A bride lost her “best friend” after criticizing how much (or, more specifically, how little) they spent on her wedding gift. The former best friend opened up about the experience in a post on the r/WeddingShaming subreddit. There, he described the friendship as “ruined.”
He began by explaining that the wedding was a seven-hour drive away. He also broke down the costs associated with the wedding—a suit, transportation, and a hotel for three nights. That same month, he said he had to pay for $1,900 worth of dental work. “As you can tell, money was tight for me during this time period,” he said on the Reddit post.
Red flags started to show as soon as the bride sent the Redditor a “rude” text because he wasn’t staying at the same hotel she suggested. Then, things got worse.
“Because money was tight, and having already spent hundreds of dollars to attend this wedding, I only gave $80 to their honeymoon fund as a gift,” he wrote. “Looking back, I admit I could have splurged for more, but I don’t drink, was without a date, and figured that everything I did to attend this wedding would all be enough for her.”
At the time, nobody mentioned anything negative about the Redditor’s gift. But things went sour a year later, when he mentioned he was invited to another wedding.
“Her first response was: ‘Well, don’t be cheap and give them only $80,’” he recounted. “This message made my heart drop. Not only did it make me feel like a horrible person, I was also angry that she remembered my exact donation amount over a YEAR later. From that point on, I lost a ton of respect for her, and our relationship was never the same.”
“I just can’t believe that her entire memory of me at her wedding was being “cheap” instead of traveling 2 states over for multiple days to be there for her biggest day of her life,” he added. “How could someone focus on THAT?”
Is the bride in the wrong?
In response to the post, Reddit users agreed that the bride was “greedy” and “selfish.”
“Tell her not to worry because the bride isn’t begging for gifts like she did in her wedding,” one quipped. “She’s got no class,” another opined. “80 bucks is fine actually. Wedding folks have become crazy entitled lately.”
Other Redditors suggested that the bride might’ve had financial reasons for wanting him to go to that specific hotel. “She was mad you didn’t go to her recommended hotel because she would have gotten a percentage out of the money you spent on your stay,” one user wrote. “She was incredibly selfish: I wouldn’t have expected any gift for a destination wedding: your presence was your gift.”
While a third added, “‘The trash will take itself out’ comes to mind, I’m so sorry she did this, I can’t imagine how you must have felt when you got that text. Yikes, good riddance I suppose,”
If you have to travel to a wedding, what are you expected to gift?
A wedding etiquette expert told Vogue that for destination weddings, or weddings in locations outside of where the couple lives, that “there is a general understanding that their presence at the wedding can absolutely be their gift.”
“You have to remember that your guests are presumably taking time off from work and arranging childcare, so they’ve already invested quite a bit,” Kylie Carlson, the CEO of the International Academy of Wedding & Event Planning, said.
A Reddit poll backs this sentiment up.
A Redditor asked, “If your guest had to travel for your wedding (and pay for travel and accommodation) would you expect a gift from them or be upset if you didn’t receive a gift from them?”
The top-rated answer in the poll, with 1,300 votes, was: “I would assume that the cost they incurred to attend would be my only gift.”
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