Just because it's the bride's special day does not excuse poor behavior. It's understandable she wants everything to be as perfect as possible, but that does not mean she has to treat her loved ones badly. Especially because sometimes they retaliate against her.
People on Reddit share the revenge they took against a bridezilla. Content has been edited for clarity.
“Little More Than Taken Aback”
“A few days ago, I’m sitting at the table with my fiancé addressing wedding invitations when my phone buzzes. I’ve gotten an email that reads ‘Please mark Name1 and Name2 as coming to your wedding, we will have the chicken and the fish.’ Cue a very confused thirty seconds of trying to figure out which of our guests has precognition, and has RSVP’d before the invites were even dropped in the mail!
Not recognizing the sender’s email or the names of either guest, we chalk it up to a wrong email address. We send back, ‘You might want to double check who you sent this to so your RSVP goes to the right place!’
Until the next day. I get two more RSVPs from two different addresses, and a reply from the original that says ‘This isn’t the email for the wedding of Firstname and Surname?’
I reply, ‘No, no it is not.’
I’m perplexed, but at work. I decide to deal with the other emails later.
When I get home, I’ve gotten another RSVP as well as an email from someone with the same first name as me, saying that she’s going to need me to give her my email account.
I reply to that, no, and also, why? I get an email back in about 10 minutes. She says that she’s got the same first name as me, and is getting married to a guy named Surname. They’ve picked ‘FirstnameSurname’ as their email account for RSVPs. She didn’t realize I made the account, so I can either give my password to her or I can reset it and she can create a new one, whichever works for me.
I reply again that she’s going to need to pick a new account. I do congratulate her on getting married, and mention that I’m getting married myself as well.
Oh, she loses it. I get a nasty string of emails from her, saying that I have no right to use FirstnameSurname unless my fiancé is named ‘Surname,’ that I won’t need it after I’m married so what’s wrong with giving it up a little early; I am ruining her life and her wedding; I am a wide array of gender-based insults and slurs; she hopes that my fiancé cheats on me because I deserve it; and finally, she’s giving me one more chance to hand it over before she sues me for theft and I owe her a lot of money.
I was a more than a little taken aback, so I didn’t reply to any of this. A few hours later, the original RSVPer emails me saying they double-checked the invitation, my email is definitely the one written on the invite. Ah, now the mystery unravels.
She put my email on her wedding invites, and sent them out to people without first registering the email address herself. It’s printed and in the mail. It’s permanent. Ooh, what a super stupid decision!
I finally reply to her tirade telling her under no circumstances would I be giving her my email, legally she doesn’t have a leg to stand on, she’s being super rude, but I am still willing to forward on the RSVPs to her if she would like me to. I ask how many people she invited, so I can get an idea of how much work I just volunteered for.
She sends back a nasty email full of expletives and name-calling again demanding my password or nothing.
Well! OK then, nothing it is!
I blocked her email and replied to the three RSVPs I hadn’t talked to yet with a simple, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not invited to my wedding.’ This has the benefit of being 100% true, albeit deceptive.
Today I got another RSVP and they got a nice curt ‘not invited!’ reply as well.
I’m hoping she has a very large wedding party.”
“She Lost Her Cool”
“So my fiancée and I went down to Mexico for a destination wedding for her friend. They didn’t have any luggage, so we let them borrow some of ours. When we got down there, the bride was acting completely selfish and being a bridezilla. We put up with it for most of the week, since it was her wedding. Well the day after the wedding, we decided to head to the next city over and go on a snorkeling cruise. We decided to rent a car and split the cost, since taking a taxi to the next city over was fairly expensive.
When we got there, she was being a total brat about choosing which snorkeling cruise to go on. After getting dragged around the marina for an hour while she was ‘looking for the best deal,’ we decided to go our own way and let the newlyweds have some time alone on their own snorkeling adventure. Well she proceeds to throw a huge fit and started crying because we weren’t all going on the same cruise.
Fed up with her bridezilla act, none of us budged and we booked our own cruise. So she tells us that they are going back to the hotel, and they are not going to come back and pick us up later in the day. She gave us $20 and said ‘take the city bus.’ That made me so upset, because we agreed to split the cost of the car rental, and she decided to hijack the car and not share it. She wouldn’t even let my fiancée’s mom take the car to come pick us up, ‘because she might want to use it later.’
So we go on our snorkeling tour, have a great time, and begrudgingly pay for a taxi back. So when we got back to the resort, we told them to give us our luggage back, and they could take the car that we wouldn’t be splitting the cost on and buy themselves their own luggage. She lost her cool. It was amazing. But we got our luggage back.”
“Her Attitude Is Bearable”
“So, I learned to do make-up as a hobby. As a solo hobby, it’s expensive. As a profession it’s even pricier, so I charge people enough to cover my kit and have some left over. It’s not exorbitant, and definitely the cheapest of services a bride pays for, and yet this bridezilla decides to argue and haggle with me over my prices, and accuse me of stealing from her.
Alone, her attitude is bearable. She is a bride after all. Except she criticizes every single product I use, and every thing I put on her face requires a seven-minute mirror inspection complete with criticism. Except when I offer to do it differently she just huffs and says ‘I don’t have time to fix every little mistake, just hurry up!’
Photo shoot makeup is a fine art, I can mess up her pictures easily without her realizing how hideous she will look. But that won’t be enough because her photographer will probably edit her to look nicer so I need to mess her up so she will notice.
My trump card? It’s an outdoor wedding, and it’s a super sunny, humid day. Normally I’d waterproof her makeup and apply it carefully so it won’t melt. Today? I slapped it on and made sure to use stuff that I know runs very easily.
Her photos will need more editing, and it will barely hold for two hours in that weather.
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if she reviews me badly. I do this for fun and as a favor to friends, it’s not my bread and butter. I hope she looked half as melted as I planned her to look.”
“Weren’t They In There?”
“When I got together with my husband, he had a female friend who was basically the queen of one of his friend groups. I was never really close to her but I liked her, well enough, even though we were very different. Fast-forward six years, and she and her long time boyfriend are getting married. Bridezilla’s mom however thinks her baby walks on water and they plan a classy wedding….confusing classy with expensive.
Thus begins the horror of this year plus engagement or as I like to call it ‘The Money Grab.’ These people have been living together for going on seven years, but they are going for the full white wedding.
At this time, my husband and I were really struggling financially so this constant spending was hard, and the guilt was constant;
‘I made you one of my twelve bridesmaids out of respect for your relationship with my oldest friend! What do you mean you can’t take two unpaid days off of work and spend $500 for my weekend long bachelorette party?’
I learned that due to the ‘honor’ of being one of 12 bridesmaids, I would be forced to spend $275 on an ugly blue rayon monstrosity from one of the city’s most expensive bridal salons. It was the definition of ‘never wearing again,’ and we had to find matching navy blue pumps.
Finally, we get close to the wedding, which means shelling out money for gifts. They are treating this like The Price is Right. They registered for computers and flat screen TV’s. They registered for 2000 thread count sheets, and finally they registered for fancy china. I think the china is what finally sent me over the edge. Bridezilla does not cook. Bridezilla does not even have a table in her apartment. Bridezilla doesn’t have storage big enough for the 12 place settings she registered for.
So, I find myself with another bridesmaid standing in Macy’s looking over the registry and I get a bright idea. I ask a saleslady to help me find the most useless cheap kitchen item on this list. Thus begins: Grudge Gifting.
We track down every useless thing on the list. And we price check it to see where we can find the exact thing cheapest. Special air vented pizza pan? Check. Counter top mini cupcake maker, in the shape of a cupcake that makes seven mini cupcakes? Yep. Countertop Fajita maker shaped like a chili pepper? Check!
Soon we have a pile of stuff that is made for garage sales. We buy all the stuff at Macy’s thus getting it off the registry. Then we go to Walmart and Target and buy the same things Then we go back to Macy’s and return the expensive things, but neglect to give the part of the receipt that says it’s from a registry. So it’s checked off.
Bridesmaid #2 and I take it home and wrap it all individually so that we have two towers of beautifully wrapped things, and no one would know what they truly contain.
We show up at the wedding and do our duty. After the wedding, we immediately go and change in to non-horrible dresses and shoes and shove our combined $600 worth of navy blue dresses and shoes in a paper sack for immediate donation to Goodwill. We get our drinks from the cash bar and top them off from the flasks that we wisely snuck in.
Two weeks later I get a call from Brideszilla trying to tactfully inquire about gift receipts. ‘Weren’t they in there??? I could have sworn I put them in there. Let me look around the house,’ I said smugly.
A month ago they had a garage sale….every single item was out for sale including a very dusty seven portion cupcake-maker.”
“She Was Really Upset”
“My friend Kelly is getting married soon. She asked myself and three other friends to be her bridesmaid, her sister as MOH. One of our friend Ellis is in a same gender relationship. Kelly seems to have no issues with it, since she asked Ellis to be her bridesmaid and invited Ellis’ partner as a guest to the wedding.
Well last night Kelly texted Ellis and told her she’s no long a bridesmaid, she and her partner aren’t welcome to the wedding. Ellis was confused and pressed for a reason. Turns out Kelly’s father-in-law was furious ‘freaking gay girls’ are attending their wedding. It’s a sacred place and dirty people have no business being there.
Ellis calls me earlier this morning while my boyfriend and I were sleeping. She was really upset and crying. I tried to comfort her the best I could. So I called Kelly and asked what was going on. She tells me it’s no big deal, she’s only missing a plate of food and she will make it up to her. She also has the nerve to tell me to ask Ellis to lend her the bridesmaid dress because she found someone to replace her. So it wouldn’t look uneven at the wedding. It’s such a hassle and last minute, if everyone would just be normal then this wouldn’t happen. I pretty much lost it right there.
I told her she’s the worse piece of trash I have ever met. She’s just all into looks and I told her I am not going to the wedding either and hung up on her. My boyfriend heard this all go down and texted the groom he’s not going to be the best man either. My boyfriend also told his friends about what happened and they are also not going to the wedding.”
“Shocked How Intense It Got”
“‘Kate’ was one of my best friends since the third grade. We hung out all the time and got along really well. She was always higher maintenance – taking three hours to get ready for anything, always late to events, and just always needed to have things done her way to her specifications. Growing up, I honestly didn’t mind. I was more laid back and not as confident in standing up for myself. We drifted apart during university as we went to different places and grew into adulthood but still kept in touch, especially when I went back home.
A couple of years after high school, Kate got engaged! I was so happy and excited – she was the first of my friends to get married and even though we drifted apart, asked me to be a bridesmaid. I was thrilled! The wedding was set in three years from that time. She wanted to make sure she got the best of everything.
This is when we started to clash. She would request entire weekends off to get bridesmaid dress shopping together. When I did make it, she looked at dresses in the $500+ range. Next she talked about having an out-of-state bachelorette party. On top of that, she still expected wedding gifts from her bridesmaids. I expressed my concerns regarding the commitment and money expectations but she said the other girls could do it. The difference was I lived in a bigger city and had to pay rent and all my own bills, while the other girls still lived at home. She couldn’t understand my budgeting. She would call me to express her disappointment and pretty much started complaining about me. I was in shock, and I didn’t know what to say. Her final saying? Let’s see this next bridesmaid dress shopping goes and I’ll let you know if I still want you in the party. I texted her saying that I don’t need to be judged or evaluated and to have a good life. I was done with these ridiculously high expectations for her wedding.
It shocked me to see how crazy intense it all got. I knew she was always more high maintenance, but I didn’t think it could get this out of hand. It’s sad to see a 15 year friendship go down the drain.”
“Whole Room Went Silent”
“I’m a photographer, and was working with a super sweet couple. Everything was normal up until when the drinks starting flowing. My partner and I were setting stuff up for the reception, and the groom comes up to us and asks the DJ if he can play a video for his wife. We assume it’s some cute slideshow or something.
Toasts happen, then the video starts to play. Turns out the bride was sleeping with the best man, and the video was from a private investigator. The whole room went silent. Bride runs out, best man goes to follow her, groom’s father punches best man out.
Everyone else ended up staying and having a great party. Super nice people, I ended up shooting the groom’s second wedding.
I asked him why we went through with it, apparently they had a prenup. At the time of divorce, if adultery could be proven, the offending party owed the other 15k.”
“She Was On The Verge Of Tears”
“Last summer I was at a cousin’s wedding. His bride and her family had been close with ours since before I was born, and the couple had known each other since they were toddlers, so it was a particularly exciting event for both sides of the family.
However, after the ceremony was over and the party had only just started, one of the bridesmaids decided to announce her own engagement. The attention was immediately taken away from the newlyweds, and brought to the bridesmaid (who I’ll call ‘Sarah’) and her equally-smug fiancé. My cousin’s wife (I’ll call her ‘Emma’) didn’t make a scene or utter a single negative word about Sarah. She looked like she was on the verge of tears, but she kept grinning and acted very happy for the other couple. This was unusual, as Emma is typically quite confrontational and speaks her mind no matter the consequences.
Sarah later picked Emma to be the maid of honor at her own wedding, which took place last weekend. This is where the fun begins.
Emma’s two much-younger sisters were the flower girls at Sarah’s wedding. At the very last moment, Emma switched out the white petals in their baskets to blue ones she had secretly brought with her. She told her sisters not to say anything about it or let the bride see them until it was time to scatter them down the aisle.
Sarah looked very confused upon seeing the blue petals, but of course she didn’t say anything about it. Most of Sarah’s other bridesmaids were also Emma’s friends, had attended Emma’s wedding, and were in on Emma’s scheme. At the reception, Emma’s sisters and the other bridesmaids were tight-lipped when Sarah began demanding to know why there were blue petals. The wedding planner ended up getting a lot of abuse for not checking the flower girls’ baskets before they walked down the aisle.
Finally, it was time for the speeches. The speeches took place in front of a massive screen, displaying a loop of photos with Sarah and her husband, which had been compiled by Emma.
Emma took the remote that controlled the presentation screen and at first she showed some pre-approved humorous photos of Sarah with Emma and other friends to facilitate a couple lighthearted jokes.
Then, at the very end, Emma said to Sarah that she must be wondering why there were blue petals instead of the white ones originally planned.
That was when Emma displayed the last slide from her presentation.
Emma announced in front of everyone that she was five months pregnant, and that she’d just discovered the baby was a boy, hence the blue petals. The last slide? Her ultrasound picture.
There were shocked yells and gasps, Sarah had a fit, but those involved in the scheme cheered so loudly. Apparently Sarah had been very nasty to her bridesmaids before, driving several of them away and forcing the others to pay ridiculous amounts of money for dresses.
Emma and my cousin were eventually thrown out of the party, but they were all smiles. Sarah’s fuming mother went to confront her outside, and Emma retorted with, ‘Gentle, gentle! I’m pregnant!’
I reckon Sarah doesn’t speak to the majority of those bridesmaids anymore.”
“No Is Not An Answer”
“My sister just got engaged over the holidays. She never asked if I wanted to be in the bridal party and just assumed I did. Personally I don’t want to be, because I can’t afford the extravagances that I know she’s going to want.
So she adds me to her bridesmaids, and starts posting what she wants us to wear, do, whatnot. So I respond with, ‘Please, I understand that this is your day, but if you want us all in this, watch the money you’re spending, not all of us can afford what you want.’
To which she and the other three bridesmaids (all of which are my other sisters) gang up on me, saying ‘All I have to do is save $50 a paycheck and I can afford it all.’ So in response, I told her I wasn’t interested in being in the bridal party. And that I still love her and want to celebrate with her and be happy for her. But apparently no is not an answer. She’s complained to any member of my family she can, that I’m the unreasonable one. Because I ‘refuse to cancel any plans my SO and I were planning and paid for prior to her engagement and use that money to pay for her wedding plans.’ Mind you, that’s not my money, it’s my SOs and he’s fantastic to me, because he knows I work hard to make it by each month.
Meanwhile, she is still expecting us to pay out $500 for a dress, $100 for shoes, $300 for hair and makeup. Plus, because she is my sister, I want to make sure she has a decent gift, and if I don’t give her at least $500 I’m the one that will look bad for not being able to give her anything.
I’ve already been told by her, I cannot do my own alterations. She has always been the little princess who refuses to understand everyone else’s situation. She is the younger sibling, and has always been treated like the spoiled child. It’s to the point of ridiculousness that I’ve asked to be left alone, and have been ignored multiple times. She doesn’t understand I will not be in her wedding, and I’m very close to never talking to her again.”
“I Have Been Waiting For This Moment”
“Two years ago, my husband (then boyfriend) and I attended the wedding of two of his friends, Matt and Victoria. There was an open bar, and everyone got merrily trashed. Lucas and I left the reception to go to the house at which we were staying for the night. After we get there, we get a call from Lucas’s friend, Kaitlin. She is in tears, and her boyfriend, Brian, can be heard yelling in the background. Kaitlin tearfully accuses Lucas of stealing $4000 out of Brian’s car and begs him to return the money. All the while, Brian can be heard in the background, threatening Lucas. Lucas tells her, truthfully, that he stayed with me at the reception the whole time, didn’t break into Brian’s car, and certainly didn’t steal Brian’s money. Kaitlin continues that they know he did it, and if he’ll just return it, they will let the matter drop. How do they know it was him, you may ask? They found a white pocket knife on the seat of the car, and Lucas is known for always carrying a pocket knife. Lucas hangs up on her and we don’t hear from him for the rest of the night. The next morning, Kaitlin (not Brian) calls and apologizes. They had gotten home and found the money on his dresser. He hadn’t even brought it to the wedding and he didn’t have the balls to apologize himself. Fine. Whatever. We let the matter drop, but, being a petty and vengeful person, I have never forgotten that evening.
So that’s our backstory. Fast-forward to this year, and Kaitlin and Brian get married in Jamaica and their stateside wedding reception is this weekend. Lucas can attend the reception, which is out of town, but I am stuck in our hometown because of work. I am put in charge of purchasing the happy couple a wedding gift. I have been waiting for this moment for two years.
What, you may ask, did I purchase them? That’s right, a white pocket knife. Included with their gift is a wedding card containing $4000 in Monopoly money and signed ‘Just in case you lose yours again, here’s an extra! Best of luck and all of our love, Lucas and Kimberly.’
The best part? Lucas is usually a ‘Take the high road, Kimberly; don’t stoop to their level, Kimberly,’ kind of person. He was on board with this whole plan and told me not to even bother getting them anything from their registry.”
