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Louise Thomas
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A common debate during the wedding planning process is figuring out how many guests to invite, especially when there’s the possibility of upsetting family and friends along the way.
In a recent Reddit post shared to the “Wedding Shaming” subreddit, one bride explained that she has a rocky relationship with her father, as he tends to struggle with her level of success. Because they live in two different countries, he offered to hand out her wedding invitations to their extended family.
“He asked to hand-deliver the wedding invites, so I made the huge mistake of giving him the invites (no extras, just the exact number needed) to send to a list of relatives I had made,” she explained in the post. “Communicating with relatives this way has always been his method, so no red flags here. Plus, my lack of time to visit their country made me think this was a great idea: a win win.”
Her father then asked her for a PDF version of the invites, specifically for family members that live too far away to be hand-delivered. The bride questioned why he didn’t mail the invites, but he replied that it was easier to send the invite through WhatsApp.
When she later arrived to her father’s country, she discovered that he had invited extra relatives to the wedding, including some she’d “never even met.”
“Why? Because, in his words, ‘I can’t possibly go to X relative and not Y relative, that’s not the right way to do things,’” she recalled. “I was in disbelief and speechless. He then proceeded to show me a message, claiming: ‘It’s your fault, you told me to do this.’”
The bride-to-be explained that the message “in question” was a text from her father asking if she wanted her cousins at the wedding. “I answered, ‘Absolutely, I already counted them,’ and he used that as an excuse to invite all of HIS second and third cousins,” she wrote.
My dad invited extra people to my wedding and blamed me for it
byu/ConsciousAd3109 inweddingshaming
The Reddit user emphasized that both she and her mother, who is divorced from her father, had sent him the list of approved wedding guests four times. However, she claimed that her dad “still did whatever he wanted, then blamed me for saying I wanted my cousins there, is WILD.”
She later told her father that it was not his wedding, nor was he paying for the wedding. If the extra guests confirmed their attendance at the wedding, she instructed him to be the person to pay for them and demanded an apology. In response, her father simply reiterated the potential repercussions of inviting some cousins but not all of them. However, she reminded him that she did invite her own cousins, and not his second or third cousins.
After her father eventually apologized, the bride assumed that the family members he had invited would decide not to attend. But when two of her relatives responded to the RSVP, her father told her to be the one to uninvite them.
“He created this issue. I don’t know these people, don’t have their numbers, they’re not on social media, and I don’t even live in that country anymore. Yet, he’s making it my problem. The urge to go no contact and never see him again is strong, and I am RAGING,” she wrote.
After posting about the wedding dilemma on Reddit, many people took to the comments to let her know that she should be prepared for some of the extra invitees to show up at the wedding without sending an RSVP.
“Other people he invited may try to just show up! Reach out to the ones who RSVP’d and they may tell the others not to come,” one comment read. They suggested that the bride informed her extra relatives that she has a strict wedding budget and her father chose to invite them on his own. “You are forced to tell them not to attend as a result,” they said.
Another commenter agreed, writing: “I have a feeling the people you’re dealing with are not the RSVP kind… you might have a bomb in your hands about guests who did not RSVP showing up.”
