getting married to a South African man encountered a challenging circumstance involving her aunt. The couple had meticulously organized a modest, intimate wedding, inviting only 30 guests—13 of whom flew from France—to a remote savanna reserve in South Africa.
They wanted to make sure that the wedding and the pool party the following day were exclusively attended by their closest and most loved ones. For the weekend, the bride and groom booked a cabin to host a portion of their guests. Ten persons might stay at the lodge.
In an attempt to patch things up, the bride extended an invitation to an aunt she hadn’t talked to in eight years out of benevolence. Despite the fact that plus-ones were not permitted in the small wedding environment, this choice was made. The bride told her aunt that although her husband and kid were not invited since the couple didn’t know them, she was. Nonetheless, the aunt would feel at ease with a lot of family members during the wedding.
The bride protested, stressing the intimate and personal character of the ceremony, but the aunt’s insistence on inviting her relatives resulted in a year-long campaign by the aunt and the bride’s mother. On the day of the wedding, the bride’s aunt took independent action.
The bride’s aunt purchased tickets for her family as well as herself, claiming that her husband and kid could go since other guests had declined to RSVP. The bride, taken aback, made a compromise offer, permitting the aunt’s family to join her for the pool party the day following the wedding but not the ceremony.
The aunt attended the wedding on the day of the event, but she left for a short while when the bride and groom went to snap pictures on the savanna. An argument ensued when the aunt brought her relatives to the wedding location when she came back for the meal. The bride graciously met her aunt’s family, not sure how to react at first.
The bride was put in a difficult situation at the wedding meal incident when her mother and grandmother proposed that the extra food and chairs might accommodate the unwelcome visitors. In order to inform the aunt and her family that there were no more seats since several were broken, the bride’s sister stood beside her sister.
The aunt was scheduled to remain for supper, but she declined and departed the wedding with her family, saying she would come back for the pool party the next day. The bride, shocked, informed her aunt that she was no longer invited to the pool party and that the arrangements had altered.
Enraged, the bride’s mother instructed her daughter to invite her aunt. The bride politely informed her mother at this point that she and her new husband had paid for the wedding and that she had no right to decide who should be invited to the festivities.
The bride refused to let her aunt join the pool party the next day, even in the face of her mother’s ire and even yelling at her. Later, the bride questioned if she had behaved too brutally and asked online users to weigh in on whether, given the circumstances, she was justified in what she had done to her aunt.
On her post, the bride received a range of responses. Some felt that, considering the international nature of the wedding, the bride was incorrect to invite her aunt without permitting her to bring her family. A commenter expressed astonishment that any of the bride’s guests had attended, saying, “You come across as exhausting and entitled.”
Some believed that everyone was to blame, including the aunt for accepting the invitation even if it had conditions she didn’t agree with and the bride for allowing plus-ones to her destination wedding, which may have been some attendees’ last opportunity for a family vacation.
Some thought the bride’s actions were justified. Someone said that the bride’s aunt and mother had plotted to paint her as the culprit. The bride was justified in standing up for herself, another commenter noted, adding that the aunt’s family could have stayed at the lodge during the wedding and simply attended the pool party the next day.
The bride’s sister was the only person who could console her in this predicament, therefore several were astonished by the bride’s mother’s actions. The commenter wished that the bride would not have to deal with her mother or aunt the next day at the pool party.