Photo: Dmytro Voinalovych / Shutterstock
This all happened a year ago, and he still wonders.
By Kurtis Condra — Written on Aug 23, 2022
On wedding days, many are expected to gift the bride and groom with something to help them start their new lives together.
While this can be costly for guests, it's considered to be an unspoken requirement. However, one man says his friends clearly aren't aware of this custom — or else they just didn't care about it.
Posting to Reddit’s r/weddingshaming, he decided to tell his story.
The man said at his wedding, none of his friends gave them gifts which he found odd.
Beginning his post, the man stated it had been a year since the official wedding. They had about 75 invitees, 20 of them were his friends, some of whom had been close to him since high school.
“We aren't materialistic at all but I feel embarrassed with my wife because none of my friends gave us absolutely any gifts,” he wrote in his post.
The two are hosting a one-year anniversary dinner and going over the invitee list and thank you notes, and he says his wife brought it up again.
He reminds everyone that this is not a complaint post and just pointing out how odd it was. He says the wedding was a classic one with a printed invitation, a website, RSVP, rehearsal dinner, open bar, and such.
Their website had a wedding registry with gifts ranging from $20 and up — the man also repeatedly stresses that he doesn't care about the gifts, but rather it was more about the gesture.
He says that because his wife comes from a wealthy background, perhaps his friends who come from a public school system may have felt that they were well off and didn’t need anything else to flourish their house to get started in their new life together.
He also mentioned this was his second wedding, so maybe his friends thought he'd be divorced again. Or because he was living on his own for 7 years and he didn't need anything, or because they gave him wedding gifts the first time around?
In the comments, Reddit users expressed a similar level of confusion about the man's predicament with many finding it odd that so many of his friends all neglected to give him a gift.
However, others warned the man that it was possible their gifts were stolen with several users telling stories from their own lives of wedding venue employees and sneaky guests who stole gifts or envelopes with checks from the gifts table.
“As someone said, one person might have been responsible for coordinating a group gift and didn’t, or maybe the answer is they didn’t get a gift," the top comment reads.
Others, however, pointed out that gifts are a kind gesture but not required so while it is odd if none of his friends got him anything, there's not much he can do about it!
Kurtis Condra covers entertainment, news, and human interest topics for YourTango. He is also a poet based in San Francisco, California. You can keep up with his poetic journey on Instagram.