Christian bride has secret wedding, uninvites bridesmaids, 'it all happened so fast!'
We've heard of brides shaming bridesmaids for their hair color, their tattoos, or their income--but what happens when a bride shames her bridesmaids for their religious views?
So, when a conflicted ex-bridesmaid and former Christian decided to vent to the gloriously petty 'Wedding Shaming' group on Reddit, people were ready to weigh in on the drama. Note: if you think there's any universe in which a bride might have a secret wedding without you after asking you to be a bridesmaid, don't buy the dress.
My best friend uninvited her bridesmaids to her wedding...
My best friends, Rose and Gwen, and I met at a Christian grade school. The three of us stayed close through college, constantly texting, and scheduling group video calls monthly. We enjoyed daydreaming about our future weddings and promised to have each other as bridesmaids.
Rose met a guy at college and they got engaged 6 months later. She asked Gwen and I to be her bridesmaids. She also asked all of her college roommates, her two baby sisters, and some new friends - a total of eight bridesmaids. The wedding was going to be huge, with pretty much every person she’s ever met and very distant relatives invited.
Now my friends knew that I grew up in an abusive situation, and that I had serious doubts about our religion. They knew that I had moved to my bf's hometown to escape and cut off my family (coincidentally moving to only an hour away from Rose’s college).
Rose was actually weird about me cutting off my parents because she had apparently wanted to invite them to her wedding. I wasn’t comfortable telling my friends right away that I wasn’t Christian anymore because they were still practicing, or that I had moved in with my partner because they were against sex before marriage.
During this time, I got a flight to meet up with Rose and Gwen at our hometown to help Rose pick out her wedding dress. Then we took her out to celebrate the engagement.
She told us that she was having her bridal shower at a city near her college, where her fiancé's family is from. The city is conveniently only an hour away from where I had moved. But she weirdly told me that I wasn’t invited, as only college friends and family would be there...
The wedding was scheduled for the following June. Gwen and I purchased the bridesmaids dresses Rose picked out. I was tight on money at the time, so I picked up shifts to buy her a $200 wedding gift.
During our video call in March, the conversation turned to religion. I ended up sharing that I had decided to leave the religion. The first question Rose asked is if this meant I had slept with my bf.
I shared that I had actually moved in with him when I moved here. Gwen shared that she had slept with her bf too, although she was trying not to anymore. Rose was visibly upset and wrapped up the call.
We continued to text like normal, but the next month, Rose didn’t show up for our scheduled video call. We saw she was online, but she ignored all of our texts trying to reschedule, then asking if she’s okay and what’s going on. None of us had ignored our texts for longer than a day before, but she didn’t open our texts for over a week.
Finally, Rose texted us back, “guess what, I just got married! it all happened so fast that I wasn’t able to invite you both, sorry!” She had spontaneously gotten married over the weekend, with all of her husband's family from my new area somehow making it there (a 12 hour drive).
The church had a 200-person limit, which was her excuse for uninviting a lot of people, Gwen and I included. The pictures of the entire day look crappy. The reception was in an undecorated church basement and the cake was a typical Walmart cake.
I now regret that I still sent her the $200 gift, but our friendship did fade out after that. Rose wrote a thank you note for the gift where she only thanked me for the fancy bag it came in.
Later, she edited the post to include:
edit: I forgot to mention that she texted us saying that she was pregnant within a few weeks after the wedding. Neither of us were very excited for her given that we had just been excluded from her wedding. She immediately made being pregnant her entire personality. She already had a party to celebrate her new motherhood on mother’s day that May.
She had a second baby within a year. The struggles of being a mom and posting profuse pictures of her babies is her entire personality now and she’s actually still friends with my parents on social media, but we both unfriended her.
This supports the theories in the comments that she could have been in a rush to have sex too, or that she ended up actually having sex when she found out we did, then had to cover it up by rushing the wedding. I actually never considered that second option before...
Of course, the jury of internet strangers was dying to weigh in on this disaster. Here's what people had to say:
TheBattyWitch said:
She was totally pregnant when she got married but was trying to be a 'holier than thou.'
DiamondHeist1970 said:
Oh, gosh I am so sorry to hear this story. It seems that weddings can not only bring out the worst in people but can also destroy friendships in a heartbeat.
yachtiewannabe said:
I hate Rose.
SavageAsperagus said:
Your so-called friend may be religious but she has no morality. Abandoning close friends and keeping your abusive parents in her life shows she has no sense of right and wrong whatsoever. I am sorry she dumped you both like that.