A woman has been blasted online after she became upset at her friend for not buying her a thank you gift for serving as bridesmaid at her wedding.
Her insistence that she receive a gift came despite the fact she actually backed out of serving as bridesmaid on the day and instead attended as an ordinary guest.
As a result, her request has fallen on deaf ears, not just with the bride but also on social media. In a Reddit post shared under the handle u/Competitive_Lie5575, the bride revealed how the woman, with whom she had been good friends since high school, “dropped out a few days before the wedding without any reason.”
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“I know her job gets stressful so I didn’t push for an excuse, but she still attended the wedding,” the unhappy bride wrote. According to website The Knot’s 2023 Global Wedding Report, the average expenditure for a wedding in the U.S. today stands at $30,000.
Given that kind of outlay, the pressure is on the happy couple to ensure they enjoy as memorable a day as possible. For this particular bride, that meant having her nearest and dearest friends with her.
As a thank you for their help, the bride said she bought her bridesmaids a selection of gifts that included skin care products, a spa gift certificate and personalized robes and slippers.
When her friend dropped out, however, the bride decided to give her gifts to her 15-year-old cousin as they both had the same name, Hannah. That was all fine until her friend got in touch after the wedding to ask “when she could pick up her gifts.”
“I told her they were a thank you gift to my bridesmaids and she attended the wedding as a guest, so I gave hers away,” she said.
Since then, the friend’s mom has gotten in touch to hit out at the bride for being “spiteful” in giving away her gifts, telling her she “should have considered her [the friend’s] feelings.” Yet for event planner and designer Shellie Reid-Warner, the friend’s initial decision to back out of the bridesmaid role in the way she did was inexcusable.
“Let’s take away the title of bridesmaid, which is a temporary title, and get down to the heart of the relationship which is friendship. A good friend doesn’t leave her friend without a participant in her wedding at the last moment, without explanation and the opportunity to discuss it,” she told Newsweek.
Even so, Reid-Warner felt it was a mistake to give her gift to someone else. “The bride can share a a gift with whomever she wants to as it is hers until it’s given away. But if this friend was important enough to be invited to be a bridesmaid, it would have been kind to just give it to her anyway to cheer her up since she obviously was struggling with something enough to back out,” she said. “Friendship is far more important than a one-day gig.”
Others online were less forgiving. One Redditor wrote: “Pulling out at the last minute was fairly rude, even if she was p***** at you giving away her gift she should have the grace to understand that she doesn’t get to complain about your behavior given her own questionable way of operating.”
A second commented: “The gifts you bought were a thank you for being a bridesmaid, a job well done, if you will. Your friend didn’t complete their job and is not entitled to the bonus.”
A third user concurred, writing: “If you accept a job offer, go through orientation, and then quit before you start your first day on the job, you don’t receive the company Christmas gift.”
The bride has since returned to Reddit to reveal that the friend had contacted her and explained she dropped out after realizing she had gained weight and could no longer fit in the dress allocated to her for the wedding and there was no time left for alterations.
“I didn’t know, but I apologized for giving away her stuff,” the bride said.
Newsweek reached out to u/Competitive_Lie5575 for comment. We could not verify the details of the case.
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