I think if a sibling wants their opposite-gender sibling to be in the wedding, they should buck tradition and make them a “best woman” or a “bridesman”. It’s your wedding, after all. You make the rules.
Looking back at weddings I’ve attended throughout the years, it also seems that I’ve seen more “future in-laws” in the wedding party when I was younger (college & soon thereafter) than in weddings of people older (late 20s and beyond).
Has anyone else noticed this?
My gut tells me that, as nice as it may be, it is certainly not required to invite in-laws to be members of the wedding party. Miss Manners agrees (first question).
I was a little taken aback when I was told by my only sibling that I wouldn’t be in his bridal party. He said he had assumed that I wouldn’t have been into it, since I don’t like all that girly stuff. I told him I totally would have put up with it for his sake.
But I am very glad it worked out how it did. I wouldn’t have fit in with my SIL or her sisters and her friends. She was older, like 38, and this was her dream wedding. I woulda felt bad for her to have some fat stranger tagging along in all of that. Everyone woulda felt awkward.
My brother let me do a speech at the reception. I don’t remember if it was in lieu of the best man or not, but it was big time. I thought it was a great compromise.
My friend’s brother got married last summer. The bride had her sister and best friend stand in and that’s it. My friend - who is 31 and a mother of 2 - spent the whole wedding literally crying about how she wasn’t in the wedding party. Lame lame lame lame.
I come from a large family, so including me would mean including several other people besides. I didn’t ask any of my SILs when I got married because I had several sisters of my own and wanted space in my bridal party for a friend or two besides.
The only family wedding where an in-law was asked to be in the wedding party was when my brother’s fiance asked my daughter to be a bridesmaid (daughter was 16.) My husband was the best man, which was kind of sad because I never thought the two of them were that close. It was also annoying because we had to rent the tux, pay for a bridesmaid dress, and a flower girl dress (youngest in the same wedding), I made (and paid for) the cake, and took all the pictures. That was an expensive summer.
Why, are we trying to stave off a war between medieval England and France or something?
I will say this. If a brother/sister are close–not just siblings, but friends–and if the family dynamics/traditions are such that they can’t be included in their own family’s retinue, they should be asked to be on the opposite side. In a big fancy wedding, it’s really hard to spend any time with the happy couple at all–pretty much only the wedding party gets to actually talk to the bride and groom very much at all.
It would be awful and awkward to have a sibling you were really close to get married and have to sit with the herd of guests at dinner while your parents and all his/her friends were clustered around them, leaving you to make conversation with your new in-laws’ work friends. Again, not all siblings–I am not that close to my two married brothers, and never dreamed I’d be asked to be in their bride’s party. But there are some brother/sister pairs that are BFFs, and a new spouse should help to support that relationship.
These days, it makes more sense to just break the gender line, but 20 years ago, that didn’t happen hardly at all, and even today there are a lot of families that would think it a little too weird in the pictures. So I think that’s where the tradition comes from.
When my male cousin got married his sister was not part of the bridal party. She did do a Bible reading as part of the ceremony.
The only person who was offended or bothered or whatever by this was my sister’s husband. And I don’t know if he was truly offended or just trying to stir up trouble. He’s like that sometimes. “Hey Cuz. Aren’t you pissed off that she didn’t include you? I’d be so mad. You must be mad.”
My cousin was not mad in the slightest. She got to enjoy the wedding (which was absolutely great in every possible respect), wear what she wanted, and sit with people she already knew and liked.
The best solution to things like this might be to be willing to step away from the traditional Maid of Honor and X Bridesmaids/Best Man and X Groomsmen model if it doesn’t fit the actual situation. Traditions are important, but if you refuse to modify them to fit your reality, then they become shackles.
I wasn’t in either of my brothers’ wedding parties. It was fine with me, and there were no hard feelings.
You’d be surprised how long family members can hold a grudge. Again, it all depends on family dynamics, but if including your SIL in the wedding party is going to make life easier for the next 20+ years, it seems like an easy choice to me. Especially if she is close to your fiance.
Do some couples think of the wedding party as consisting of people who are close to the couple, while others think of the bridesmaids as people who are close to the bride and the groomsmen as people who are close to the groom?
Not only was I not invited to be in my brothers wedding, my (same sex) partner was specifically not invited to the wedding at all. I was directly told that I was not in the wedding party because he wanted ‘Men of God’ to be there with him.
My sister-in-law didn’t ask me to be a bridesmaid. When she and my brother set the date, I had an eight-month-old who was nursing on demand, and I lived in Indiana, while she and my brother lived in California. Also, while I did like her very much, and had spoken to her on the phone several times, I’d only actually met her twice.
If I’d been expected to fly out to California with my son, and no one to help with him, and be away from my husband, to attend showers and bridesmaid’s parties, dress fittings, and then buy a dress I’d never wear again, all at my own expense, at a time when my husband and I were stretched pretty tightly financially, it would have been very awkward. I actually even considered calling my brother and telling him to please tell his fiance not to feel obligated to ask me. I settled for mentioning in one phone call (when she called to wish me a happy mother’s day), that we were happy, but it was A LOT OF WORK, WOW.
I have no idea whether she ever considered asking me to be a bridesmaid, but we have always gotten along, and she is a wonderful aunt to my son.
I think if she’d asked me, I would have had to say no; either that, or shown up a couple of days before the wedding for a hurried dress fitting, having missed out on all the other bridesmaid stuff, and that would have caused problems. Thank goodness she didn’t ask me.
If it’s a tradition, it’s not one that overrides all practical considerations.
Maybe I never developed proper familial attachment circuits in my brain or something, but if my brother said something like that, he would de facto not be my brother anymore. I’d “men of god” upside his head!
I can hold a grudge a long time…
Oh god yes this.
As the “my husband has 5 sisters (and I only have 1 sister)” poster, I will add this caveat - I did bow to pressure and have one of his sisters, and it was fucking stupid.
I didn’t need to get the chance to meet them - they all lived near us in Chicago or the suburbs, and they all cross-examined me heavily during our early dating years. One repeatedly tried to set my then-boyfriend-now-husband up with one of her friends. They were all also 10-15 years older than me, so I didn’t think any of them would be gleeful about putting on a bridesmaid’s dress.
I was wrong. At our family get-together where the engagement announcement was made, his youngest sister drunkenly told my brother that she just had to be in our wedding party, and he said sure to get her to get off the topic, assuming she’d forget. She didn’t. So ostensibly to avoid family drama (ROFL) I buckled and allowed her in. This apparently hurt the feelings of another sister (but she’s a whole other topic).
Anyway, the bridesmaid-sister backed out of being in the wedding party maybe 2 weeks prior to the wedding (lingering back problems flaring up was the claim, and she did legitimately have that issue but it tends to flare up when she doesn’t want to do something), she showed up IIRC after the vows because she couldn’t get her ass out of bed in time for a midday wedding, got into an argument with another one of her sisters at the reception after making a very pot/kettle accusation (but another sister shooed them outside quickly), and really, to this day I would have preferred to just elope.
So with all that bullshit and more, you need people who will have your damned backs, and at least we did.
Now back to the OP - I’ll say it varies by situation, but the respective couple should choose (preferably together), and people need to stop assuming they “should” be invited or that this is even a good thing. (One of my oldest friends went full-on anal-retentive Bridezilla down to requiring dyed-to-match heels for us (WTF?) that really fucked up my feet, and having us assemble wedding programs and hand-knotting a particular type of thin gold cord in a very specific way to hold them together.)
If you haven’t met and at least developed a cordial relationship with someone’s siblings by the time you agree to marry them, you are NOT going to make friends with said siblings during the mutual stress and hassle of coordinating clothing for 5 people of utterly different sizes/shapes/coloring and smoothing ruffled feelings because asking the sibling means you don’t ask your college roommate and planning parties and figuring out how big a deal it is if people’s shoes don’t all match each other and and and. You’re just not. You can sometimes deepen a cordial acquaintanceship into friendship sitting around tying bows around wine glasses and such, but that only happens if you have the sort of personality match that you’d have been friends even without one of you marrying the other ones brother.
Neither of my sisters-in-law asked me to be a bridesmaid, and I can’t say that it ever occurred to me to be hurt or upset or feel snubbed. I already knew and liked both of them, and both of them seemed to like me well enough, but it’s not like we were friends independent of the familial tie. I would have willingly been a bridesmaid if they’d wanted me to; I was happy to go along with whatever made their wedding experience easier and happier, and they both knew and seemed to appreciate that. Especially once the bridesmaid politics really started rearing its ugly head in other quarters.
I also didn’t ask either of my sils to be bridesmaids, because I didn’t have any. Our wedding was going to require travel, and I didn’t want anyone to feel obligated to spend their vacation time to come, much less feel like they had to buy a dress they hate and throw me parties and all that shit. Also, the thought of navigating the minefield of who’s going to be hurt if I ask someone else and not her kind of made me want to blow my brains out. I sat down and counted it up one day and found that by the time I played the “if you include this one you have to include that one” game I was looking at 9 bridesmaids. NINE. For a wedding that would have less than 50 people at it.
Fuck that shit.
I had two attendants. They were both married, so they weren’t bride’s “maids.” I had a very informal wedding-- my dress was blue, and cost $25. Anyway, I just told them to wear something that made them feel pretty. They were completely different, and different from my maid of honor as well. And each one looked great. I know my maid of honor bought a knew dress for the occasion, but since she picked it out herself, she’d wear it again. My attendants I think wore stuff they already had. I just couldn’t dream of forcing someone into something that didn’t flatter her, and then expect her to pay for it. That would have put a cloud over the occasion for me.
The main thing my attendants did was sign the ketubah. And dance to “Hava Nagila.”
When my wife and I were married, we each had two people in our respective parties: A sibling and a close friend. The possibility of her brother being a groomsman was never even brought up. Perhaps that was due in part to size, or the fact that she’s not terribly close to her brother.
It’s natural to feel a little hurt when you perceive you’re being left out of something, but just try to remember that it’s not about you. Throwing a wedding is full of tough choices, sometimes with few correct answers.
If so, my wife and I sure missed the memo on this. Neither of my sisters was one of her bridesmaids, and her brother was not one of my groomsmen. And I don’t think anybody expected any differently.
Seriously, I’ve never heard this rule. Maybe it applies to high-society weddings where the bride has a dozen bridesmaids, and the wedding has a cast of thousands. But I don’t think it applies to the rest of us, if it exists at all.