Couple spark debate after demanding guests pay over $2k to attend wedding

A woman has taken to Reddit to express her absolute shock after her friend was asked to fork out an obscene amount of money just to attend a wedding.

The story captured the attention of the online community, as well as the guests themselves(!), due to the bride and groom’s unconventional approach to their wedding.

It ended up sparking an interesting debate on entitlement and wedding etiquette. Keep reading to find out what happened!

A friend of one guest, a Redditor going by the handle u/lemonkitty_14, explained what happened in a post on Reddit. She wrote that her friend, Jack, was set to attend his friend Jeff’s wedding. Jeff is from the UK and his bride-to-be, Sophie, is from the US. Ahead of the event Jack had received an email with a link to make an online payment. The instructions were simply: “Click here for payment.”

Jack said that he assumed the money was going to go towards a honeymoon fund for the newlyweds, but he was shocked to find out that the link led to a payment of more than $2,400, apparently just to attend. 

While he was shocked, he had also already told Jeff and Sophie that he would be there alongside his girlfriend, who had apparently not yet met the couple. So, Jack decided to grin and bear it, coughing up the $2,400, which he assumed would be to cover the cost of dinner and an open bar for him and his girlfriend.

Though, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. In fact, when Jack arrived at the wedding venue, he was told that the $2,400 he’d paid to attend was not inclusive of any drinks – those would be an additional $37 each for him and his girlfriend.

Jack eventually discovered that the $2,400 each guest had to pay was for the venue and other wedding fees, meaning that the bride and groom enjoyed a wedding that was essentially free for them, thanks to the generosity of their friends and family. But that wasn’t the only cheeky thing they did…

“Not only did the bride and groom pass on the costs of a ridiculously priced venue to the guests, after people had RSVP’d, essentially putting the venue above guest attendance, but then they passed on the cost of a tip to the guests WITHOUT TELLING THEM, as a required charge on check out,” the Reddit post said.

“I’ve never heard of anything so entitled in my life,” it continued.

It’s no surprise that the online community was equally as dumbfounded and enraged at the bride and groom’s sneaky acts.

“The entitlement is overflowing here. I would never pay to attend a wedding, let alone pay $2,000,” one person wrote.

“Once I saw the payment screen, I would have called and canceled my RSVP,” someone else added. “I don’t care who the bride and groom are to me. You want a specific type of wedding, pay for it yourself.”

Other comments included suggestions to ask the bride and groom for a refund and even to simply not attend the wedding (though, in Jack’s case, it was a little too late for that). Generally, most people seemed to agree that the couple had displayed some pretty entitled behavior.

Redditors also addressed the growing pressure associated with weddings these days, especially with more and more couples desperate to show off on social media. People also had a lot to say about showing more respect for guests’ boundaries, given that not everyone has the same financial capacity.

What do you think about this scenario? And what would you do in this situation? Let us know in the comments!