When you break up with someone, the odds are that they will no longer be an active part of your life. You create some distance between both of you, and you both get on with your lives. However, not everyone has this luxury.

Redditor u/Nepo_Barbie went viral on r/pettyrevenge after opening up about a delicate situation in her family. Her brother has recently gotten engaged. However, his ex-girlfriend, who had earlier married his and the OP’s dad, was trying to interfere with the engagement party. Luckily, things turned out very different from what the ex/stepmom had hoped. Scroll down for the full story.

Bored Panda has reached out to the author via Reddit, and we’ll update the article once we hear back from her.

When your ex-partner marries into your family, it can lead to a lot of drama

Image credits: Nektaria Kleopoulos / pexels (not the actual photo)

One woman shared how she saved her brother’s engagement party from his ex-girlfriend, who is now married to their dad

Image credits: Rene Asmussen / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Soner Görkem / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Nepo_Barbie

The first step to resolving family issues is proper communication and setting some boundaries

Things can get complicated when there’s tension between close members of the family. However, things get even more tangled when one of your family members is someone whom you’ve dated in the past.

Though everyone’s free to choose whom to date, there’s a lot of emotional baggage that comes from getting into a relationship with a person who has dated someone you know.

Consider how strange it would be if your friend started dating your ex-partner. Now think how emotionally messy it can get when a close relative of yours does the same. It almost sounds like the premise of a rom-com scenario. However, we’ve found that fact is often stranger than fiction.

These sorts of complicated situations only work out if everyone is aware of and respects each others’ boundaries. As redditor u/Nepo_Barbie pointed out, her brother’s ex overstepped. She wrote that the ex made her brother and his fiancée very uncomfortable with her behavior and questions.

In these situations, clear communication is of utmost importance. On the one hand, if you keep quiet and grit your teeth, you avoid conflict, but you start feeling more and more resentment toward the person who’s trampling your boundaries.

On the other hand, if you’re not tactful enough and sound too accusatory, you might force the other person to escalate things further out of spite. And that can lead to an even bigger headache for you than before.

So what you want is to talk to the problem person privately. Tell them how their behavior is affecting you. The key here is to make sure that they understand that you’re open to listening to their perspective, too.

Mostly, people just want to be heard and understood. And if they know that you’re taking their thoughts and feelings into account, they’re more open to coming to some sort of compromise.

Image credits: Maryia Plashchynskaya / pexels (not the actual photo)

Whether or not to invite your ex to your engagement party or wedding depends on what your relationship is like now

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However, if the other person refuses to learn from their mistakes and continues spreading anxiety and misery, you have to be firmer. If their goal is to ruin your engagement party, it might be best for everyone if they’re uninvited. Or if you’re feeling particularly creative, you can always bribe the staff to run interference on them, like the OP did.

Naturally, if you uninvite someone, there’s going to be at least some emotional fallout. But at the end of the day, engagement parties are supposed to be about happy couples who are starting their journey of love together. The focus should not be on some of the guests who have very strong opinions on who’s dating whom.

According to The Knot, it’s appropriate to invite your ex to your wedding only in some cases. For example, if a lot of time has passed since you’ve dated and if both of your families have remained on friendly terms. The key here is that both people have moved on with their lives and have stayed cordial.

The rule of thumb is to be honest with yourself if you’d feel awkward having someone at your wedding or engagement party or if you’d feel comfortable having them around.

Another thing to consider, according to Alexandra Denniston, the owner and lead planner at Eventlightenment Planning, is how your fiancée or fiancé feels about you having your ex at the celebration.

“Communicate how you feel about including or not including this person and have an honest discussion about what feels most appropriate,” Denniston told The Knot.

Meanwhile, Wedding Wire warns people to not invite their exes if they’re only doing this to make them jealous. Your wedding should be about love for your partner, not about rubbing your awesome life in someone else’s face.

On top of that, you should not be using your wedding as a way to rebuild burned bridges with your former partners.

Image credits: Samantha Gades / unsplash (not the actual photo)

The author of the viral story revealed more details about her family in the comments

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