After getting engaged over the holidays, she and her fiancé carefully planned celebrations so both sides of the family could feel included. The proposal happened with her immediate family present, and later they celebrated with her grandparents as well.

When it came time to announce the engagement on social media, she chose a few photos from the proposal and family celebration, but left out one picture with her grandparents because she didn’t like how she looked in it.

Read on for the story.

AITA for not including a photo of my grandmother in my social media post announcing my engagement?

My lovely partner and I got engaged at the end of 2025. For context, we spent a few days with my family for the holidays and then directly after spent a few days with his.

He planned the proposal to be on the last day with my family (December 27) so that we could celebrate with them and then the very next day we could celebrate with his family. We felt we had to include both of our families in this special moment so that nobody felt left out.

As you’ll soon come to understand, some of them don’t take too kindly to being left out, even when it’s really not about them. Unfortunately my grandparents left to go back home on the 26th so they couldn’t be with us to celebrate. But we live quite close to them so we decided to celebrate together after we got home.

This isn’t gonna end well, is it?

To announce our engagement, we chose to post photos of the proposal and a few shots celebrating with family. I didn’t include a photo we took celebrating with my grandparents because the angle of the photo made me look heavier (I’ve struggled with my body image for a long time).

At the time, I thought we were only posting to Instagram, so I didn’t even think my grandparents would see it (they don’t have Instagram). But then my partner shared the post on Facebook, which they have.

Two days later, I receive a text from my grandmother demanding an explanation for why we excluded her from the post.

Oh, come on.

I apologized for making her feel excluded and explained that I just felt the photo made me look fat and I felt insecure. I also said that what I felt mattered most was that we got to celebrate together.

She responded that she liked the photo and it was unfortunate we decided to exclude her. I again apologized and said that it wasn’t our intention.

After this she never responded, but I hear she’s running around telling everyone about how I’m a horrible grandchild for excluding her.

A little harsh.

I love my grandma to bits but she has a history of starting drama over petty things like this. Some members of my family think that I should just add the photo to the post and apologize to her.

If you’ve read this far and thought “I don’t see why this is such a big deal”, then be grateful you don’t have a family as crazy as mine.

Just the planning my partner did to make sure everyone else felt included in OUR special moment shows that, yes, they would make a big deal out of something this ridiculous.

True.

I don’t understand what would drive someone to make someone else’s engagement about themselves, let alone a close family member.

Now whenever I look back on what is supposed to be a magical moment, I’m just nauseous with anxiety. I keep telling myself that not giving in is part of breaking this cycle of drama, but I just want to move on.

Anyways, do I just have a blindspot and I’m the asshole here? How do I proceed to fix this?

Despite apologizing and explaining her insecurity about the photo, the issue has now spread through the family, leaving her wondering if she actually did something wrong, or if a happy milestone is being turned into unnecessary conflict.

This person says absolutely NTA.

This person is against public proposals for this reason.

And this person says the logistics are rather silly.

When someone else’s engagement post turns into your personal PR campaign, the problem probably isn’t the missing photo.

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.