In my view, you’re absolutely right. Uninvited people should not be showing up to a wedding. My comment was the fact that a person with 4 siblings invites only 3 to her daughter’s wedding (niece of the uninvited sibling) is an incredible “a**hole” move and we did not try to ‘crash the party’ to see what lengths they went to. They’re wealthy people and it was quite the lavish event so we found out.
As an aside, I present to you the concept of a new word in English: to “exvite”.
It’s the opposite of invite.
The word was created by a journalist named Wim Van Leer., who wrote an autobiography in 1985 describing his personal life and extremely weird family.
His very rich and very proper family disowned him.
He had no contact with them for decades, but they continued to send him formal “exvitations” for family weddings.
Like a regular, formal wedding invitation,nicely printed on expensive paper, except that it specifically said “you are informed not to attend the wedding of …:, being held at …”
Without receiving the “exvitation”, he would never have known, or cared, that the bride and groom even existed, because he had no contact with them. But the family insisted on being properly spiteful by informing him.
Certain social conventions simply must be upheld, mustn’t they!? Including the conventional right to be beastly to your blood relatives. Or rather, to be beastly especially to your blood relatives.
I understood your post. In the long run, they probably did a favor, because who wants to be around people like that?
As for exvites, of course I’m not going to ask directly, but I have a relative who got divorced in recent years (oh, hell, we knew they were eventually going to do that from the day they met) and their special-needs child is graduating from HS soon. I would not be surprised if she would do something like that, especially if he wants to be there (which he probably does), and then tell their child, “See? Daddy doesn’t care enough about you to see you.”
Since you knew people who did go; did you quiz them, about the specifics of the party? Or did any of them ask the host why you were excluded?