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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/LucyAriaRose on 2025-05-19 04:20:12+00:00.
I am NOT the Original Poster. That is AvailableTea7528. They posted in r/AITAH
Thanks to u/captandor for the rec!
Do NOT Comment on Original Posts. See rule 7. Latest update is 7 days old.
Mood Spoiler: I honestly don’t know how to feel. OOP and commenters are very split
Original Post: January 12, 2025
I got married last weekend. I’m still so pissed off at what my brother did. He took all of the attention off of me and my husband. Normally, I don’t feel the need to be the center of attention, but this was my freaking wedding day! I feel like it’s all anyone was talking about during the wedding and now it’s like the main thing any of them even remember from the entire thing.
It was a destination wedding within the US, so nothing crazy. We kept the guest list to our families (immediate and extended), as well as closest friends.
My parents paid for our immediate family to arrive about 5 days ahead of time. So, it was my parents, my sister, and I initially, and my brother arriving a few days later.
We knew my brother was bringing a date. No big deal. He said he was just bringing a girl from school. He didn’t even call her his girlfriend officially.
My parents showed up at the airport to pick my brother up and there he was, hand in hand with an obviously pregnant girl that none of us have ever met. My parents were obviously taken aback. My brother greeted them like everything was normal, according to my mom, and my parents didn’t really know what to do or say. Then he just said “Surprise!” My poor mom almost fainted and claims my dad yelled out “WTF have you done?”
He introduces us to this girl, but doesn’t clarify if she’s his girlfriend and doesn’t give us much info at all really. It was very weird. It was obvious that she was uncomfortable. She’s said she wasn’t feeling well and needed to go lay down after the flight. So, at dinner it was just our family as she was resting. We were all awkwardly sitting around the table eating dinner, barely saying a word. My mom finally says “(brother’s name), is that your baby?” By then we all assumed it was, but my mom needed confirmation. The lack of any real explanation or details from him up until then was just odd.
He admitted it’s technically not his baby, but he’s in love with her and intends on being a father to the baby anyway. The actual father isn’t involved and doesn’t want to be, and if they get married then he can adopt the baby so he’ll legally be the father. She’s living with him and none of us knew this either. He’s been her main support person throughout the entire thing (she’s 28 weeks, well 29 now since this was over a week ago). I think this was worse than what we had all assumed. So in love with her that he’s going to take on the responsibility of her child AND marry her, yet we’ve never even heard of her? He said he has mentioned her quite a few times. Well, maybe he’s mentioned her name in passing (not to me, maybe to my parents), but never said she was his girlfriend or pregnant. None of us understand. He’s 21, about to graduate college, planning to enter law school next, and he’s an attractive guy. Why would he do this? My parents, especially my mom, were stressing out about it all weekend long throughout my entire wedding weekend. It was like my wedding became an after thought. All my parents could talk about was how to make my brother change his mind about this girl.
Then, when the wedding photographer was taking family pictures, he wanted her in them! That’s was really the breaking point for me. She isn’t family. None of us knew about their relationship, and we met her 2 days prior. She shouldn’t be in our official family pictures from my wedding. It’s like forget the bride and groom, look at random heavily woman hitching herself to my brother. No, I told him no. I refused to let her be in the photos. My mom made me allow her to be in one picture, but said we don’t have to buy that one or put it in display anywhere. It just made my blood boil!
Anyway, I don’t think he should have brought her. There was no reason to bring her to my wedding, especially without warning. I mean, it’s all my side of the family could talk about and he was reticent to even correct them about it not being his baby. He said that’s because it was awkward for her to have to explain the full scenario to everyone, so he just let people think what they wanted. Because he wouldn’t at least say something, everyone was gossiping and wondering about it the whole time.
I’m posting this because I’m upset that several friends and even my own mom are telling me I’m overreacting and just need to accept it. When I told a group of my co-workers about it after the fact (they weren’t at the wedding), they agreed with me and thought what my brother did was absolutely insane and rude.
Some of OOP’s Comments:
Commenter: Yeah this is a wild story and your brother was absolutely in the wrong. He should have definitely explained who he was brining and what the circumstances were.
OOP: He had months to tell us about what was going on. Months!!! He didn’t have to wait and surprise us all on my wedding week.
Commenter: (downvoted) ESH You’re being an AH for emphasizing how your brother “ruined your wedding” instead of being concerned about how your brother could be ruining his life. It’s not like the poor expectant mother wore a white wedding dress and made an announcement at the reception.
It’s also an AH move of your brother to spring this major life consequence by surprise on everyone at your wedding.
OOP: Oh I am concerned about him ruining his life. It’s almost all my parents could talk about all weekend. We all think he’s insane and that this will be a gigantic mistake.
In her defense, she seemed very uncomfortable the entire time and I don’t think she wanted to be there. I think my brother may have forced this on her as well.
To a removed comment:
I don’t think I would have been so upset about her presence if we had just known ahead of time. He had months to tell us what was going on. There’s no reason he had to spring it on us and our entire family at my wedding.
Commenter: (downvoted) NTA for the fact that u wanted your wedding to be about you, but YTA for the way u talk about this whole situation. Your brother is a very nice man for wanting to step up in that baby’s life and they way u said that he could pull anyone but chose her like she’s a monster or smth rlly made my blood boil
OOP: He’s 21 years old. He shouldn’t be doing this to his life. He didn’t get her pregnant.
Commenter: Doing what to his life? He wanted to step up and that’s not a bad thing. He’s an adult, he likes her, she wants to keep the baby so there’s nothing u can do. Maybe he knew this would be the reaction of the family and that’s why he didn’t tell about her sooner. It was a very bad move to introduce her at your wedding tho. He can still have an amazing future whilst being a step/adoptive father. Single moms deserve a partner too.
OOP: Do I really need to explain the “what”? He’s 21. This decision could affect the entire trajectory of his life. It’s like he’s cleaning up somebody else’s mistake and he’s going to suffer because of it.
Commenter: A lot of people are being kind of rude to you here and I don’t think that it’s warranted. The way your brother went about this was in very bad taste. He should have brought her way in advance to introduce her to the family. But at this point… what’s done is done. Move on, forgive your brother and support his decision to step up to the plate and adopt this baby. I have a good friend who was very pregnant, her husband filed for divorce and took off. She met a wonderful man who saw her through the last of her pregnancy and adopted the baby as his own. They’ve now been married about 40 years!
OOP: If he wasn’t 21 and still in college I might feel differently regarding his decision. I wouldn’t feel differently about the way we found out, but I might be more supportive in general if circumstances were different.
OOP replies to another comment:
He’s graduating in a few months. He was planning to go to law school immediately following, but now he’s hinting that he’ll delay that since he’ll obviously need to have a full time job to support a baby. Oh, and she took a leave of absence from school due to her pregnancy so he’ll need to support her while she goes back. He hasn’t outright said he’s going to delay his plans, but he’s dropped several hints.
He can’t even fully support himself now. My parents pay for much of his life. So, if they continue to do that they’ll be paying for this girl and her baby too. It’s not fair to do to our parents.
Commenter: NTA. What he did was an AH move, though he probably didn’t think it through enough to realize all the implications of his actions.
He absolutely shouldn’t have dropped that bomb at your wedding or any wedding.
OOP: I don’t think he did it to be malicious. I don’t think he thought about what he was …
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1kq2xg8/aitah_for_saying_my_brother_shouldnt_have_brought/
Commenter: NTA. What he did was an AH move, though he probably didn’t think it through enough to realize all the implications of his actions.
He absolutely shouldn’t have dropped that bomb at your wedding or any wedding.
OOP: I don’t think he did it to be malicious. I don’t think he thought about what he was doing to me. He also hasn’t apologized though. If after being told something you did was rude and hurtful, at least own up to it.
Brother’s girlfriend:
He said they were friends for 2 years, but it didn’t turn romantic until after she was pregnant.
Top Commenter: I think he knew in a wedding setting that attention would be divided, your wedding was his meat shield.
OOP: Interesting take and something I hadn’t thought of. He was purposely trying to take attention away from me and my wedding, he just wanted some of the attention taken off of him and his poor decisions? Still selfish.
Commenter: NTA. If he has gotten away with a lot, then he definitely knew what he was doing. And the fact that you told him how you felt after your wedding and he hasn’t apologized yet, just hammers at home but he doesn’t give a s*** . He sounds like a selfish, self-centred asshole. I’m curious as well, because you mentioned that you and your sister never got away with anything compared to what he gets away with. [in a different comment] Could it also be the fact that he’s the son ?? Because that would be even shittier of your parents to enable that kind of behavior from him.
OOP: My parents pay for where he lives…and for where his girlfriend is now apparently living. I asked them if they were going to stop paying and they said “well, we can’t make them homeless.” They also paid for a huge chunk of his college tuition. They paid for a small fraction of my tuition and told me if I wanted to move out of the dorms I would have to pay for that myself. I did move into an apartment with a boyfriend eventually, but my parents didn’t help out, my mom criticized me for living with my boyfriend without being married, and we couldn’t even afford furniture! They say they were just in a better financial position by the time my brother went to college, and they admitted they should have helped me more and just didn’t realize - they learned from their mistakes and decided to do things differently once my brother went off to school. But, they did pay for a lot of my wedding. My husband and I also contributed financially to the wedding.
Commenter: But again, meeting entire family first time at a wedding is imo just a disaster waiting to happen if you are pregnant and not even by your partner 🤷🏻♀️
OOP: He asked us not to tell anyone the truth about him not being the father. I respected that. Well, I told my friends, but I didn’t tell anyone in our family. Even though I was annoyed, I still followed his wishes.
Commenter: You are NTA. Not only was your brother and AH to you and your husband on your wedding day, he was also potentially an AH to his gf. Did she know that none of you had no idea she existed? Imagine meeting your bf’s family for the first time and they didn’t even know you existed.
OOP: I don’t know how aware she was of the fact none of us knew anything about her.
Update Post: May 12, 2025 (4.5 months later)
I think I might be about to do what I’m assuming very few people come here to do.
I’m sharing an update and want to say that in hindsight I think I was actually the asshole in my situation. You can see my original post on my profile.
I think I was riding high on wedding hormones and “center of the universe” vibes at the time, but I’ve slowly come down to earth in the many weeks since I last posted. I let my worry about the “gossip” about my brother and his girlfriend get in the way of me enjoying my day, and there’s no way to go back and change it. I also realize that I should have just agreed to do one photo with his girlfriend included. One photo wouldn’t have been important and it didn’t have to be considered the “official” photo of me and my family that I put in my wedding album or hung on the wall. Instead, I chose to be a witch to somebody I was meeting for the first time and we already felt very uncomfortable.
For many weeks after I made my first post, I was sure I was not the asshole. My he has deflated and I’ve had a talk with my brother about it. We both came to the conclusion that in our family we didn’t really learn how to have difficult conversations about things that we knew might make somebody else uncomfortable, which is why I couldn’t calmly voice my feelings to my brother on my wedding day and instead acted like a spoiled child. It’s also why instead of having a normal conversation with our parents to let them know that he was dating somebody who was pregnant by somebody else and that he was going to be raising this baby as his own, he panicked and decided to just announce it without actually having to voice it to them at all, and my wedding just so happened to be the first occasion he had to do so. I don’t think he mentioned to hurt me.
Several people have asked me about an update on my brother and his girlfriend. Well, she’s his wife now. They got married. They’re still together, living together. We’ve gotten to know her a little better and she’s not as bad as we all wanted to make her out to be. I think she genuinely loves my brother and my brother loves her, she just so happened to be pregnant when they met and they both acknowledge it’s a bit unusual. My brother is the type who brings all the stray animals home so I think we all sort of worried that he just felt bad for her and wanted to help her and protect her, but I think it’s more than that. I went to her baby shower. She seems perfectly normal and nice, and really crazy about my brother. The baby was finally born at 41 weeks and of course my brother was there. The baby is several weeks old now. Half the time I forget that the baby isn’t actually my brother’s baby and isn’t actually related to us by blood.
After my wedding, my parents started to get more concerned about the whole situation with my brother. My mom became the most judgmental one. My brother talked to our dad and eventually got him to realize that my brother is an adult and he’s going to do what he wants to do - eventually my dad was like “you’re right, and I rather just support you here.” My mom couldn’t get on board. She wouldn’t let herself even give his girlfriend/wife a chance. She convinced herself that my brother was just being manipulated and taken advantage of by this evil woman. She told everyone that too. So things were sort of tense because I felt somewhat in the middle at that point. But now? My mom has been the only person to babysit since the birth. It’s like she saw the baby and forgot all about everything and she’s all buddy buddy with his wife now. I’m shocked that this woman has decided to not completely cut my mom out of the baby’s life all together but perhaps she’s a bigger person than all of us!
Some of OOP’s Comments:
Commenter (downvoted): Geez, did you just really compare a pregnant woman your brother chose to date with stray animals people bring home to rescue from the streets? You reaaaaly are TA, aren’t you? Damn…
OOP: That’s not really how I meant it. Separate comment: My brother has a big heart and can’t resist helping somebody who he determines is in need. We worried about whether he was genuinely with her because he was in love with her or if he was with her because he felt bad about her situation and had convinced himself he was in love with her. This is how we sort of looked at the situation previously, not currently.
Commenter: I knew exactly what you meant, and it’s not like humans are any better than any other animal. A stray is a stray… human, canine, feline… doesn’t matter.
OOP: No, it’s the opposite - animals are better than humans. I don’t see animals as inferior to humans, so I really didn’t mean it as an insult. I for one could only dream of being as beautiful and loyal as a dog!
Commenter: I don’t understand why people want to use major family events for big rollouts—long lost relatives reappearing, estranged parents showing up with new partners, proposing.
Or in this case, the OP’s brother debuting a new relationship.
Other people’s events just aren’t the time.
OOP: In this case, it was because he just couldn’t figure out a way to say it before hand. Sure, I think if you’ve taken on the responsibility of becoming a parent you should have the balls to have that uncomfortable conversation with your own parents but at the same time, after reflecting, I’ve done similar things (never during another person’s big event) when it comes to not being able to tell my parents something I know they’ll be upset about. In our family, growing up, all 3 of us have pretty much always done what our parents expected of us and wanted us to do.
Commenter: He showed his immaturity by injecting an emotional bomb into his sister’s wedding. […] Sorry his now wife didn’t see the need to avoid the scene the two of them created. You can shock-slap a family with such news without raining on your sisters parade. […]
OOP: He wasn’t completely honest with her about it and she thought we knew more than we actually did. She didn’t find out the truth until they were ready on their way, and he convinced her everything would be fine. She didn’t want to come.
Commenter: I still think you’re NTA and that your brother was an immature idiot to announce things the way he did. It was unfair to everyone, including his then girlfriend. Weddings are stressful and highly emotional already, I can’t think of anyone in my life would handle that news well with the way it was presented.[…]
But it is lovely to see that everyone has mended fences and is loving the new baby. It’s the best possible update.
OOP: (downvoted) I’m not denying that what he did wasn’t really the best way to go about it. He was still an idiot, but I can sympathize with how he felt about not being able to tell our parents. I also feel that I could have communicated my feelings in a better way. I could have been honest without acting like a brat myself. Our family only has room for so many of those
Commenter: I don’t know why you think you were an AH. You weren’t. Just because you have since reconciled and are happy with how things have turned out doesn’t mean that what your brother did was in any way acceptable, or that your completely justified reaction to what he did was wrong. It wasn’t. Don’t rewrite history, you’ll do both of you a disservice yo pretend that you were in the wrong when you weren’t. It’s OK for him to have been an AH.
OOP: I think I could have reacted differently, been honest about my feelings and story up for myself without letting the whole thing eat me up and secretly want to explode.
Commenter: Okay- I’ll be blunt and say that this is the most 180 of 180 degree turns. I don’t think the original OP was the TA because I don’t think the author of this post is the first OP. It doesn’t even read like the first post.
OOP: It’s me, the same person. Haven’t you ever had a chance to look back on something you did in hindsight? I don’t know, maybe this sounds bad, but now that the wedding is behind us I just sort of feel like it wasn’t as important as it felt like at the time. The world continues to spin.
Commenter: You are not the AH and never were, your brother was an inconsiderate AH for doing that to you and your family gaslit you into believing you’re a bad person for being upset about it. I hope you come to realize that you did nothing wrong by being upset after all and you choose to cut these people out of your life before they make you think you’re in the wrong for being rightfully upset about this kind of stuff again. […]
OOP: Thanks, I guess? I don’t know, I don’t feel like I’ve been gaslit. Strangely, my husband is now more upset about it now than I am. He didn’t even really seem to care about it when it happened, but he makes comments about my brother’s AH move.
Commenter: Didn’t he originally say they had been friends for 2 years prior to their romantic relationship? But now you say she was pregnant when they met?
OOP: He admitted he lied about them being friends for 2 years. He didn’t plan to lie about it but when he saw our reactions it just sort of came out in an attempt to make him seem slightly less crazy. They met when she was already pregnant, she had just found out basically and apparently was up front with him about it. Idk, in a way I find that slightly better than her having known him for 2 years and suddenly being romantically interested in him once she found herself single and pregnant. It was almost a relief to find out it was a lie.
Why brother and SIL got married:
They were married before the baby was born specifically so he could put his name on the birth certificate and naturally be presumed the father by law.
Commenter (in response to a ‘you’re all losing your minds’ comment): I have to agree with this take. I’m a married woman but I’m not big on weddings; yet even I feel like any bride in this situation would have every right to be upset and refuse to include this person in professional photos.
Beyond that, the whole situation with the brother and his now wife is abnormal. I can’t think of many men, especially a young college aged guy with plenty going for him, making a decision like this. The family has just gotten over him dropping out of school when he was probably almost finished to support a woman and a baby that isn’t even his? Most families would be disappointed enough if it was actually his screw up and his baby, but to willingly do this to himself is just not something I can imagine most families being supportive of. I don’t have kids, but I feel like I’d be furious if this was my son.
OOP: I can agree that his decision is very unusual. It’s not something I’d advise anyone to do. But he’s an adult and we can’t make his decisions for him. We grew up having all our decisions made for us, and I have a lot of resentment for it. So, if this blows up then it least it was his own decision. He didn’t drop out of school. He graduates this month. He’s putting off law school. He was supposed to go straight into law school but he’s postponing that so she can support her while she finishes school. I think we’re all concerned he won’t ever go to law school now, and he’d really been set on it before. Maybe he secretly doesn’t want to go but again doesn’t know how to tell my parents. I also think we’re all still worried about how much more difficult he’s made his life as a young adult just graduating school. He can’t just be concerned with finding a job and doing all of the other things a new college grad does. I definitely hate the thought of seeing him struggle, but he says this is what he wants to do. There’s no guarantee this relationship will last. We’re not taking bets on when it’ll end, but realistically they’ve been together less than a year and now there’s a baby in the mix so time will tell how well they can handle it all together.
Read like a bad romcom.
