Planning a wedding can be really stressful, especially when some of the decisions you make are to please your family.

If your conservative family didn’t want alcohol at your wedding, would you have a dry wedding to please them, ignore their wishes or come up with a way to try to make everyone happy?

In today’s story, a bride told her conservative family there’d be no alcohol at the wedding. She just didn’t say nothing would be poured. Now, her family is pretty upset at what she did.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for secretly selling alcohol at my dry wedding to cover costs?

So I (27F) recently got married. My husband (29M) and I planned a pretty big wedding—about 300 guests.

It was beautiful, honestly a dream.

There’s just one thing: our families are super conservative and very religious, so we told everyone it would be a dry wedding (aka, no alcohol). That decision kept the peace with our parents and extended family.

As we all know, wedding are expensive and we were footing most of the bill ourselves.

This was clever.

I saw an opportunity and took it.

I hired a licensed bartender friend of mine to set up a “VIP bar” hidden at the venue (it was at a large event hall with a garden and private side rooms).

I gave a heads-up to about 75 of our younger friends and more chill cousins, and basically had them pay for drinks—think wedding speakeasy. The drinks were priced reasonably (like $5 a beer, $8 for cocktails), and people were happy to pay because 1) open bar weddings are rare in our circle, and 2) they thought it was kinda fun.

Long story short, between the money from drinks and tips, we made about $2,000, which helped cover part of the catering bill.

Wowza.

The issue is… word got out.

A few of my aunts overheard someone talking about the “secret bar,” and now my mom is livid.

She says I lied to everyone, disrespected the family, and made a “mockery of our values.”

My MIL also called me “manipulative and selfish.”

But honestly, most of our guests didn’t even know it happened, and the ones who did loved it. We didn’t force anyone to drink. We just gave the option discreetly.

Her husband isn’t fully supportive of her decision.

My husband is kind of in the middle.

He gets why I did it but wishes I had told him beforehand. I didn’t because I knew he’d get stressed and say no out of guilt.

Never Miss a Story

Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.

So… AITA for secretly selling alcohol at my dry wedding to offset the cost?

General consensus on Reddit? Definitely the AH here, for all kinds of reasons.

This person says lying makes them the AH.

This person says not telling the other guests make s them the AH.

And this person says it all kind of makes them the AH.

Now the only thing on the rocks is her family’s opinion of her.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.