In today’s day and age, there’s nothing quite as sacred as a well-established group chat.

So when a tight-knit cousins’ group chat faced pressure to include someone new, the cracks in the unspoken familial hierarchy began to show.

The result: plenty of hurt feelings to go around.

Read on for the full story.

AITA for removing my cousin’s fiancée from the cousin’s group chat?

My cousin made a group chat with most of the cousins (ages 14 to 25) about two years ago, and that’s our way of connecting while we’re all in school, work, or living in different countries.

But as new honorary members of the family arrived, things started getting dramatic.

He got engaged to his fiancée 9 months ago (his ex-girlfriend’s older sister, but that’s a story for another day), and some of us decided that if he ever added her to the group chat, we would leave.

They weren’t a fan of their cousin’s fiancé, but still tried to at leas tbe nice to her face.

Their whole relationship seemed weird to us, and we didn’t want to be involved with that.

All in all, we’ve welcomed her into the family and treated her with respect, because at the end of the day, our cousin is marrying her.

So when this cousin wanted to invite his fiancé to holiday festivities, a lot of the other cousins couldn’t agree on what to do.

Fast forward to now, we were planning a Secret Santa, and he wanted to include her.

At first, some of us wanted to keep it cousins only, but we let it go.

Then he added her to the cousins’ group chat, something many of us were against. Maybe it’s weird to be against that, but this group chat is so exclusive that we haven’t added any of our other cousins.

Ultimately, they decided they didn’t want her around, which obviously angered their cousin.

One of my cousins made a separate group chat without her and named it “Cousins,” while I removed his fiancée from the group chat and said, “Sorry, cousins only.”

He then proceeded to remove himself and text me asking whether it was necessary to remove her.

I told him that I only did what everyone else was thinking.

AITA?

This definitely doesn’t sound like the Christmas spirit.

What did Reddit think?

This user seems to think this behavior was just unnecessarily petty.

Some things really just need to be reserved for family.

Is this really how adults handle a situation like this?

It would seem that even in the digital world, family dynamics can be incredibly delicate.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.