Bridesmaid Walks Out On Bride After Discovering She & The Maid Of Honor Have Been Mocking Her Appearance Behind Her Back
The bride claims that her comments were "all in good fun."
George Rudy / Shutterstock While going wedding dress shopping with one of her best friends (or so she thought), one woman came across text messages that the bride had sent to her maid of honor about her.
The vile messages mocked everything about the woman, from the way she ate to the way she dressed.
Reduced to tears, the woman knew she could not stay at the bridal shop alongside someone who was supposed to be her friend and fled without saying a word. Now, she is wondering if she did the right thing.
The woman left the bridal shop after she discovered that the bride and her maid of honor had been mocking her appearance.
Sharing her story to Reddit, the 23-year-old woman, who was stepping in as one of the bridesmaids for her friend, Shelly, explained that she accompanied her to the bridal shop to look at wedding dresses.
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The woman said that she has known Shelly since they were in college together along with their friend Gaby, who is the maid of honor.
“We were roommates in college and stayed in the same city after graduation,” the woman wrote. “While the three of us are close, I’ve always known that Gaby and Shelly are the closest. They have a really sweet friendship.”
The woman recently went wedding dress shopping with Shelly. Gaby was unable to make it due to work. While Shelly was trying on dresses, she asked the woman to take pictures and videos of her on her phone so that she could send them to her mom and Gaby.
“I was getting the camera ready when a text from Gaby came through,” the woman wrote. “I didn’t mean to click on it and was instantly going to click back out when I saw one of my Instagram pictures in their private chat from earlier that morning. Both were making fun of me for the face I was making and my outfit choice.”
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The woman said that curiosity got the best of her and snooped through Gaby and Shelly’s private chat to find out if there were any other instances where they mocked her.
To her horror, there were multiple pictures of the woman that the two had taken off her Instagram account to ridicule her.
“I found multiple pictures that I, my boyfriend, or my mom have posted of myself, absolutely ripping them to shreds. Ranging from selfies to posed shots to even a few baby pictures,” the woman wrote. “They’d also make fun of me in general in terms of the way I talked, wore my hair, and the way I ate. This went back, as far as I could tell, at least a year.”
The heartbroken woman could not believe what she was seeing. “It all felt so juvenile and high school,” she wrote.
“While we all joke around, I would never do this to them, nor have they ever even tried to instigate these types of conversations with me about the other one-on-one.”
Having been bullied all through middle school and high school, the woman was overcome with emotion upon the discovery that her two best friends were also her biggest bullies.
“I put the phone in Shelly’s purse and brought it to another employee, telling her to tell Shelly that I had to go,” the woman wrote. “I drove home and had a long cry.”
By the time the woman got home, Shelly had texted her asking where she went. The woman messaged her back, telling her that she had to go home and that they had to talk later.
“When she did call a few hours later, she was understandably confused and hurt that I left,” the woman shared. “I told her what I found, explaining that I only looked further because of the initial text I accidentally saw.”
While Shelly was upset with her friend for going through her private messages and for leaving the bridal shop, the woman argued that it was the right decision given that she was overwhelmed with emotion and could not “fake being happy for her.”
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“Shelly told me the texts were ‘all in good fun,’ and clearly she loves me because I’m going to be her bridesmaid,” the woman wrote. “She added that I’m only hurt because I chose to read all those texts.”
Later that day, Gaby called the woman to criticize her for “invading” Shelly’s privacy by reading her messages and for walking out of the bridal shop.
However, the woman said that her mom and boyfriend are standing by her and support her decision to leave.
“I just want some unbiased looks: was I an [expletive] to look through the texts and then leave?” the woman asked Reddit.
Most people sided with the woman, arguing that it was within her right to leave the bride, who was secretly bullying her behind her back.
“If I was in your place, I think I'd drop out of being in the wedding. It's one thing to jokingly make fun of someone one time, but it seems like they have done this to you a bunch of times,” one Redditor commented.
“You may feel bad about looking through her phone, but as far as I can tell, she never apologized to you about talking behind your back and went straight for the offensive,” another user wrote. “This doesn't sound like a good friend who has realized how their actions have hurt you.”
“Searching her phone was maybe crossing the line, but that line is far less important than two supposed friends spending months making fun of you behind your back. The ‘all-in-good fun’ excuse doesn't hold water because you were not a party to it,” another user pointed out.
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True friends would not bully each other behind their backs.
While we are all probably guilty of teasing our friends now and again, most of us would not ridicule someone so callously, especially if we consider them a close enough friend to have in our bridal party.
Even if the woman had no right to snoop through her friend’s phone, her friend should have, at the very least, apologized for being so cruel instead of playing the victim.
If Shelly truly loves the woman as much as she claims to, she will do everything in her power to mend their relationship and spend the rest of their friendship making it up to her.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.