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Louise Thomas
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A couple tried to get a bridal shower gift refunded from a family friend they didn’t invite to the wedding.
In a post to the Wedding Shaming forum on Reddit, a woman wrote that she went to her friend’s son’s bridal shower and bought him and his wife a spice rack as a gift, adding that she provided an Amazon receipt just in case the couple wanted a refund. But that wasn’t her only contribution to the bridal shower, she noted that she had spent “over four hours” preparing 10 pounds of potato salad and 4 pounds of pasta.
“The shower ends up being one of the most awkward experiences of my life,” she wrote. “The groom is incredibly quiet and introverted and the bride did not come up to a single person she did not already know. You could tell she felt like this was her ‘mother-in-law’s thing’ and was doing the bare minimum to be a part of it.”
Despite being enlisted to help with the bridal shower, she wasn’t invited to the wedding. Initially, she was under the impression that she wasn’t invited because she was under the impression that it was an “intimate” ceremony. She also chalked up her lack of invitation to not knowing the couple as well as she knew the groom’s mother.
Two months later, she was in for a surprise when she saw the photos from the wedding.
“Fast forward 2 months and I’m surprised to see a whole bunch of wedding photos on my IG feed of a pretty sizable wedding,” she recalled. “I definitely felt a little duped by how the wedding was presented to me when invited to the shower only. It started feeling like more of a gift grab than a proud mama moment.”
But to add insult to the injury, two weeks later, the groom’s mother asked her to look into the Amazon refund policy since her son wanted a refund for the spice rack she gifted him and his wife.
“Imagine how I felt when a few weeks later, my friend tells me that her son was trying to return the gift on Amazon and was having a problem and if I could look into it,” she wrote. “Mind you it’s been nearly 3 months and this was a ‘food’ item so Amazon’s 30-day return window was closed. All I could figure is they waited until after the wedding to see if they got a spice rack they liked better.”
She added that she felt like she was in an awkward position in which they expected her to refund them for the gift she gave them, even though they had the audacity not to invite her to the wedding.
In the comment section, many theorized that the whole bridal shower snafu was the fault of the mother of the groom, who may have pushed for the bridal shower to have a lot of her friends.
“This sounds like [the groom’s mother] wanted you and her other friends on the guest list, the bride and groom don’t know you and declined the suggestion, and strong-armed them into a shower to make cutting her friends from the list a bigger deal,” one person wrote. “I get why you’d be offended or see it as gift-grabbing, but there’s another reasonable explanation.”
“Sounds like [the groom’s mother] basically forced them to have a specific event solely for her friends,” another added. “Groom didnt want it, and bride DEFINITELY didn’t want it as she doesn’t even know these people and has enough of her own things to worry about with, you know, planning a wedding and all.”
