Emily Duprie
A bride-to-be received a reality check after she excluded her slightly younger friend from her wedding. Not having kids herself, the bride wanted her big day to be entirely “child-free.” This isn’t an unusual request at all! However, this bride had a misconstrued view of who qualifies as a child and who doesn’t. According to her strange reasoning, she determined that anyone under the age of 21 is a kid.
Here’s the kicker; the bride/judge in question is a decrepit and withered 22-year-old! Her friend, and the victim of this story, at the time, was sitting at the ripe age of 20. The pair of “friends” have a two-year difference between them, which was apparently enough to get the younger one excluded completely from the venue.
The original poster (OP) shared her (u/21wedding) story with the popular subReddit “Am I The A-hole?” A lovely place on the Internet where people post their morally-challenging situations in hopes of receiving clarity from strangers. The bride-to-be was the one to ask if she was the “A-hole” after excluding her younger friend.
Read her story below to determine what you think!
After she excluded her friend from her wedding and received backlash, OP asked, “AITA for wanting a child-free wedding?”
I (22f) am getting married soon. Since my fiancé and I are child-free and because we plan to have alcohol at our wedding, we decided to have a child-free wedding with the age cutoff at 21.
After ignoring the social construct that 18-year-olds are legal adults, OP banned anyone under the age of 21 from her wedding.
This requirement so far has gone over well with most of our invitees (most of our invitees don’t even have kids anyway so it doesn’t make a difference for them).
I do have one friend “Mel” (20f) that I had to exclude from the wedding. After realizing that pretty much everyone else from the same social circle had been invited except her, she confronted me and demanded to know why she wasn’t invited.
I tried to explain that it wasn’t personal and that I just didn’t want to have to worry about underage drinking going on under my nose on my wedding day.
Mel saw right through OP’s facade. She confronted OP and brought up that she was once an underage drinker herself.
But Mel kept accusing me of being a bad friend. She argued that since we had drank together before it shouldn’t be such a big deal, but I told her that it was different since we were both underage at the time (I was 20 and she was 18-19ish when we started drinking together). Now as an adult, I feel like I have a responsibility to prevent underage drinking, and as the bride, I feel like I have the right to have a child-free wedding.
Mel is unconvinced and keeps talking bad about me behind my back to our mutual friends and making snarky comments about me feeling superior. I don’t see why she can’t just relax and let me have my wedding day the way I like. So Reddit, aita?
The bride’s superiority complex didn’t sit well with the Redditors who saw her post and the response she received wasn’t exactly what she was hoping for.
The nerve this bride has to exclude her friend from her wedding for being a mere two years younger than her! Mel was still an adult nonetheless, and in some countries, she would be of legal drinking age! There’s a chance that OP left out some context on Mel that may have helped her case. For example, if Mel was a raging alcoholic who couldn’t stay away from a bottle, or if OP simply doesn’t like her and wanted an excuse to keep her away from her special date.
Do you think OP was in the wrong for what she did? Or do you think that there could be more to this story than meets the eye? Let us know!
Based on the bride’s story, Redditors agreed that she was the “A-hole” for excluding her friend who was two years younger.
