A bride-to-be’s brother wanted to know if he was in the wrong for withholding his sister’s custom-made wedding dress from her after she slighted his son, and took to Reddit for advice.
In a post shared on the AITA (Am I The A******?) subReddit under the username ThrowAway5291926, the man said his sister had asked his 17-year-old son who has “always loved design and fashion and has taken technical courses to be able to make clothes” to design a wedding dress for her.
Several months later, the dress was completed, and “it was just amazing,” the user said, adding in the viral post that “my mother cried seeing my sister in the dress and I confess that I almost got emotional too.”
But the poster said he later found out that his son was not invited to her wedding. His sister explained that she “didn’t want any underage people at her wedding because there would be alcohol.”
This stock image shows a bride smiling in the mirror at a wedding dress fitting. A post about a man refusing to give his sister a wedding dress that was designed by his son has gone viral on Reddit. iStock / Getty Images Plus
According to a survey of 12,000 couples who got married in 2022 conducted by the wedding website The Knot, coming up with a guest list is the second-most challenging aspect of the wedding planning process. More than a third (36 percent) of couples surveyed said deciding who would be invited to their wedding was their top challenge.
The survey also found that the average cost of a wedding dress was $1,900 in 2022, and just a fifth (20 percent) of brides surveyed wore a custom-made dress.
The user in the Reddit post, which has received over 35,000 upvotes at the time of writing, said it “felt weird” that his son hadn’t received a wedding invitation when other family members had, especially because there aren’t any other minors in the family.
He said his son was “very sad and cried because he spent months on this dress and couldn’t go to the wedding.” After seeing his son in anguish, the Redditor told his sister that she “should look for another dress as soon as possible, as she would no longer wear the one my son made.”
The bride-to-be apparently “yelled” at her brother, accusing him of being “unreasonable,” but the dad said: “I don’t think I’m being wrong but just rational and paying her back in kind.”
His son later agreed to sell the dress to his aunt at market price, which turned out to be “quite high” after all the calculations. They sent this proposal over, but she allegedly “hated it” and said that “she couldn’t afford it because it was too expensive and it should be a gift because ‘she is family.'”
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The Redditor told her that “it was too easy to say she was family to get a free dress, but not enough to include my son.” He said his sister cried and “begged” him “not to ruin her day.” However, she didn’t change her mind about letting her nephew come to the wedding, or at least apologize to him.
Poppy Sienna, a luxury wedding and event planner based in the United Kingdom, told Newsweek the bride-to-be in the Reddit post was being “unfair.”
“On the face of it, I would normally say, it is your wedding and you can invite whoever you please. But when you are excluding just one person, especially the person who is doing a very kind thing for you, for free, I do think you may need to compromise and have a bit of flexibility when making that decision,” Sienna said.
“Of course, being a week out to a wedding will heighten emotions, but I think the bride needed to make a call—invite her nephew or pay for the dress,” she added.
In a comment that got 62,600 upvotes, user rezdogs870 said: “NTA [not the a******]. He should go, and wear the dress,” to which the original poster replied that it “would definitely be unexpected.”
Another person wrote, “Dumbest excuse [because it] only applies to one family member. What an UNGRATEFUL sister,” in a comment that got over 2,000 upvotes.
Redditor BlueKante said: “And even if you only have one underage family member no one would bat an eye if you gave one exception to a SEVENTEEN yo child,” in a comment that got 1,100 upvotes.
Newsweek reached out to ThrowAway5291926 for comment.
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