Bride refuses to apologize for 'humiliating' her aunts at her wedding. AITA? UPDATED 2X
When this bride is annoyed with her aunts' behavior at her wedding, she asks the internet:
"AITAH for not wanting to apologize for calling out my aunts at a wedding?"
I (26f) have been with my partner (27f) for 5 years, and we are getting married next year.
Overall, the wedding planning has gone pretty smoothly until now. For context, there is a large age gap in my family when it comes to the grandchildren on my mother's side (my dads an only child).
My mother had me in her mid 20s and my 2 aunts waited till they were in their late 30s to have kids so i've just been more of an extra aunt to a lot of my cousins as theirs about 4 of them all between 6 and 10 (all girls) except for my cousin ‘kate’ (25f) who is the daughter of my mothers older brother.
Now I love my family i do, but my aunts have always been the kinda parents who can never say no to their precious children, and that has resulted in them being spoilt brats.
Over the last decade, there has not been 1 family event that hasn't been ruined in some capacity by a child having a tantrum over something stupid. in the last year alone we've had tantrums over not wanting to leave a party even though the party place was closing, not having the correct flavor of strawberry...
ice cream at our grandfathers 85th bithday or just getting a pack of hairbows that didn't match eachothers and many others that tbh the reason why are so stupid they feel made up. and these tantrums are bad...
like the full screaming, pounding the floor, and enough tears to water a field until their mothers give into their demands. the husbands are just real walkover, tbh and let their wives deal with the kids.
it took a long time to even bring my partner to one of our many family events just because i always knew these tantrums were gonna happen, and i didn't want to scare her away.
I work with kids so i know this is beyond not normal behavour of kids and i know the lack of discipline is to blame but i've never been in the position to call it out cause in my family its very much if you don't have kids your opinion of how to raise them dosen't count but as the kids have gotten older its gotten so much worse.
now onto the wedding planning. we are not having a large wedding cause neither of us want it. between our family members we want there and are friends. it's just over 100 people.
My partners family has no kids under 16 and when the idea of having a child free wedding came up it was clear my partner liked the idea of no one under 16 and tbh i...
was happy with it as well as our dogs were gonna fill the roles of ringbearer and flower girl anyway and we both knew there was gonna be at least 1 tantrum and neither of us wanted to subject our friends and her family to those.
My parents and grandparents agreed that it would be nice to have no kids for a change, and with that, we sent the invitations out.
not long after the invitations went out, we had my cousin kates wedding. She grew up 3 hours away and hasn’t turned up to really any family events in the last decade, but her mother made her invite everyone to show off as there were over 400 people.
Don’t get me wrong, you could tell a lot of money was put into the event, and it was lovely, but I personally wouldn’t have liked it for my day.
Her new husband had a niece and nephew so they did the flowergirl and ring bearer roles (and yes there were tantrums thrown when that news broke) and it only took 5 minutes into the wedding for a tantrum to happen cause one of the kids wanted to sit of the front and not a few pews back.
My partner has gotten into the habit after 4 years of these events of keeping track of the tantrums on her notes app, and she counted 3 in the church alone. It only got worse as it was raining after, and the kids didn't want to wear jackets to get to the car, and many tears happened.
The meal wasn’t much better, but thankfully, we were at the head table with my grandparents away from it, but you couldn’t not hear the whining and shouting occasionally throughout the meal.
Things got bad when, at some point before dessert, two of the kids came up to me and asked why they were not invited to my wedding as they had been for kates. A bit stunned I just replied that the place we were having it was only for adults.
That obviously was the wrong answer cause almost immediately another tantrum about how apparently their parents had promised them they would be the flower girls at my wedding erupted.
Thankfully their small for their age, so it was pretty easy to pick them up and move them away from the head table, which was on a stage and away from people staring. While this was happening, my parents were confronted by my aunts asking how was it that their kids were not invited.
My parent just repeated the same thing as i had said, and this also wasn’t good enough . At this point, my grandfather and I were behind them with 2 of their screaming children. I honestly don’t know what came over me, but i blurted out .
You really cannot see why i might not want to have your children there on my wedding day? Can you please stop discussing this right now is not the time and people are already staring at us. And left.
Well lets just say that while most of my family agreed with what i said, now my aunts are refusing to attend the wedding until i apologise to them and their kids and invite them.
Some family members think it was the wrong time to say anything or just apologie to keep the peace but honestly i dont want to as i don’t think what i said was that bad especially considering the thing i knew that the grooms family were saying after the wedding from what i heard from Kate and her new husband.
Before we give you OP's updates, let's take a look at some of the top responses:
bunnyslater64 writes:
NTA. So, your aunts will not come to your wedding unless / until you apologize and let their children be members of the wedding party? Sounds like the trash took itself out and you and your partner are going to have a lovely, stress-free day!
And what's with this "keep the peace" bs? To my way of thinking, "keeping the peace" means nipping your child's tantrum in the bud so everyone else can have a peaceful time.
megsymeg6 writes:
If you have to apologize for what you said, then they have to apologize for every time their children ruined events. Because you know, keeping the peace is important. Your fiancé’s notes will come in real handy lol.
In all seriousness, I fully believe that some people think that kids will just suddenly know how to be functioning human adults when they turn 18 and think their only job is to placate them. Like the kids will just magically learn how to be good people. Nope. Not how that works.
Stand your ground, and frankly your family needs to start having the discussion of whether you want this to be the rest of your lives or not, because these kids won’t get any better at this rate. NTA.
cynicallycyn writes:
NTA your aunts are obviously going to start sabotaging the wedding. Best they do it from afar with a cell phone then right there at the venue. Let them dig their hole. Let them badmouth you. Look at it this way.
There’s a chance that they will see the light and the kids will get help before they turn into unbearable adults. If that doesn’t work out then at least you don’t have to sit there and watch the destruction anymore.
OP's 1st update:
I had planned ahead of time to spend Christmas with my partner and in-laws who live over an hour away and then celebrate Boxing Day back at home with my parents and grandparents but to my surprise my mother contacted me late on Christmas...
day just to say the boxing day celebrations were called off after a disastrous Christmas meal with the family which at the last minute included the aunts and the children.
So apparently they had decided that as the family had been going nc in the week since the events at my cousins Kate's wedding they were gonna turn up to my great-grandmother's house for Christmas and confront me about it to my face to make me apologise for calling out their kids behaviour.
They usually do their own thing at Christmas and often go to their in-laws (forgot to mention they are married to brothers who are 2 of the weirdest men I’ve ever met but that's a rant for another day).
I guess they thought if my 99 year old great grandmother (my mothers, moms mom) was present I wouldn't refuse their demands. However they failed to check that I might not be there and according to my father, their faces when they realized their plan had backfired were hilarious.
Obviously, their little terrors were running rampant and screaming their heads off and one even had a temper tantrum cause there were no presents for them under the tree.
The aunts had turned up in the middle of the Christmas meal several hours after all the presents were opened but apparently, the kid couldn’t comprehend that according to my aunt. At one point my great-grandmother got so annoyed at the screaming she yanked her hearing aids out.
No one in the family had thought to fill her in with what had gone down at Kate's wedding. It was one of those we all thought someone else had done so she was a bit confused at first. She knew the wedding was childfree so she couldn’t understand why they were making such a fuss about it and to just get over it.
She said she’d like to enjoy the likely last wedding she’ll ever attend in peace away from screaming children (My family has a very dark sense of humor).Between that and what I had said earlier, I think most of my family have just had enough of their crazy excuses.
Obviously after great granny said this they went on about their poor angels but they didn’t have much of a leg to stand on as pretty soon after they opened their mouths the terrors had gotten into my grandmother's homemade baked Alaska and had dropped it ruining the desert for everyone.
Apparently, my grandfather just snapped and told them to get out and let them enjoy one family event in peace and they needed to get their children's behavior in order if they ever wanted to be invited to another family event as their children's behavior was out of line and was only gonna backfire of them the older they got.
This man had served for over 10 years in the army and another 25 years as a police officer and is terrifiying when he snaps so understandably they got out of there asap. My great grandmother even opened one of her fancy bottles of whisky to celebrate.
My grandfather had been one of those who did not want to disinvite them and keep the peace (He's financially contributing to the wedding) but when I got home yesterday he gave me full permission to rescind their invitations.
I had originally decided to not rescind my aunt's invitations but give them a warning that if they turn up with their children or try to cause a scene they will be escorted off the property immediately.
But now after an emergency family meeting on boxing day we ended up just rescinding their invitations and instead just using what we would have spent on the four meals on jewelry for myself, my mom, grandmother and great grandmother as a memento.
My parents and partner are 100% behind me on this and we’re lucky that our venue is owned by my soon to be in-laws and with that security is included in the cost as they have had several crazy family members stories from renting it out for...
weddings and events over the last 30+ years. It's run in house by my soon to be brother in law so we have full control of who is allowed on the property during the wedding.
My maid of honor and bestie has also volunteered herself in the case of one of them turning up in a white dress to be the one to take one for the team and ‘spill’ a glass of red wine.
Her back up plan is using my doys (both West Highland terriers who will be at the wedding) who are trained to pee on command and have an ‘accident’. She's a drama teacher so I'd be pretty confident in her being able to make it look convincing as an accident if a worse-case scenario happened.
In terms of if I knew the kids coming up to me at the wedding was their parents way of guilt-tripping me yes I did know. This is far from the first time it has happened. For example When one of the terrors had their holy communion it fell around the same time my partner and I had adopted our two dogs.
We hadn’t expected to get two but they were inseparable and we just fell in love with them immediately and took both home.
My job requires me to work saturday mornings so couldnt attend the church service for the communion and there was not real way to could get it off so early on i made sure everyone knew i wouldn’t be attending the church service making sure to hand deliver a card with money in for the child the day before with a small gift cause apparently to my aunts money doesn't count as a gift.
Anyway later on at the meal the sister of child who had their communion just came straight up to me during the event and asked me why I never turned up to the church in front of everyone and asked where was their puppy.
Apparently, my aunt had told them one of my puppies was for them. Let's just say tantrums happened and the puppy they did end up getting lasted 1 week as nowit lives with my in-laws. They hadn’t pulled that stunt in a while at least not to myself so I guess that's what threw me off more than anything else.
As with what was said by kates in-laws not long after i got back to the table Kate's now mother-in law sent us over a round of drinks to help with our growing headaches and there was a lot of how on earth do you deal with this on a regular basis? and oh boy they're gonna be nightmares when they're older.
We were also betting with the rest of the bridal party when the next tantrum would happen (my partner won betting when there would be one just before the speeches) and a few rounds of who could guess what the reason for a tantrum was thanks to my partners 4 year long notes.
Kate's in-laws also share my family's dark humor so later in the night we were betting which would be the worst once the teenage years and all those hormones hit. Was it the most adult way of dealing with it…probably not but was too drunk and annoyed to care about that.
OP's 2nd update:
Hi all. I’ve gotten a lot of requests in the comments and dms to explain the weird husbands and for a potential update. This is gonna be long cause i had a lot of questions and an update that's pretty chaotic so here we go.
To start, the husbands are not twins but I have a hard time telling them apart. They have the same height, same hair style, usually similar clothing choices and even have the same profession. the only way i can is that one has a faded tattoo of a bird on his eyebrow (why he has that idk).
It's quite ironic cause my two aunts would hardly classify as sisters from looks as one looks exactly like my grandmother and the other my grandfather. It's only when you see them with my mum or uncle you can see the resemblance because they both look like they are a combo of my grandparents.
They are also 10+ years younger than my aunts. Not against age gap relationships in general but it's definitely weird to see your aunt married to a guy who's only about 8 years older than you and they look young for their ages.
Now for the weird stuff. They both are very weird about women particularly women younger than them. They have this weird almost 1950’s idea about women and how they should be and particularly with what they wear.
They don’t like the idea of women, particularly women under 50 wearing pants and one of them has said to my face before how women in pants make him feel uncomfortable. I wish I could say I was kidding but I know from personal experience I get treated very differently by them if I'm wearing a dress or pants.
They can’t even look at me in the eye if i'm wearing pants. I known in some cultures and relgions this is a thing but in 2024 Canada to a Irish family this is just weird.The weird sexist ideas don't stop there unfortunately.
They’ve more than once mentioned they believe women shouldn’t bother going into certain fields as the man will always end up as the breadwinner as it's the fathers main job to provide for the family.
It feels weird to write that two grown men were horrified that a woman earned more than they did but when my mother let slip that my partner's job as a corporate lawyer meant she earned more than both of them they legit looked horrified.
There's also weird things like how they’ll never drive a red car. why not entirely sure, something to do with satan and one hates green vegetables apparently. Also just how they interact with people is just really weird.
It's hard to describe in words but it's like that person we all have in our lives that just gives us the ick anytime you have to interact with them and they have that in spades.
Outside of their stable jobs idk what my aunts see in them. when I first met them one of them would wear glasses frames with no glass where the prescription glass would be. Thankfully he stopped that.
Finally on the husbands probably they weirdest thing about them is their family particularly their mother I’ve only meet this women a handful of times at family events organized by the aunts and their wedding (yes it was a joint wedding) and tbh i tend to stay away from her cause her family is pretty nutty.
She's one of those people where you feel like if you're stuck talking to her for more than five minutes you're gonna get yourself pulled into a Ponzi scheme. The highlight is she refuses to tell her children where she lives.
All they know is that she always flies in off a flight from the same airport and that's the extent they know of her whereabouts.
She's still married to the dad but they just live separately outside of holidays periods since the kids turned 18 cause she doesn't believe in divorce after they had a shotgun wedding at 17 (very religious) and they just don’t like eachother.
I think my aunts like her cause they see it as they don't have to share her attention like they do with my grandparents. Her mother (the husband's grandmother) is also just very weird. She also carries a bottle of holy water with a photo of one of the popes on it and she sprinkles it on people.
I’ve avoided her at all costs after she tried to set me up with her unmarried nephew when i was 19 (he was definitely early 30s) cause apparently she couldn’t compute the idea of a gay woman in general but espically not one having long hair and liking dresses and make up.
So about the size of the wedding and how apparently a hundred people is actually quite large. I come from an Irish Catholic family on my mothers side and my dads Italian/french canadian so any wedding that is under 300 people in my family is considered small. My parents' wedding there were over 500 people there.
I’ve also had a surprising amount of questions in my dms about how the dogs are trained to use the bathroom on command.
Well to explain my grandmother was a dog trainer for many years training people with guide dogs and one of the things she trained the dogs to do is if you say ‘busy, busy’ they know that's the signal they can go to the bathroom if they need to go.
Obviously they can go and will go otherwise it's not just on command but say for example we live in a city so we have about 6 spots on our usual walking route that the dogs are able to use the bathroom so whenever we pass them we give the que and they know it's good to go if they need to. She's trained all the dogs in my family so they all do that. Didn't think it was that weird.
And now for the update (buckle up this gets weird):The aunts so things were eventually quiet in the days following the blow up on christmas day. My aunts initially responded to the message I sent then uninviting them to the wedding with a lot of abusive text messages and phone calls.
My mother stepped in and said anything they wanted to say to me would go through her and cause my aunts are scared of my mother it stopped. We were surprised they didn’t put anything on facebook cause usually that's what happens anytime they are mad about something or someone.
Overall the rest of christmas and new years was pretty great and the headaches we had at our annual new years family lunch were from drinking the night before and not screaming children.
Both myself and my partner don’t work over the christmas break along with my parents so the days following we just kept going with the remainder of wedding planning.
My partners a very type A lawyer who loves a spreadsheet, my mothers a financial adviser and mother in law is a wedding planner so between them they have done like 65%...
of the planning I just have to come in for all the fun parts which tbh suits me cause i do not have the brain or the patience to sit and go through the hours of budget meetings they have already done.
It was after new years we realised the aunts didn’t take the disinvite to the wedding and along with the calling out from the family as well as we would have hoped. I don’t know how but this all happened within the last week but things started to get weird last wednesday...
when I was at work and i got a call from my partner which in itself was weird cause given our jobs we don’t every call each other during the work day. At most we’ll send each other a text or just wait till we know the other is available so this surprised me.
Apparently my aunts tried to contact our venue that morning and cancel with one of them claiming to be me. I'm pretty sure they were aware that the venue is owned by my soon to be in-laws but if they didn't, apparently my mother in law made it very clear to them.
Then after that didn’t work they drove over to our old apartment building, and apparently we had forgotten to mentioned to them we have moved before christmas and the aunts got themselves arrested for trespassing cause they threw a hissy fit believing we still lived they and we told the doorman to lie for us.
My partner lived in the building for 8 years and has a lot of friends still living there including the doorman who contacted her about the incident to inform her.
I have to give credit to my partner by the time I got home from work all of my family were informed of the events and warned under no circumstances was our new address to be shared and if they had any contact with the aunts and I was mentioned they were to contact her if anything suspicious came up.
This also was extended to our friends and anyone else we could think of including such as our dog sitters and our residents association. And yes, my great grandmother thought the situation was hilarious, saying “and here I thought life would be boring at 99”.
They contacted my grandparents to bail them out but thankfully my grandparents didn’t give into their demands like they usually would.
I love my grandparents but they have always been real pushovers when it comes to my aunts their entire lives and it seems now over the past few weeks they have realized what they did wrong as parents have now also affected their grandchildren.
They were very strict with my mum and her brother who my grandparents had as teenagers while my aunts who were in their early 30s could do no wrong in their eyes. According to stories from my mum there was nothing my aunts could do to get disciplined by my grandparents to their faces.
Even when one of them got a tattoo at 15 and the other got caught drinking underaged my grandparents would complain about them to other people but would never say anything directly to them.
A lot of my mothers family didn’t live close by so there was no one with an outside perspective that really saw how bad it was especially as they hit the teenage years as by that point my mum and her brother were both well out of the house living their own lives and was only when my aunts were older we had some family such as my great grandparents but by that point there wasn't much they could do.
Now unfortunately onto this recent Tuesday where I got called out on my lunch break by my boss who informed me the tires on my car had been slashed and a letter on the front of my car with flyers with all anti gay stuff on the windscreen.
Apparently this time it wasn’t the aunts but their mother in law who did it (and was arrested) while at the same time my aunts went to my grandparents house to confront them.
I’ll summarize all that was said but their anger was not so much directed to my grandparents directly but more so about how my grandparents apparently took my side over theirs.
According to my aunts my grandparents should always back them over me cause as their granddaughter I was a lower in the Familial hierarchy whatever the f*ck that's supposed to mean.
Then the usual homophobic stuff came up and apparently claimed my late great grandfather would have never approved of my ‘life choices’ and it was disgraceful their inheritance is going towards my wedding dress.
For context my great-grandfather and i were born on the same day 75 years apart and i was named after him and a small part of the inheritance when he died 13 years ago...
was added into a fund that he had been set up for me when i was born to pay for things including my education and other things that i might need which for me currently includes my wedding dress (and now 4 new tires).
He wasn’t extremely rich but he had built a successful business back in Ireland and sold it to a bigger overseas competitor in the late 70s which allowed him and my grandmother to follow his siblings who had moved to the US and Canada in the years previous to set up an even more successful business which he sold in the 90s.
The remainder of the inheritance is put away and controlled by my great grandmother to pay for her care and upkeep of her home until she passes and then what remains goes into the control of my grandparents.
Now for the kicker, what my aunts didn’t know was that my great granny was in the next room hearing everything and she's the complete opposite of my grandparents and takes no bulshit from anyone.
Once great grandpa mentioned she was fuming (if you have an irish mammy you know exactly what im talking about) and she came into the room and berated them stating she was cutting them out of the inheritance cause that's all they seem to care about.
That apparently shut them up and changed their tune and my grandparents saw the monsters they created.
My parents have joked before in the past that my aunts only contact my grandparents when they want something and wouldn’t even think otherwise but it's most likely their jokes were correct.
And Great granny wasn’t kidding when she says she's taking them out of the will; she's already met with her lawyer today to discuss changing the will.
At this point I didn't know if I should be laughing at the absurdity of the situation or crying from the stress this has brought.
Like seriously, how does a comment about screaming entitled children embarrassing the family at a wedding result in me considering talking with a lawyer about pursuing harassment charges and now the feeling that I've ripped my grandparents' vision of their family up.
My parents and partner have been my rocks and honestly idk what i would do without them backing me up. Also thanks to everyone on here with your comments and dms letting me know i'm not going crazy.
I know something like this was eventually gonna happen and I'm glad the families are on the same page but I never imagined it could get this chaotic.