Sibling’s secret wedding

[IsitanIssue]

Name change for obvious reasons.

Without being too outing, keeping it short as need opinions!

I got engaged, booked the venue, sent out save the dates to our guests. After sending out the save the dates, my sibling became engaged and booked their wedding to take place abroad 2 months after mine.

To avoid drip feeding: This is my first marriage. It is my sibling’s second marriage.* They left their first marriage after having an affair. It’s been less than 5 years since they got married the first time.

We did not go to my sibling’s wedding because it was a few months after ours and on the other side of the world. Unsurprisingly, we were broke after our wedding and did not have time to plan financially to go on their holiday of a lifetime so soon after our own celebrations. Clearly, relations were strained. This has created a HUGE rift in the family, and this sibling shouted at me several times and family members have been furious with us for not attending their wedding.

TWIST: It now turns out that my sibling secretly got married LOCALLY just days before our own wedding. So when we did not go abroad a few months later, we actually did not miss their legal marriage, as this was secretly attended locally to us with parents there. No one else seems to know the wedding abroad was not the legal wedding. Now legally, there was no need to get married in advance locally, as the wedding abroad would have been entirely legal and they are residents there.

AIBU- No reason to feel annoyed, and they are right to resent you.

YANBU- They hid important information about the wedding when shouting at you. That’s annoying.

*They have since broken up!

@IsitanIssue Do you think your brother is finding it difficult to let go of this because he is ashamed/embarrassed that his second marriage has failed?

If I try to imagine myself in his shoes. I've already been married once and it ended badly. A relatively short time later, I decide to get married again, and this time I'm so sure of myself that I ask all my loved ones to fly to the other side of the world to celebrate with me. Only my sister, recently married herself, declines to come. She claims it was a financial decision but I don't have sight of her bank accounts, I get the impression that she's judging me a bit for it being a second marriage, and I interpret her decision not to come as a vote of no confidence in my second marriage. Then my second marriage fails and in my head my sister becomes the person who correctly predicted that it wouldn't work out. And because I'm ashamed/embarrassed that I made the rest of my family spend all that money to celebrate my incredibly short lived marriage, I can never admit that my sister actually made the right call not to come, so I have to remain angry with her about it. (As do other family members who possibly regret spending all that money but can never say so, and prefer to focus their ire on my sister who saved herself thousands of pounds.)

I think you may have missed in my OP that they have since split up - BUT I’m really starting to understand that what may have hurt my sibling is them thinking I thought a second wedding was less important. I can see how that would be deeply upsetting and thank you for pointing it out.

I think they are very unreasonable to have been.shouting at you and letting rifts develop. It should have been accepted graciously that you couldn't attend.

That said, their wedding was announced right after your save the date. You hadn't spent all the money yet so the potential to have put some aside to attend their wedding was there. It sounds like you plain old didn't want to (fair enough, i might not either) so didn't prioritise it. That is going to lead to disappointment for everyone else even though you aren't unreasonable to not go. My guess would be the way that was all discussed/handled may be part of the issue. Also, you do sound very dismissive of your sibling for the fact it is their second marriage, the way their first ended etc. Is it possible that sense of superiority came through when talking to family? If it did then it might be the real reason for the rift, it's just not very tangible so things like 'you didn't care enough to come' get focused on.

I wouldn't focus on the legal ceremony at all. They didn't want people to think of that as their wedding which is their prerogative.

Two failed marriages and a family rift that developed when a sibling didn't want to attend their second wedding... I would imagine that your sibling has some personal.issues going on, and might carry a lot of shame and feeling inferior.

I was really hoping to gain a new perspective on the situation and these kind of replies are really helpful.

It really did not occur to me that not going could be interpreted this way and I can totally see how feeling rejected could lead to the falling out now. They just seem so strong and confident on the outside I hadn’t thought about it this way.

@IsitanIssue hope everything gets worked out soon x

"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"

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."

We will NEVER miss another wedding - that’s a promise!!!

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!

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.

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 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."

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.

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’

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.)

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

They actually don’t know we’ve found out! Probably won’t mention it now.

There were underlying issues and then they boiled over during this time.

Thats fair and it would have been nice to have more money left over for sure! Lost our heads a bit planning our big day (and yes venue and all deposits were set before they got engaged so the monetary obligations were in motion). We did have a great time though! But you’re right in hindsight maybe a loan was the way to go.

What have your parents said?

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

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...

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'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.

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.

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??