Most people marry out of love and devotion, right? The results from a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center would seem to show so too, as 88% of the respondents cited “love” as the reason they got married.

Yet sometimes, couples get married for other reasons. This netizen’s friend decided a wedding might be quite a lucrative endeavor, so, she wanted to throw a wedding for the attention and the gifts. After she found this out, the woman refused to attend the wedding but still shamed her friend online to demonstrate what some folks are willing to do for free stuff.

Bored Panda reached out to the person who posted this story, u/sly-pickle, and she kindly agreed to tell us more about her friendship with the bride and why she decided to say “no” to the wedding. Read our chat below!

One woman planned to throw a fake wedding just “for social media and gifts”

Image credits:  Karolina Grabowska / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

Her friend refused to attend the wedding and be her bridesmaid and shamed her online for it

Image credits: Aiony Haust / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

Image credits: sly-pickle

“I didn’t feel it was my place to go around and tell her friends and family and fiancé,” the OP tells Bored Panda

When a friend tells you they’re having a wedding, your first thought probably isn’t “Is it for money and social media likes?” u/sly-pickle felt the same: she cut ties with the friend right after she told her about her plans for the fake wedding.

The women met a couple of years prior to this drama. The Redditor told Bored Panda via a message that they became friends when she first moved to the area. “We started to grow apart a bit after I moved so we still kept a long-distance friendship and would fly to visit each other every now and then,” she explained.

‘I was planning my actual wedding and I think that caused some jealousy with her because we started to not be as close,” u/sly-pickle adds. “That’s why it wasn’t that hard for me to cut her out of my life after she told me about the fake wedding.”

She wasn’t as close to the bride’s family or her fiancé, either. That’s why she didn’t feel comfortable telling others about the real wedding intentions. “Because I never made it to her bachelorette party or bridal shower I never met them,” u/sly-pickle clarifies. “She didn’t have that many friends in the area either and those that she did have she kept separate from me.”

“I also didn’t feel it was my place to go around and tell her friends and family and fiancé,” the Redditor explains. Some commenters blamed her for not telling others or at least the BF about the bride’s real plans, but the thought didn’t really cross her mind then.

“I wasn’t even close to her fiancé and I figured if she told me this she had to have told someone else. I just wanted to get as far away from her and this situation,” u/sly-pickle recalls.

If their paths crossed today, the OP says she wouldn’t be interested to catch up. “I did so much for this girl over the course of our friendship without so much as a ‘Thank you’ from her, so, I have nothing to say to her. I helped her get a job at my company so she’d get insurance and benefits and gave her money and she was just ungrateful. Maybe this fake wedding is her karma.”

People might be moving away from the concept of the performative “perfect” wedding

Image credits: Olivia Bauso / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

At their core, weddings were once about celebrating the formation of a new family. You could even call it a party: a party for the bride and groom, their families, and friends. But, increasingly, it seems that weddings are more about the spectacle and less about the relationship between the bride and groom.

As Megan Garber wrote for The Atlantic in a piece titled “How ‘I Do’ Became Performance Art,” today weddings are “celebrations not just of two people deciding to merge their assets, but also of celebration itself—its pageantry and its unapologetic excess.”

This story perfectly illustrates how, for some, a wedding can be more about appearances and beautiful photographs for one’s Instagram feed, and not about loving the person that you’re marrying.

That’s why some newlyweds are moving away from the trend. Amy Shack Egan, an “anti-wedding” planner who calls weddings “love parties,” offers her clients a different experience. “Wedding planners plan and focus on the wedding, not the relationship, which is what I’m highly invested in, and making sure that relationship is reflected in the event,” she explained to The New York Times.

“We’ve become obsessed with perfection, trends, and putting your big day on a pedestal. I try to subvert that with love parties,” Egan said. The fact that more and more people seek out different wedding experiences perhaps shows that the concept of a wedding is changing.

People no longer want it to be the perfect, most important day in their lives with lavish gifts, costumes, and professional photographs. For some, delivery pizza on the floor and a bounce house at reception sounds just as good.

“Not my circus, not my monkey,” the OP clarified why she wasn’t the one to tell the BF everything

Netizens gave their verdicts: “This is so trashy”

Interestingly, other netizens have seen fake weddings, too

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