Awkward party encounter as uninvited guest glares at bridal couple from across the room. UPDATED
"Uninviting someone we never actually invited in the very first place."
So, my fiancé (34m) Mike has a acquaintance, Jen (f-early30s). It's looking like we'll have to uninvite her, though she was never actually invited to our wedding to begin with.
We know Jen through mutual friends, but in our wider social circle she's on the fringe for a series of things that happened years before we were around but they weren't great. Jen is in a relationship that's pretty serious, they're moving in together.
Despite that, she's made it clear that she has a crush on Mike. There was a period of time where she was text bombing Mike constantly - on the most active day, she sent him 50+ messages. She was trying to flirt in places. He responded to hardly any of it, letting her know that he was busy at work and didn't have time to talk.
Mike does not reciprocate these feelings, and declined any sort of in-person one-on-one interaction when she asked to meet up for drinks after work, alone. He shared the message threads with me because he saw the red flags and didn't want to end up in a situation where there was any room for doubt.
When things were less obvious and awkward, she tried to arrange double date nights but we generally made excuses and declined. The one time we went out with them on a double date, she made an ass of herself at the restaurant by a gross display of PDA with her partner and trying to dive into sex talk with kids within earshot at the table next to us.
All of us -including her partner- let her know that we weren't comfortable with where she was pushing the conversation and she pouted and said we weren't any fun (yes, she had been drinking).
She made a big show of wanting to be girlfriends with me to my face with Mike present, but I've never heard from her once and she hasn't made any effort. I have no idea what her partner knows about or thinks of all this.
This past weekend we learned that Jen has been telling others in our social circle that she's invited to our wedding, when she never was and is asking about our gift registry. We don't have one.
We're having a tiny ceremony with less than 10 people present and a bigger catered party but the guest list is still less than 50, based on cost and our friend's backyard isn't large enough to comfortably host more than that. But even if we weren't having an intentionally tiny wedding, she still would not be invited because neither of us consider her an actual friend.
She's hurt that she wasn't invited to his stag party, which is just a board game night but she was never a consideration. She's also complained that I overlooked her when having a shower or the bachelorette.
I didn't even have a shower because we already own a home and are established and I have zero reason to invite her to anything, because we're not friends and she's been disrespectful.
Two separate friends let us know that Jen is telling this tale. One of them tried to understand why she's lying about this by keeping it breezy and playing dumb, but she kept evading answering questions about it.
My guess is she's telling people all this for two reasons: 1. she believes that she and Mike are friends and her feelings are hurt and 2. she's possibly trying to ferret out the details/location of the ceremony and the party.
We generally don't think anyone we invited would share this information with her, given the general history in the social group. There's a chance she could manipulate it out of someone, though.
Needless to say, we think we've gotten to the point where we need to have a direct conversation with Jen over text, so there no confusion that she is not invited and what she's doing is just, well, bizarre.
We don't think we need to tell anyone connected to the wedding locations that she is specifically not invited, at this moment but we will if we need to. We mostly think she won't try to show up, anyway. After the conversation, the plan is to block her on SM and messaging platforms.
Is this unhinged? Yes. Should I have to devote any energy or time to a 30-something year old woman who behaves this way? No. Is this totally absurd? Yes. Does she need serious help? Definitely yes.
Here is what readers had to say in response to the OP’s post:
I would nip this in the bud. NO more hanging out. No more texting, even block and delete. But i would FIRST tell her that she is not invited. Maybe along the lines of "I need to clear something up, we were told that you have been saying you are invited to our wedding.
We do not want you to be embarrassed but there is no invitation." Do not apologize or make excuses. Just you are not invited. It is clear and to the point. BLOCK and DELETE right after that.
matryoshka_surprise (OP)
Oh, believe me - we haven't hung out directly with her since early 2024. When we do see her, which is rare, it's at birthday parties or other mutual social circle gatherings. She tried to organize a few more double dates after the first one, but we just kept politely declining.
Mike hasn't blocked her and I haven't blocked her because I think we both thought she would get over this and move on and if we gave it any attention, it would encourage her. Obviously, we were wrong. But yeah, otherwise,, we're totally on the same page. We just never thought we'd have to have this conversation with anyone.
I think Mike needs to text her back that “he does not want any further texts from her, and that she’s to leave him and you alone. In addition she needs to accept that she is not invited to your wedding which is for close friends and family only.
If she does turn up, which would be uninvited and on notice she is not welcome , she will be asked to leave and police called, as she is on notice now that her communications are causing harassment.”
Then I would say to the group you “are both worried as she won’t leave Mike alone, sometimes sending him 50 texts in a day, and Mike had to tell her to stop and to leave you both alone.”
Three months later, the OP returned with an update.
We weren't all that concerned about her crashing the wedding, which is still several months now but replies to my original post did press upon us both that we should actually be more concerned.
We did take those comments to heart and set-up measures with vendors to prevent her attempt to meddle with aspects of the wedding. The owner of the venue, which is just our friend's backyard, agrees that she likely won't show up - especially now.
But he has various things in place to monitor the situation including voice and movement activated home security cameras on the property that would alert him if she showed up at the bottom of the driveway. The way the house/yard/etc are configured, she doesn't really have another option to get in but through the house and she wouldn't make it that far.
The conversation with Jen happened. A friend of ours tripped going up the stairs in her home and broke her wrist that morning. Her husband was out of town at the time and she needed someone to drive her to the ER, so I went with her.
Mike added me as a third to the text conversation, so while I was there I just wasn't able to be active on it. I caught up to it when it was basically over while I was in the waiting room.
Mike opened by just wanting to understand if there was some kind of misunderstanding and the rumor mill at work and noted the confusion it was causing. I really thought Jen would object to my being in the conversation, but she didn't bring it up and feigned concern about the stress that was being created by these rumors.
He pointed out that two separate people both noted that she had lodged complaints about being excluded from being pre-wedding celebrations and also, that she had been invited to our wedding to them. Jen denied it all at first.
She insisted that she had not spoken to at least one of them at all and that whatever she had said to the other was probably a misunderstanding. Her version of things was that she understood she hadn't been invited to our wedding and assumed her exclusion was based on expense.
She also said she didn't expect to actually be invited to any pre-wedding events because it would be weird, in her opinion, to have a girl present at an all-male bachelor party because she assumed it would be event involving a strip club or related sex work.
As an aside, Mike's actual stag party is a board game night because that's one of the hobbies that gives him a lot of joy and he's sex positive but strip clubs aren't his thing. But he didn't get into any of that. Instead, he just responded that he chose an activity that he liked doing, it had nothing to do with the invitee gender and he was intentionally keeping it small.
Mike's response to the wedding invite denial was to show her screenshots of conversations with the people who brought this to our attention. They had given full permission to share that with her. Jen's tone immediately shifted and she started insisting on moving to video chat. Mike didn't want to do that and declined.
She kept on denying, at that point, what she had said, insisted those folks were lying to us and causing drama, and was getting increasingly upset (all caps typing and a lot !!!!!'s being used) that there were people in social our group who never let her move on from the past and were out to get her.
Mike responded that he was sorry if that was the case, he didn't hold those sentiments, he wasn't even around when all that went down but wanted to emphasize two points: 1. He wanted to make it absolutely clear and certain that an invitation to the wedding was not on the table.
2. while he considered them friendly, his takeaway from their interactions was that she was interested in him in a way that he was not going to reciprocate and if he had somehow misread her intentions there.
There was at least a desire for a friendship that he didn't feel was appropriate to pursue with her because much of what she wanted to talk about - as a friend - was took awkward and inappropriate, given that he doesn't really know her and he's engaged and she has a long term partner.
At that point, she kept reiterating how no one will ever let her move on from ten years ago and she was really upset that no one will recognize her efforts at changing or growth and that the wider social group went out of their way to bully people who are neurodivergent.
She didn't provide a response or apology for making things uncomfortable and awkward around the flirting attempts. He started to tell her that it was probably a good idea to end this conversation since it didn't seem like they were going to resolve this, but she beat him to it by blocking him.
A few days later, Mike got a few messages from her partner, who was upset and concerned that Jen based on what he was hearing was being attacked and bullied by us because of her checkered past in the group.
Honestly, the guy was just trying to defend her, which I get and he wasn't around for those events, so I don't know what Jen has told him happened but I generally assume by the messages he sent, Jen has misrepresented the past to him as well.
Mike thanked him for reaching out, said he understood that he was acting protectively toward Jen and asked him what the partner understood about everything.
The partner repeated a version of what Jen had told people, that her good friend Mike was being a bad friend by excluding her and allowing other people in the group to bully her by proxy about being autistic and past behavior and that we had abruptly uninvited her because I had decided she was a threat and I was jealous of her.
Mike set him as straight as he could by explaining that he never considered Jen a close friend - friendly at best- and that he wasn't even around for everything that happened years ago, so whatever opinions he had of Jen were his own and not entirely informed by the past. He also made it clear that Jen had never been invited to the wedding in the first place, and had let her know that.
He also shared that Jen had been inappropriate in her communication with him with what he took as overt attempts to flirt with him, including text and flirty emojis and asking him to meet up one-on-one. He offered to share those messages with him.
Jen's partner asked to see some of it, Mike shared probably the more obviously blatant stuff. The partner didn't really say much after that, just thanked Mike for what he shared and the conversation just kinda died. We haven't heard from him since, but my guess is our version of events really didn't match hers and the jig was kinda up.
Jen has made some vague posts on SM about being betrayed and misunderstood, but Mike didn't take the bait on any of it and hasn't responded. He hasn't blocked her on Instagram because he wants to keep tabs on things for a bit but it she's mostly back to her usual content: selfies.
About a month later, we ended up running into her at a birthday party. She didn't really say anything to either of us but didn't look happy to see us. We kept our distance and kept it cordial. No drama resulted. No word on her partner, all I know is he didn't come with her that night. We weren't going to ask.
Here is what readers had to say in response to the OP’s post:
would love to read this person's texts. I wanna study her like a lil lab rat. wtf is wrong with Jen??
matryoshka_surprise (OP)
Honestly, they weren't even that good? Like it was emojis instead of words and 'omg fr fr' kinda stuff but also flirty. It was like a lazy AI sexy chat bot and a teenager had a baby?
As the great Sir Terry wrote,
"Multiple exclamation marks,' he went on, shaking his head, 'are a sure sign of a diseased mind'."
You know they’re obsessed when a phone call won’t do and they insist on video chat. Why? Why is video chat the only option? Probably because she wanted (needed) to see Mike. What a crazy person. I’d have just sent her fiance the text chain honestly.
That is a lot but seems to work out if she's not interacting with you two. Here's hoping the liar will leave you alone permanently.