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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

@maxelly
1- the OP had already organised/booked/sent the ‘save the day’ cards by the time her brother decided to have his wedding 2 months later.
There isn’t a lot she could have changed.
2- her brother decided to get married close to her wedding date, knowing that fur some of the family paying to go to the 2 weddings might be hard (not just the OP)
3- the brother’s wedding was ‘on the the side of the world’

So it wasn’t the case of saving a few hundreds pounds.
And im wondering where you think she could have saved that money from? Reducing the number of guests and upsetting people? Not having a photographer? Changing her wedding dress to a less expensive one?

When people tell you they can’t afford a trip to the other side of the world, usually they are believed. Actually, it would also normally be accepted that you dont want to spend £thousands for a one day wedding (plus jet lag etc etc). That’s what happens when you get married that far away.

@IsitanIssue Im actually really sad that you have now been convinced the answer is to always go to a wedding and put yourself in debt instead.
It’s a crazy idea. Seriously

Ideologically, I wouldn’t say I’m convinced in general it’s the right choice. But personally, I’m realising that the rift caused by not going may have been worth taking a loan out to avoid. It’s been awful and we almost want there to be another wedding abroad just so we can prove we’ll be supportive.

Just a question: by any chance is your brother the one who can do no wrong and you the scapegoat in general?

Because I’m still 😵‍💫😵‍💫 at the fact so many family members seem to have automatically supported him.
And you seem to really want to see yourself as the only one who can do something g to repair the rift.

I think the secret wedding is a bit of a red herring. They probably did this for some legal reason or the fact they wanted there to be no doubt that the wedding was properly legally performed in the UK. Obviously they wouldn't tell anyone about this, because they didn't really intend this to be the actual wedding. Just a formality and if they had, then a load of people would probably have said that they wanted to go to that and not the destination wedding.

On the one hand I think your sibling kind of has a point that you should have made every effort to go to their wedding. Maybe you should have held a bit of cash back from your own. Or maybe your public behaviour since then appears to indicate that you are not as cash strapped as you claim you are.

OTOH expensive destination weddings, I think if that is something that you actually want you have to be receptive to the fact that not everyone is going to have the money to drop on something like that, and as a consequence you have to be prepared for the fact that not everyone is either going to want or be able to attend due to financial issues.

So I would say it is a 50:50 really, depending on whether you were really as cash strapped as you claimed you were and haven't been doing obvious stuff like buying Ferraris and booking holidays to the Seychelles whilst simultaeously claiming you didn't have enough cash to attend the wedding.

Very true. I guess it comes down to that I personally would put my siblings wants above my partner (assuming here he wanted the lavish wedding because I certainly wouldn’t). I guess we’ve seen in the post partners come and go but siblings are for keepsies and that should be cherished. Again probably only if you get a good one which maybe OP hasn’t

Ouch! My spouse has never yelled at me or turned people against me in the well over 10+ years we’ve been together - which makes me feel a lot safer than my sibling does! We have been entirely on the same page throughout the ordeal, including reflecting together on how we could have done better. Ideally, anyone who is ‘keepsies’ won’t be shoutsies 😅

You could say they are the golden child. Mum has been known to say they could have been prime minister 😂

We had prebooked a luxury honeymoon so perhaps that did not help our cause! Basically, we planned and booked our dream wedding and honeymoon (before they were engaged) and didn’t change anything to save money to attend their wedding. To be fair, when they got engaged they said they would get married in UK and it wasn’t until a few months later we found out that had changed. Though it’s funny how we’ve now found out they technically did get married in the UK (we just weren’t invited to that)!!

Personally I don't think it really matters whether they married legally before or after... it would suck to legally get married in a quiet ceremony and then noone see the point of celebrating it with you at a party on another date.

But. I do think they are being totally unreasonable in that if you decide to marry abroad then you do that accepting that you will not get all the people there who you'd like to be there unless it's agreed well in advance and you're prepared to pay towards those who couldn't otherwise afford it. And even then not everyone wants to use that much annual leave/ has the childcare/is happy to fly etc etc. I think it's something you do being prepared to take your oil on others declining. So shouting at you for it and causing so much drama is wildly unreasonable.

I'd just breeze over it and repeatedly say "such a shame we couldn't afford it and didn't have the leave to take from work."

Out of interest (and because it gives you the moral moral high ground, even though you don't need it), was the second wedding between affair partners?

The sibling is batshit, knows they've messed up the "marriages" element of their lives, and it taking it out on you as the one with the perfect "marriages" element of her life. They need someone to blame for something to do with their wedding, and your non-attendance is a clear-cut thing (to them) that they can vent their spleen about.

I didn't go to one of my siblings' weddings in St Lucia, because I hate destination weddings and frankly I just didn't want the expense and couldn't be bothered. I declined politely, they accepted my apologies graciously, they're a very happily married couple after nearly 2 decades and we all get on extremely well. That's a grown up, adult way to behave.

In that case, I’d look at what has happened taking that into account.

Because it will happen again.
And you’ll have to chose to either constantly appease him/your mum or do what you feel is right.

I didn't go to one of my siblings' weddings in St Lucia, because I hate destination weddings and frankly I just didn't want the expense and couldn't be bothered. I declined politely, they accepted my apologies graciously, they're a very happily married couple after nearly 2 decades and we all get on extremely well. That's a grown up, adult way to behave.

You’d think that was the obvious way to react!
The fact the family also bought into the ‘how dare you not come to MY wedding’ is confusing too.
Im wondering what those people are thinking now that the marriage has already fallen apart. Will they be as keen to spend so much money again for the next wedding I wonder…..

I didn’t want to add more judgement to my original post but the second marriage did begin with my sibling sleeping with their second spouse while they were in a relationship with someone else.

And I love reading that you and your family handled it so maturely and are happy so long after!

I'd be judging away, mate. You stand on that moral high ground, let the noise bubble away down below. So predictable.

If they saw the legal ceremony at home as just a formality and the overseas wedding as the real wedding then I think it's a bit unreasonable to say "they were already married" but I think it's seriously unreasonable to expect anyone to travel internationally to attend your wedding and they should definitely have just accepted that you couldn't afford it.

So she made a huge fuss that you didn't attend the wedding abroad, along with a number of family members and now they're divorced. Don't you just love it when certain people cause drama and then karma bites them on the backside. YANBU

@IsitanIssue how did you find out about the date of the legal wedding? did you approach your sister and confront her with the big lie when you found out? I would love to have watched her face!!! I would get a copy of marriage cert and send it to the family who no longer speak to you!

The OP said that the marriage abroad would have been legally recognised, so the couple actually committed a criminal offence by going through a second "legal" marriage ceremony abroad. It's called technical bigamy, because even although married to each other they're not single and free to marry !!!!! It's only if the 'marriage ' abroad is just a blessing rather than a legal ceremony that it would be necessary to have the legal bit done here. Any other posters who think it's OK to have 2 "legal" weddings need to think again !!!!

And OP, you are definitely not being unreasonable. It was unnecessary of them to have a destination wedding, and so close to yours. You did nothing in my opinion.

This.

The sibling in this case sounds completely mad, for a whole bunch of reasons. The OP did nothing wrong.

However, life circumstances sometimes dictate that a couple needs or prefers to do the "legal" bit in advance of the ceremony. For example, in some countries, these may be completely separate anyway (in Japan where I live, due to religion/state separation your wedding ceremony has no legal validity and the legal bit is when you go to the city office on a separate date), or there can be other reasons. Some people don't have enough money for a nice ceremony, want to save up, but also want to get on with TTC for age reasons and want to have legal protections in place beforehand; it is a very sensible thing to do. I always think that it's very unkind to get upset about this, or act as though the wedding ceremony was not a "real" wedding for this reason, and I'm surprised at how common this kind of reaction is on Mumsnet.

I agree, I think this element is irrelevant.

I think sibling was unreasonable to get married abroad and expect your attendance though - surely people being unable to come is a risk you run if you decide to do something that will be expensive for guests.

I also don’t understand why so many people think their wedding should be as important to other people as to them.

this is why I took advantage of lockdown and got married at 4 weeks notice when everyone else was cancelling theirs. 15 people limit including us and the vicar and a lot less stress!