Woman heartbroken after getting evening-only invite to brother's wedding, asks if it was fair to her

Relationships require care and effort to nurture, but sometimes even family bonds can feel strained. One woman, who goes by @Eveningonly on Mumsnet, turned to the online community for support after feeling sidelined by her family. She shared that her brother invited her to his wedding—but only to the evening reception. Though the siblings hadn’t seen much of each other over the years, she was hurt by what she saw as an exclusion by her loved ones.

In the post, the woman explained how she rarely got a chance to meet her younger brother since she left her family home. Due to a “complicated” relationship with her mom, the siblings never really got a chance to be together. “I left home when he was aged 10 or 11. Due to a difficult relationship with DM (Dear Mother), I rarely returned home for visits,” she explained. Despite not seeing each other for long, upon meetings, the siblings still used to get along.

“I have seen little of DB (Dear Brother) since then, but we always get along well when we do see one another,” she added. By the time the woman reconciled with her mother and they both became more amicable toward each other, her brother had left home. “We have only ever seen one another at family parties since,” the sister elaborated. More so, the distance between their houses, as per the woman, made it very difficult for them to see each other. “I also live a fair distance away, so this is another reason why I don’t see family all that often,” she wrote, adding that her brother would soon be getting married in the coming months.

She recalled her brother handing her the invitation at a recent family party, which initially thrilled her. “I was pretty chuffed because they had announced the date of the wedding almost a year ago. So, I thought I had been left off the list,” the woman remarked. The assumption led her to conclude that it was a “last-minute” decision to invite her to the wedding. The sister claimed that her family did this to avoid “awkwardness” at the party, with everyone discussing what would have happened had she not attended the event.

But when she got home and finally read the invitation, she was hit with an unwelcome surprise: it was an “evening-only” invite. The sister wondered if she was being unreasonable for feeling a little hurt by her family’s decision. “I realize we’re not close, but we are one another’s only sibling if that counts for anything?” her post read, asking the online community about their opinion on the same.

“I’m also not a bad person and we never had any ‘bad blood’ or conflict. It isn’t a small, intimate wedding from what I gather either,” the woman concluded, expressing her feeling of having been excluded from the family fold. People in the comments empathized with the sister. Hoglet70 said, “I’d probably be a bit hurt too, but it is what it is.” “I’d be disappointed. It doesn’t appear you’ve made much effort to sustain the relationship with him, so I guess he doesn’t feel close to you?” NeedToChangeName added. “It sounds like you’ve become the default ‘distant relative.’ Families can be quite strange,” Doggymummar emphasized.