Family friction is the worst. You’re bound to these people by blood, and family feuds have been known to last a long, long time. It’s easy to get caught up in a game of tit for tat, especially if the initial beef caused a lot of strife in the relationship.

One Redditor found herself in an awkward situation after her daughter refused to invite her aunt to her 16th birthday in retaliation for being excluded from her wedding. Forced to put the upset aunt in her place, she turned to Reddit to ask if she was a jerk for doing so.       

More info: Reddit

Aunt and niece shared close relationship until aunt decided to exclude her from wedding

Image credits: lookstudio (not the actual photo)

Aunt told sister she wanted a child-free wedding so she could have the freedom to go wild on her special night and that the niece would get over it

Image credits: freepik (not the actual photo)

Niece was extremely upset, especially since the aunt had always talked about how important her attendance at the wedding would be

Image credits: freepik (not the actual photo)

Niece decided to get her own back by not inviting the aunt to her sweet 16th birthday

Image credits: u/AITA_Kids_Birthday

Mom was forced to put upset aunt in her place by asking her what she expected after the wedding snub

OP begins her story by telling the community that her daughter grew up extremely close to her sister since the two shared such a small age gap. The sister decided to have a child-free wedding so she could let her hair down on her special day, so she didn’t end up inviting her 15-year-old niece.

This came as a shock to the teen, since the woman had previously expressed how important it would be to her to have her at her wedding one day. Upset, the daughter decided to get back at her aunt by not inviting her to her 16th birthday party.

When the aunt asked her sister what time she should show up, she told her she hadn’t been invited because her daughter was still hurting from being excluded from the wedding. The aunt got upset, and asked the girl’s mom why she was letting her niece punish her for having her wedding her way.

The mom responded by asking her what she expected after excluding the teen and told her that she should have known it would upset her. Now that the party is over, the aunt is still acting passive-aggressive towards her and her husband, leaving OP to think she may have overstepped the mark by putting her in her place. 

In this scenario, it seems that both the niece and her aunt could benefit from letting go of their grudges before things spiral out of control into a family feud and estrangement.

Image credits: benzoix (not the actual photo)

In her article for Healthline, Courtney Telloian writes that grudges aren’t uncommon – in fact, according to an informal Trustpilot survey that polled a total of 12,000 people from six countries, the average adult holds 7 grudges at once. 

Holding a grudge negatively affects your mental health by making you more pessimistic, isolating you from others, increasing your risk of cognitive decline, and increasing your chances of anxiety and depression. It also boosts your overall stress levels, which can contribute to high blood pressure, heart problems, and lowered immunity.

Instead, the pair would be far better off finding a way to bury the hatchet. In his article for Psychology Today, Steven Stosny, Ph.D. writes that, if you’re in a family, you’ll almost certainly make mistakes. You’re likely to hurt the feelings of loved ones, and they’ll hurt yours, although the hurt may be masked by irritability or resentment. 

An effective apology makes relationships resilient. Stosny adds that you will find it impossible to apologize adequately if you view it as a submission. According to him, a sincere apology is never submission. In fact, it is one of the more profound forms of human interaction: reconciliation.   

Stosny adds that a sincere apology should state how important your family member’s well-being is to you, how sorry you are that you’ve done something to hurt them, and ideally involve some way of making it up to them. If the aunt and niece were close before, perhaps they can mend the relationship by taking Stosny’s advice and making heartfelt apologies to one another before it’s too late. 

Bored Panda reached out to Dr. Stosny to get his professional opinion on the matter. When we asked him what he thought of the aunt’s exclusion of her niece from her wedding, he had this to say, “The aunt probably had no intention to hurt her niece by not inviting her to the wedding, but we can’t simply evaluate our behavior by our intentions and ignore the effect of it on others. Teens are particularly sensitive to – and often harmed by – perceived rejection.”

On the point of one piece of advice he’d offer the pair, he added that the skill that makes relationships thrive is binocular vision – the ability to see the perspective of loved ones alongside your own.

What do you think of the situation OP finds herself in? Was she the jerk for telling her sister how it is, or do you think she crossed a line? Let us know your opinion in the comments!

Redditors responded by saying she wasn’t the jerk and that her daughter was rightly entitled to choose her own guestlist for her birthday

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