I’m kind of surprised at most of the responses, because I’ve always assumed asking the siblings to be part of the wedding party was a given (I was a bridesmaid at my brother’s wedding, and I’d only met my SIL a couple of days earlier). That said, I haven’t been to that many weddings of people who had more than one or two siblings, and I guess if there are a whole lot of them, that changes the dynamics.
It’s a common enough trope to have appeared in both Bridesmaids and The Hangover.
I wanted as simple a wedding as possible, with only my best friend as maid of honor. I had only met my husband’s two sisters very briefly on one or two occasions, since they lived half-way across the country.
One sister threw a hissy fit when she found out I only intended to have a maid of honor. Since I had no desire to create problems, I promptly asked them to join the wedding party.
Meanwhile, my mother had unilaterally decided that my BF was “unreliable” and might not show up at the wedding, leaving me stranded with no bridesmaids. She therefore asked a childhood friend of mine, who I was happy to have - but in addition to wanting to keep things small, I hadn’t wanted to impose on her to attend the wedding several states away.
Anyway, I ended up with FOUR bridesmaids when I only wanted one. Luckily I am not the bridezilla type, so instead of getting upset I just shrugged and went with the flow. It wasn’t really “my” wedding anyway - my mother commandeered the whole process and I just endured it.
But if you were to ask my real feelings on the matter - at the time, I was NOT pleased that the sister butted in and whined that she had to be a bridesmaid. Really? When you don’t even KNOW me?
(That was years ago, BTW. While I rarely see my sisters-in-law, I genuinely like and respect them both a lot now.)
Congrats!
It might not be personal at all actually. Generally speaking, people want the wedding parties to match - in that the bride and the groom have the same number of attendants. This can lead to some fairly odd diplomatic scenarios.
The thing is, most people when they get married have a fairly set list of people they actively want in their wedding party which can range from “oh god, nobody can we just elope?” to “all my sorority sisters!”. Mostly this number is somewhere between 3 and 5, but if the bride has a list of three and the groom a list of five, either the groom needs to trim his party down (which he won’t want to do and which has a high potential to cause drama and chaos) or the bride needs to make up numbers.
Take my own wedding - my ideal bridal party was my best friend and my two sisters. My husband wanted his father and his best friend. Since I really, really wanted my best friend and there just isn’t a diplomatic way to exclude one sister over the other (and really, who the fuck even tries that?), my husband needed a third groomsman. He went with his favorite cousin - the male cousin he was closest to.
I think it’s fairly common when you’re trying to make bridal party numbers match up to sort of mentally survey relatives of the appropriate gender to see who might work. “Working” here means is appropriately gendered, someone who the bride/groom actually likes or wants to honor, doesn’t have another set job in the wedding, someone who isn’t part of a set that would cause hard feelings if so honored (one of three sisters of the groom for example), and, ideally, someone who won’t be massively inconvenienced by inclusion (either financially or for other reasons - illness, small children, geography, etc.). You need someone who the happy couple likes, who they want to extend an honor (mostly, the offer to be included in the wedding party is a honor - an expensive one sometimes, but an honor), and who doesn’t cause bonus wedding drama.
My husband legitimately was fond of his cousin - who is the only son of the aunt he was closest to also. They’re still close even all these years later (we’re going to the cousin’s wedding this winter). It’s just that left to select his ideal wedding party, my husband would have stopped at two people and the overall logistics dictated three. His cousin was the best fit for the third person for a lot of reasons - including that my husband loves him. He doesn’t love his other cousins less, mind you, but of his other male relatives, two other cousins are twins (which would have landed him with four members of his party and I would have had to make numbers and where does that end? Madness, I tell you!), the fourth male first cousin was geographically distant (and we weren’t sure would be able to make the wedding) and his brother. . . . just no. My husband and his brother do not get along.
He contemplated asking my brother - as a gesture towards mixing our families - but my brother was even more geographically distant, my husband had never even met my brother, and at the time of my wedding my brother had both a toddler and a wife who was seven months pregnant. We asked my brother to be an usher - which, since we had a causal park wedding, was a token honor that he could bail on if his wife or toddler needed him and mostly involved setting up chairs and locating beer.