Regardless of the excuse, their initial requests were egregious, made worst by their greediness in wanting an over-the-top wedding with the subsequent parties, planned too quickly with the costs borne by others. It’s also rude, as in RUDE, to request others to hold parties for you. If you don’t have friends who come up with the idea of having a bachelor party for you on their own, then you fucking skip the party. What you don’t do is starting emailing unless lists of increasing demands, and to do so without considering the cost is simply beyond the pale.
Correct. They need to apologize to you.
Fuck that shit. They have behaved badly. If it were me, I’d simply bow out from everything.
You come across as a pleasant person. This ‘friend’ of yours doesn’t.
Well they’ve asked you to apologise, which shows what they think of you.
Sorry, but this is not going to go away.
Imagine the conversation in the happy couple’s house:
Groom “Darling, I’ve spoken to FluidDruid and it will all be worked out.”
Bride “Your so-called ‘friend’ hasn’t apologised to me.”
Groom “There will be an apology, dearest. FluidDruid is just embarrassed about behaving so thoughtlessly.”
Bride “I don’t like FluidDruid.”
Groom “Ah, snuggle bunny. Don’t worry about it. You’ll always come first.”
I’m a young (22) British male, and I have no idea about wedding etiquette, but from a personal point of view, I’m quite surprised about the concept of having a party for yourself which others pay for. Sure, if you’re a kid and it’s your birthday party, that happens, but when you’re an adult? I wouldn’t expect my friends to pay for a party for me, I wouldn’t organise a stag night without checking with my intended invitees that they could make it and were happy to pay their contribution, and I certainly wouldn’t organise something and expect my share to be paid for - that would be unbelievably rude.
fluiddruid, sorry you are having to put up with this nonsense. I think this letter is excellent - concise, personal boundaries clearly defined and difficult for the recipiant to extract any further drama from except by basically coming out and wailing that she wanted to hit you up for more cash. Bravo, Enugent.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. These people need to get over themselves. You’re not a full-time party planner. You’re an adult, presumably with a job and family/friends and interests besides their wedding. You’re already devoting time, energy, and money towards their wedding, and now they want to have a share session where the three of you re-hash their bad behavior? Give me a break.
It’s out of the ordinary here, too. Typically, the maid of honor/best man organizes the party, after checking to get a general idea of what the bride/groom wants. Although you hear about parties where each guest is supposed to pony up big cash, I’ve never encountered that in real life. For my bachelorette party, we went to a minor-league baseball game. The other ladies bought my ticket ($8) and my drinks (maybe 4-5 beers over the course of the game), but nobody put in more than $10 total. I figure that if you want the full-on do with strippers, you should have to help pay for it.
OK, this is going too far. The interpretations of the situation paint the groom to be a baby killer and the bride to be a bunny rapist. (I’m not picking on you, glee, this reply could apply to almost anyone who has responded to this thread. You just happened to win the lottery, like the millionth person to cross over a new bridge.) The general reaction to this situation is “Get out! Get out NOW! These are BAD BAD people!”
It sounds to me like there is not so much malice and greed involved as poor communication coupled with unbridled enthusiasm. I, for one, find it sweet that the nuptially engaged persons want to have such a perfect experience. They just need to be brought down to Earth for a few moments and reminded that the world does not, in fact, revolve around them. fluiddruid has already taken steps to do so.
I’m optimistic that this can all be worked out to the satisfaction of all. Give the happy couple a nice party, but do it in a way that no one has to sell a kidney on the black market. No one’s head has to end up on a pike over this.
I’m going off to hug my friends right now! I’d be tearing my hair out if anyone tried that crap with me. Both of these people are acting like selfish idiots. You certainly don’t owe anyone an apology here.
A calm, face to face discussion with everyone would be a good idea, I think. If this guy’s a close friend, and you want to keep things that way, you’re going to have to get to know his wife better, anyway. If you calmly explain your position to both of them in person, if they have any class (they haven’t displayed much so far, I admit) you’ll be able to resolve it. (Unless they really are selfish idiots.) All this calling one friend and passing messages back and forth seems like it’s creating confusion. Plus, this all started in email. Face to face discussion is best for this, especially since it’s gotten all emotionally charged. Stand your ground, though.
For some reason, weddings bring out the worst in many otherwise normal people. The capacity for rational thought is temporarily lost. For some, this is permanent; if their obnoxious behavior creates real long-term grudges, the damage can be long-lasting, and bad habits get defensively solidified. Sometimes, though, when the bride-and/or-groom misbehave, their friends carefully and sympathetically (but firmly) stand up for themselves, and the bride/groom realize they’re being obnoxious and back off. Those are relatively uncommon, though; most often, the friends put up with it in the short term, the irritation is temporary, the wrinkles get smoothed over, the bride/groom get their brains back without ever realizing anything was wrong, and everything goes back, more or less, to normal.
So it’s possible that this is an indication that continued friendship with these people is contraindicated. Or they’ve just lost their minds for a few weeks, same as millions of other people leading up to their wedding, and they’ll regain their human faculties in due course. At this point, who knows?
Hanlon’s Razor seems applicable here. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
I don’t see people painting the bridal couple as evil, but they seem to be woefully ignorant of basic etiquette.
You do NOT specify what others are to spend on you. Ever. Any party someone wants to throw for you is a GIFT. You are to accept that gift graciously, no matter what wonderful stag party dreams you are entertaining in your own mind.
That does not mean the couple are a pair of money grubbing opportunists. But it does mean that they are violating a commonly held societal norm.
Certainly not any of us. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and call it temporay insanity with a side helping of miscommunication. I’m not ready to Godwinize them yet.
Yes, I hear what you are saying, then I go back to the OP where he figures it would cost him more than $1,200 to do what they had originally asked.
Seriously. Have you ever, ever asked that of anyone? And if you had, would you be pressing for an apology? My god, I’d be mortified if I had gotten carried away in the first place and would commit ritual harikiri before blaming someone else.
Please note that the wedding people are the one who still want to hash it out.
Or, as I said, poor communication. Reread post #60 in which the groom admitted to having eyes bigger than his liver and where the bride had preemptively offered to scale things back. They’re not so much being grabby assholes as having unrealistic goals and hobbled communication. The suggestions to tell them to fuck off and die are way out of proportion.
Yes, they certainly committed a social faux pas, but it seems that they realize this. It’s not worth losing a friendship over.
Which means that he did the math where the groom did not. That’s hardly a situation that’s beyond repair.
I’ve never been engaged. But I’ve certainly displayed antisocial behavior in some situations. We all do.
And note that the bride did not demand an apology for not giving in to her greed. The groom said that the bride wanted an apology for going behind her back. There’s a world of difference there.
I agree that they’re probably socially clueless as opposed to greedy, but I’m beginning to understand why these people don’t have a lot of close friends.
No, they really don’t. The parties involved aren’t a bunch of 15 year old girls. The OP apparently lives 90 minutes away from these folks. It sounds like they want her to drive over there so they can browbeat her into apologizing. As I mentioned earlier, fluiddruid no doubt has other things going on her life besides this wedding.
**
fluiddruid**, this may be a stab in the dark, but it sounds as though your friend might be falling prey to Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All. Basically, the idea is “any failure by a friend to put the interests of the friendship above all else means that they aren’t really a friend at all.” In other words, because you’re not dropping everything to accommodate their requests for a party, you’re not being a good friend. Which, as you and I know, is bullshit.
It seems like these people want all the social benefits of being a couple without put forth any of the effort. They want people to throw them big parties, but they don’t want to do things like get their stories straight and make time for friends who are doing them favors. And be gracious. I mean, if my boyfriend’s friend does something to annoy me, and my boyfriend is involved the whole time, then my issue is with my boyfriend, he is the one whose job it is to anticipate my reaction (and even that’s debatable). I’m guessing the apology is them playing the ‘pass the blame game’. As in, “Yes, I know where you are coming from, but she doesn’t understand. And I could go to bat for you and smooth things over in private. But I won’t.”
And I agree with TokyoPlayer. If you know enough about booze to serve it at your house then you know how expensive it is. But supposing I didn’t, once I found out then I am going to treat that friend as extra-valued, and not do things like ask for apologies on debatable minor offenses.
Gah. Well, I do wish the OP the best in this situation, however it works out.
They demanded an apology, didn’t they? They offered none of their own. Fluiddruid did nothing wrong and has nothing to apologize for that I can see.
This isn’t about their wedding, it’s about a party — specifically, it’s about trying to get somebody else to apologize for not giving into their extravagant demands. This nonsense about the bride feeling slighted because fluid chose (like any normal guy would) to address his concerns to his buddy rather than the chick he barely knows is just so much manipulative bullshit.
As to this notion that a wedding couple has some kind of unlimited right to make demands on guests (especially financial demands), that’s complete bunk. It’s tacky to ask for anything besides the presence of the guests at the ceremony/reception. When did wedding couples start to aqcuire this grotesque sense of entitlement?
Frankly, from what we’ve been told, I think fluiddruid’s buddy might do well to run the hell away from this chick while he can. I can smell the control freakiness from here.
ETA Fluiddruid is a she? That makes the request for strippers even more offensive.
This is how I read the situation also. The groom has a preconception of what bachelor parties are that is probably based on what he sees in the movies, and the costs of such a thing in the real world probably never occurred to him.
ETA: If you say “This is my budget, so I was thinking of doing this that and the other” and they get in a snit about it, then feel free to say. “I’m sorry, that’s the best I can do. Someone else will have to host your bachelor party.”
Dio I got the impression that the apology isn’t about giving into the extravagant demands, but for leaving the bride to be out of the planning meeting. She felt snubbed. (But I sdon’t think the OP did anything warranting an apology.)