Weddings these days can be very personal affairs.

With free rein to decide everything from the dress to the flowers, the food to the venue, the music to the decor, couples can adapt their special day to suit their own tastes and desires.

For some couples, this means an all-out, budget-blowing experience with everyone they’ve ever met in attendance.

For others, a more intimate affair with just a few loved ones is vastly preferred.

But when the guy in this story was invited to attend a wedding of his mom’s friend’s daughter, he was quite taken aback. He didn’t even consider himself to warrant an invite to the former type of wedding.

Read on to find out what happened next.

AITA for refusing to attend my mom’s friend’s daughter’s wedding?

A while ago when I was around about nineteen years old (I am thirty now) my mom had her friend to visit for a few days.

My mom and her friend “Rachel” are very close to each other, however me and Rachel do not have any form of close relationship.

I can tolerate her and be friendly, but I always have a feeling that our personalities clash and sometimes we get ourselves into uncomfortable situations.

Let’s see how this awkward situation started.

My mom and Rachel were discussing the wedding of Rachel’s daughter, “Ellen,” who was in her late thirties at this point.

From the few times I have seen her she seemed like a lovely lady, but again, me and Ellen were not that close either.

It wasn’t that we did not like each other, but the amount of times that I have met her I can count on one hand – so we pretty much knew each other existed but that was about it.

As they were discussing the wedding, Rachel turned to me and asked me if I was going to be able to make it to the wedding with my mom. At this time I did not even know that Ellen even was getting married.

Uh-oh. Let’s see how he responded to this surprise question.

I looked at her and asked her who was going to be there other than me and my mom. She started to list off a bunch of people that I had no idea who they were, or names that I barely recognised.

After she stopped she was looking at me expectantly.

I apologised to her and basically said to her that unfortunately I would be extremely uncomfortable going somewhere that I didn’t know, and being amongst a huge gathering of people that I had no knowledge of for many hours.

My mom was very understanding as she knew how difficult it is for me to function in large crowds, especially if that large crowd was full of people I did not know – so she said that was fine.

But for his mom’s friend, this man’s social anxiety wasn’t acceptable.

Rachel however had the opposite reaction.

She tried to make excuses for why I can go, saying that my mother was going to be there and that I would be disappointing Ellen a lot if I did not go.

I said to her that I did not really know Ellen all that well as we had only met a handful of times, so I doubted that she would be that disappointed by my absence considering that we were not even friends.

I don’t remember the words that were exchanged, but me and Rachel had an argument in front of my Mom.

Let’s see how his mom reacted to this drama between her son and her best friend.

My mom very much stayed out of the argument and watched it continue, which I understand – because what do you say when your son and best friend are fighting in front of you?

When she left, my mom came to my room and asked if I was sure I did not want to go. I said to her, “most definitely not now after that.”

After the wedding, Rachel looked through photos with my mom in the living room and made offhand remarks about how I would be in them if I had attended.

I gave no attention to this, and just returned to my room until she left.

AITA?

It’s crazy that Rachel would think that a nineteen-year-old man would want to attend the wedding of a woman he barely knew, especially since the only person he would know at the even was his mom.

As for Ellen – why would she want a random teen she didn’t really know there on her special day?

Moreover, why would she want to pay for him to attend?

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person agreed that there was no reason for him to have attended this random wedding.

But others thought his response could have been better.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought his mom should have got more involved.

He was absolutely right to stand his ground.

Rachel seems to have been trying to assert some sort of control over the situation and, unlike his mom, refused to take no for an answer.

That’s totally unfair, and also suggests that her priorities for her own daughter’s wedding were quite messed up.

She was totally out of order.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.