Sibling’s secret wedding

The OP has explained that her venue was booked and her deposits were paid before her brother announced his wedding, and that it was "on the other side of the world". She'd also sent out save the dates, making it pretty much impossible to reduce her guest list without causing major offence.

Why on earth should the OP have to cut 20 people from her own guest list, or whatever she would have needed to do to economise 10% on her own (first and hopefully only) wedding, so that she could travel to someone else's second wedding? Her brother had other options. He could have left a longer gap between their two weddings. He could have made the legal wedding in the UK into a mini celebration for all those who weren't able to fly to Timbuktu for the big bash.

Or he could have just accepted with a good grace that if you choose to get married Maui, not everyone will be able to come. If he really wanted his sister there and she didn't have the money, he could have offered to pay for her air fare.

Why should she have to sacrifice her own wedding plans to pay for his choice to get married so far away?

Just imagine how pissed off she'd be feeling right now if she'd done what you suggest, perhaps losing friends of her own in the process who were hurt by being cut from her guest list, or taking out a loan which might have taken her a year or more to pay off, and then her brother had split up with his wife, and then she'd discovered there was a secret UK wedding down the road which he didn't even invite her to.

Maybe you're playing devil's advocate here, but let's just stop humouring and indulging these utterly unreasonable people's utterly unreasonable expectations.

but how do you know?

I have been divorced. There’s no need for everyone else to have looked at the details of the divorce, including the wedding date.

I don’t think you were wrong to miss the wedding abroad. I think you have to accept that happens when you plan a wedding that people will need to travel a very long way for.

But it is quite obvious you didn’t consider their marriage as important as yours because it’s a second marriage.

No, taking out a loan to go to someone's wedding is never the way to go! No reasonable person would expect you to do any such thing.

I don't know what to say really. These enormously expensive (for the guests) weddings can feel like guns at the relatives' heads; so much meaning is attached to the invitation being accepted and a refusal can cause so much offence and general upset, and the invitee might be completely unable to afford the journey and accommodation and time. It's a shame that the rest of your family have taken sides in this way. I'd suggest doing your best to keep in touch with your brother and support him whenever he tells you about the break up.

What a load of self indulgent claptrap. Why start a fight about not coming to a wedding when they were already actually married? That’s crazy.

Making all that fuss for a first marriage might be one thing, but to do it for a second marriage is pretty entitled.

And why exactly should you prioritise their marriage over your own?? Is there some kind of golden child / scapegoat dynamic going on here??

Oh actually, yeah, getting your parents to attend a secret wedding days before yours is bullshit behaviour. It's the sort of thing my own sibling would do, to try and get some attention on her and make my wedding about her too.

I'm confused by this. So five years ago your brother got married the first time. He then left for an affair partner. Two months after your wedding, he married the affair partner in Australia (or wherever), which is the country you all are from. His marriage has since failed, but everyone is still angry at you for not going. Is that it?

If so, I think that you're not unreasonable to not go, given you couldn't afford it. But also that you do seem like you look down on his wedding for not being legally binding, which I think is weird. Surely what matters is the ceremony, not the legal paperwork.

OP I find it very odd that your sibling got married just before you and then planned to get married abroad just after you. Weddings are an expensive business and surely they would have known it would cause a financial strain?
While both weddings were equally important to the couples involved, I’m trying to work out why your brother is so angry still?! I think he’s probably feeling on the back foot that the marriage failed. But the timing still feels very odd.
As for wider family, it’s not of their business. They have taken against you over not going to a wedding abroad? It would be different if it was at home, but under the circumstances it’s easy to see why it was tough for you. Any family member who cares about you for that long doesn’t take against you over this.
Why is your sibling so angry? Because it seems this wedding of theirs is masking a wider issue with them. Maybe you could talk to them just the two of you? Not that I would want to do that myself.
Family occasions seem to cause so much strife - all the politics, and in-fighting, it’s exhausting.
Just celebrate that your own marriage is going well, and spend time with good people who care about you.

I think one thing all the hand-wringing people saying 'but what was OP to do, she has not money, take out a loan or spend her emergency fund' are missing is that OP had by her own admission had a fairly big (and therefore presumably expensive) wedding only a few months before the sibling's wedding. I read that as meaning that had OP really wanted to, she could have cut back somewhere on her own wedding in order to afford to also go to the other wedding. We don't know exactly how far away the abroad wedding was or what it would have cost minimum to attend of course, or indeed exactly how much OP spent on the wedding, but you can see why the sibling and other family members might have felt that for the sake of reducing the money spent on the wedding by say 5 or 10% it would have been possible to save at least a few hundred £ and therefore OP at least, if not her husband/partner too, would have been able to come and therefore feel a bit aggrieved and/or that the 'we can't afford it' excuse was a bit of a fob-off covering the real reason which is 'we don't want to come (or not enough anyway to make sacrifices in things that affect us)'...

I'm not saying that is what OP should have done, we all make our own choices and priorities and it's OP's money at the end of the day so she's entitled to spend it how she chooses, but I think it goes some way to explaining why the sibling feels they definitely aren't top of OP's list...

Tell them to forgive you publically and take the blame for the rift and get things back on track, or you will put out a Facebook post revealing that everyone paid to go abroad for a fake wedding

What have your parents said?

But the brother didn’t propose did he?
He just got stroppy that the OP couldn’t afford the cost.

No offence, but I don't think this really makes sense.

No, it's not wise to get into debt or leave yourself without an emergency fund in order to pay for your own wedding. But it's even sillier to get into debt or leave yourself without an emergency fund in order to attend someone else's wedding.

And that's where I think the fact that it was his second wedding is a little bit relevant. Because when you're getting married for the first and hopefully only time, you should be able to decide how much to spend on your own wedding, without having to size down the scale of it in order to attend the second wedding of someone who has already done this once before and now wants you to fly to the other side of the world for their next wedding.

He also didn't have to get married two months after his sister. He could have left a longer gap. (And indeed, if he had done so he might not have got married at all and the whole family could have saved their air fares.)

I can imagine the answers if someone was posting

‘My sister has just had a big lavish wedding but she is now claiming to be too poor to come to my wedding. So she is asking ME to pay for her trip! As if I had money to spare’

So next time there is a wedding overseas and the OP can’t get there because of the cost, she should do what in your opinion?
Take a loan?

Because the OP didn’t tell her sister it wasn’t worth it because it was her second marriage. She said she couldn’t go because of costs. Which was true.
Im not sure what else she was supposed to do tbh.

If this is where he's coming from then I will have to take back my first suggested response, because making any kind of wise crack about the fact that it's a good thing you didn't spend the money given that the marriage has since ended is only going to twist the knife further.

If you are inclined to try and reconcile with him it might be better to go along the lines of, "I know you don't believe me, but we really didn't have the money to fly to Australia. We emptied our bank accounts to pay for our own wedding. We were really sad about not being able to come and celebrate with you and I hate the fact that you seem to think it was a choice we made because we didn't care enough."

There’s just no way I’d miss my sisters wedding. Be it legal or celebratory only. Be it first or to an affair partner (although I’d not be inwardly impressed). I’d def find a way to make it work and possibly take loans and cut back on my other expenses. But to be fair I wouldn’t put myself at such financial situation to not have an emergency fund by having a big wedding myself, but I’m probably more financially conservative that you.

also if he was doing the legal bit close both in time and physical distance to your ‘big’ wedding I imagine he maybe hid it slightly from you and other family specifically so as not to overshadow?

I imagine you both have bigger issues with each other than just the wedding?

If you couldn’t afford to attend, I would have asked your brother and family to subsidize your attendance. They clearly thought you needed to be there. It would have been perfectly reasonable for them to pay your expenses for a brief solo trip. While your new spouse attending would be nice, it wasn’t as important as a sibling’s presence.

I don't think YABU except for calling the legal bit the 'real' wedding. It's a purely legal bit and celebrating with friends and family is obviousky the important part to then so I can see why they might be upset if you undermined something that was very important to them by insisting it wasn't real!

You could send a message. "I was absolutely devastated that I could not afford to attend your destination wedding so soon after spending everything I had on my own wedding. In view of this I've already started saving, to give the best chance possible of being able travel make it to your next wedding."

"I'm so sorry, DB - if we'd known it would all be over so quickly then we'd have made more effort to be there while you were still together! Next time we'll try to get there before you divorce xxx"

@IsitanIssue hope everything gets worked out soon x