The bride was forced to blackmail her brother to foil his plans (Picture: Getty Images)
Weddings are often accompanied by a societal set of unwritten ‘rules’.
Though tradition is increasingly fading in favour of alternative weddings, with many brides choosing to keep their surnames or ditching white in favour of something more colourful, the certain standards for etiquette remain.
This includes things like: don’t upstage the bride, don’t assume you have a plus one, and definitely don’t steal the newlywed couples’ thunder by attempting anything like a proposal or a pregnancy announcement.
However, guests don’t always stick to these rules, something that became a reality for one bride, who ended up blackmailing her brother in an attempt to stop him proposing to his girlfriend at her wedding.
Posting to Reddit, the woman explained: ‘He wanted to ask his girlfriend, Sara, to marry him at the reception, during his speech welcoming my husband to the family.
‘My dad passed away last year and I thought it would be good to have my brother do the honours. Thank God he told me his idea beforehand.’
The bride’s family are particularly religious (Picture: Getty Images)
However, the bride and her family are a very traditional Southern Baptist household, and there was one element of the brother’s story that was bound to end in tears if publicly revealed.
‘My brother didn’t know that Sara, who is one of my best friends, had already told me that she was pregnant,’ the post continued.
‘My brother is a youth pastor at our church. Sara is the choir director. Everyone looks up to them.
‘So I told him that if he had the audacity to try and include himself in my day, the response to his speech would be me toasting his new baby.’
The woman’s brother was said to be ‘furious’, both because his secret was out and that his sibling ‘would leverage it against him’.
The woman wrote: ‘I saw red. I said that if he and his girlfriend were willing to go against our beliefs then I had no problem calling him out.
‘Our fight got loud enough that our mom came in to break it up. I kept my mouth shut despite wanting to blab right there and then.’
Thankfully, the brother didn’t end up proposing at the wedding. The day was described as a ‘beautiful ceremony’, and Sara ended up privately thanking the bride for intervening once she got back from her honeymoon.
‘Sara thanked me for my discretion and for convincing my dumb*ss brother not to try and horn in on my day’, the poster added, noting that at a family dinner, her brother remained ‘salty’ about the situation.
‘When I spoke with him to congratulate him on his engagement he said I was petty to keep him and Sara from having a moment in the sun. I said that there were a thousand more appropriate places for him to propose and that he chose well.’
In the comments, it was universally agreed that the bride was correct in her judgement.
It’s ‘not his wedding. The attention isn’t supposed to be on him anyways’, one user wrote.
‘He can be salty if he wants but Sara thanked you for what you did, so even she didn’t want that type of proposal either. You ended up doing him a favour’, added another.
‘If I was ever proposed to this way I’d be mortified.’
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‘Thank God he told me his idea beforehand.’