Spending the holidays with your in-laws isn't always a walk in the park. Tensions can run pretty high around the holidays, and even if they don't, making idle chitchat with your partner's great uncle twice-removed can be … well, kind of a snooze. If this sounds like you, at least one guy on Reddit feels your pain. An anonymous poster recently shared the story of how every year, he feels like his in-laws don't notice him or care about anything he does. And yet, they insist on him attending their Christmas Eve festivities. So this year, he devised a plan: He'd send his identical twin brother in his place, and see if anyone even noticed.
In his post, the man shared that his wife doesn't actually agree with his take on things.
"She told me that’s not true, they genuinely like me and enjoy talking to me," he shared. "But I know that the only times they’ve included me I had to basically insert myself into conversations and it feels awkward and unnatural."
And so, a bet was devised. He'd send his twin brother, Steve, in his place, and Steve would report back on whether or not anyone realized it wasn't him.
"I purposefully did not prep Steve on anything," the poster continued. "He went in completely clueless."
Of course, there was something in it for Steve — he got $20 for the gig (not to mention a fair amount of amusement).
Aaaand spoiler alert: Nobody noticed!
"As I suspected, Steve confirmed that he wasn’t approached all night, nobody could tell he wasn’t me, and he admitted he even felt excluded and he could only imagine how I felt," the poster relayed.
Oof.
"So this morning on Christmas I invited Steve to join," he continued, explaining that Steve normally goes to their mom and dad's every year. [My wife's family] knows about him obviously, but didn’t know about the switcheroo. That was when I revealed that last night 'I' was Steve and expressed disappointment that nobody noticed and said this is why I stopped trying, nobody talks to me."
YIKES. Talk about an awkward conversation starter.
No surprise, his wife was NOT happy about him spilling the beans.
"My wife drew the line here, she was hoping we would keep this between the two of us as a funny prank," the man shared. "But how can I expect her family to see what jerks they’ve been if I don’t expose it?"
Some people couldn't BELIEVE the wife's family didn't notice.
"I mean, if my brother-in-law had a twin brother and swapped out with him, we'd notice," one person wrote in the comments. "There's in-jokes he wouldn't be in on, history he doesn't have. If I had a twin who replace[d] me when my in-laws are around, they'd notice. To me, the in-laws in this family are so much the assh—s because they don't have that sort of relationship with OP. Even if it's only the parents- and siblings-in-law, SOMEONE should've noticed something was up."
Still, some people felt the guy was being a tad dramatic.
"You had in laws that couldn't tell the difference between you and your identical twin brother?" one person asked. "Or in laws who didn't check in with you every 5 minutes at a party to make sure you were enjoying yourself, were being spoken to, and were fed, bathed, and walked?"
Others felt the man wasn't totally in the wrong -- until he brought the whole thing up in front of everybody.
"If he had kept it between himself and his wife, his wife could have discussed it with her family privately," one person said. "About how he's being left out, without letting the cat out of the bag."
But bringing it up in front of the entire family? Well, that just made things super awkward.
"Now I'm sure the family is offended by their bamboozling and likely won't be nicer to him now after he called them out in front of everyone," the person continued. "Also, I can only imagine how incredibly awkward OPs twin brother must have felt being in that situation when OP called them out. Now the in-laws may dislike OPs brother as well."
"If this is real I'm going to go with ESH, you should have kept it between yourself and your wife to prove a point that you shouldn't have to go see her family," added someone else. "Yes what her family does sucks and makes them assh—s but you really have no hope for that ever changing, people tend not to change sh—y behaviors if called out. By doing what you did you've now made a bad situation worse."
One thing's for sure: Next year's Christmas Eve is likely gonna be even more awkward than this year's — because his wife's family is probably going to spend the entire night trying to figure out which twin they're actually talking to.
Merry Christmas, y'all!
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