Guest discovers bride's plan to turn out of town friends into her unpaid staff.
Many brides often get unfairly accused of being 'bridezillas,' but there are a few soon-to-be newlyweds that seem to try their absolute hardest to earn the title...
So, when a disappointed guest decided to vent to the fabulously judgmental 'Wedding Shaming' group on Reddit, petty people everywhere couldn't get enough of this horror story of forced wedding-related labor.
Bride decides that out of town guests should become staff...
Late last spring my high school friends were getting married after Covid postponing plans for a while and invited lots of old friends. We’re all in our 30s and about half of us live in different states but a good amount live around the same general area, but easily 2-3 hours apart in LA traffic.
Several of us planned to come into town the week of the wedding to hang out with our own family and friends and just make a little vacation out of it. We had a group chat where we planned some hangouts and outings with everyone that was going to the wedding, both local and out of town.
We sent the bride and groom a short message to let them know that they could always stop by but that we assumed they were busy and we’d see them at the wedding. They were interested in joining us for a few specific locations and that was it.
The general plan was - on a few days we had early brunch plans since lots of local family etc would be working and it seem d like a good time to see everyone that was on vacation basically.
There was one evening at planned as a potluck at one local house. There was a kids museum visit planned as a group with a mix of local and out of town families for Friday morning.
So first brunch - bride starts calling people in the morning casually asking for help with some DIY decorations building. Most people say no, they have their whole day planned already.
During the brunch she creates a group chat with just 3 of us asking if we could try and do a quick meal and get everyone over to her parents house to help glue stuff. None of it seems urgent and we don’t feel bad for saying no. We laugh and move on.
The next get togethers she doesn’t call anyone but created different group chats over the days to try and talk people into helping with fun jobs like writing banners and painting stuff and braiding fabric.
No one really wants to help but one friend stops by and helps her with some stuff but tells us the bride is very unorganized and she mostly wasted her time because bride doesn’t have all the needed materials for the project even and expected friend to drive an hour to go pick up some craft stuff.
So Friday morning we’re out with loads of kids and bride starts calling…crying. Wedding is on Saturday and most of the bridal party is only arriving that day. They are supposed to spend the end of the day decorating, but most decorations aren’t even made yet. She’s upset that we all came in early but haven’t lifted a finger.
We end up explaining to her that we’re not going to cut the kids fun short to drive two hours in traffic towards her. There’s no way to even come and be productive with this amount of toddlers and infants. We tried to problem solve with her but she wasn’t opened to just two dads and a mom driving there to help out etc. She needed all of us.
On Saturday the wedding was in a lovely venue but covered with odd random decorations. Older generation was pretty catty about it. This wasn’t a cheap venue. The decorations were standing out in a bad way and clashed with what the Venue provided in the public areas and the bars etc. there was a silly amount of banners with pictures and phrases that were all unevenly hung up.
After the wedding the groom asked a few times about why we all fluked and turns out bride was telling him all the out of town friends were going to help with setup like it was the plan all along.
Apparently the bridal party had been worked to the bone and refused to stay in LA at their own cost to become decorators. The friendship hasn’t quite repaired yet. The annoying thing is if she had communicated this to us earlier we could’ve planned a whole day during the week to help her.
Of course, the jury of wedding shamers was dying to roast this freeloading bride. Here's what people had to say:
higeAkaike said:
Wow, she was super un organized, expected free labor from everyone and didn’t communicate that at all.
strangernumberone said:
My favorite part of this story is that they've been planning this wedding for YEARS, since lockdown caused the postponement, yet decided not to create the decorations until the week of the wedding. But sure, blame that all on the guests!
MeredithL6 said:
Good for you for saying no! I’ve been reading way too many stories here about getting bullied into things.
Littleballoffur22 said:
It’s weird how people assume things and then get mad because they never asked for help or made things clear. The decorations sound unnecessary if the venue was very nice to begin with.
ColeDelRio said:
So she knew yall were planning stuff and still waited til yall were in town to casually try to draft you into doing stuff? Yeez.