Weddings and funerals have a tendency to bring out the best and worst in people. We don’t know why people seem to wait for milestone moments to act up, but it happens too often to ignore the trend. Sadly, one Reddit bride recently had to contend with bad behavior from her new sister-in-law on her big day.
Her husband’s sister-in-law committed a serious faux pas by showing up to the wedding in a dress that was a little too close to white. The bride handled it with grace, but still, in the aftermath of it all, the SIL found a way to make it about her.
A new bride and her SIL got married within months of each other.
In Reddit’s Am I the A–hole forum, a new bride wanted to know if she was being unreasonable on her wedding day. The bride told the Reddit community that her husband’s brother got married three months before she did. The brother and SIL's wedding had been postponed due to COVID and now fell quite close to the original poster’s nuptials.
Everything with her wedding went beautifully. But when the newly married couple stepped outside, the bride noticed that some of her guests seemed upset.
The bride was shocked to see her SIL in what looked like a white dress.
“We wanted a big picture of us together with our guests and while the photographer coordinated who would stand where my SIL tried to stand next to me,” the bride wrote.
“That was when I saw she was wearing a white dress. I was shocked but didn’t know what to say so I just looked the other way,” she wrote. But her maid of honor was not so willing to brush this off, and she said something.
The maid of honor addressed the tense situation.
She turned to the SIL and said, quite loudly, “Oh, what a nice white dress.”
The SIL gasped and said, “That’s tan.” Still, the bride said nothing.
Later, when the photographer asked the groom’s brother and wife to be photographed with the bride and her husband, her SIL attempted to stand next to her in the “tan” dress. Thankfully, the brother-in-law stepped in and switched places with her so there wouldn’t be any confusion.
The bride never confronted her SIL.
The bride never mentioned the dress to her new sister, even though her friends had plenty to say about it amongst themselves. Still, the issue came to a head after the wedding when the OP’s new relative decided to address the issue.
“My MIL (mother-in-law) took me aside to tell me the dress my SIL (sister-in-law) was wearing was tan, not white and my SIL is extremely hurt about what my moh (maid of honor) said and felt shamed and excluded. My mil asked me if I really thought the dress was white and I said yes,” she explained.
She continued, “Furthermore I told her I think it was a totally inappropriate dress because I know that my SIL wedding dress was the exact same color and she would have hated having someone at her own wedding wearing something similar.”
Instead of empathizing with her, her MIL claimed she was being an a–hole for not preventing her friends from speaking about the dress.
The Reddit community ruled almost unanimously for the bride.
The Reddit community agreed that this bride is not the one in the wrong.
“MIL seems upset that OP didn't … control her guests' thoughts??” one person wrote.
"It's SIL's own fault if other guests at the wedding thought badly of her for what she did. You didn't react one way or the other," someone else shared. "It's not up to you to manage how people (reasonably) feel about her behavior, and MIL's putting it on you is weird."
Others noted that if the SIL really didn’t mean to offend with her dress selection, she wouldn't have been so adamant to stand beside the bride in her too-close-to-white dress.
"If it was done by accident, she probably wouldn't have kept trying to stand next to the bride as though they were both brides in white!" one person commented.
What do you make of this situation? Should the bride have said something to her friends or was the SIL completely out of line?
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