AITA for uninviting my sister from my wedding in 2 weeks?
Hey guys — I feel weird making a post about this because the answer seems really obvious, but here goes nothing. Using a burner account because many of those involved are on Reddit.
My fiancé (32M) and I (31F) have had a wonderful, healthy relationship that has blossomed and resulted in him being a full-fledged member of my family, most of whom live nearby to us. We spend holidays and birthdays together regularly, and recently we decided to spend Mother’s Day all together.
I have two sisters. One of which (27F) has a great relationship with fiancé, and she got us all into a groupchat to pull together a Mother’s Day celebration for my mom. I’ll call her Sister 1 due to birth order. Sister 1 said she would handle decorations, I would handle gifts and cards, and fiancé would do all the barbecuing, so we all agreed and got to work.
We asked Sister 2 (24F) to contribute by grabbing some flowers and drinks at the store. The problem is that Sister 2 doesn’t leave her basement room and spends the day & night sleeping. She’s been struggling with serious mental health problems that have resulted in her being depressed for years now, locked in a filthy dark basement room, and barely holding onto her job. When she’s not working, she’s sleeping. We have all tried everything to help get her back on her feet, but she has generally not been receptive to our efforts to help her and gets angry instead. It has been a great source of pain for all of us and we’ve all gotten into arguments about how to best approach the situation as her mental health has gotten worse and worse.
We also strongly suspect she’s addicted to prescription drugs of some kind. We’re unsure exactly of what drugs she’s using (other than weed) but strongly suspect she’s been taking pills due to some instances in the past involving her physically abusive ex, who also abused pills and who she is now talking to again, unfortunately.
Additional context: she did not attend fiancé and I’s engagement party due to it being on Valentine’s Day, and she was struggling around missing the aforementioned ex. She completely missed the meeting of the families, which was an important milestone for us. She apologized afterwards, but that has hung heavy over me, and it’s basically how to things have been with her over the past two years.
Anyway.
Eventually after being badgered by Sister 1, Sister 2 emerged from the basement to go buy flowers and drinks. Fiancé and I tagged along with her to get some stuff at the grocery store for the party.
In the car, she began to complain about how Sister 1 was “such a bitch” for being upset with her for not helping out. I used an admittedly badly timed moment to tell her how frustrating it is to be left without her help for family events, how Sister 1 is justified in being annoyed, how hard it’s been to not hear from her for weeks to months, and how it seems she’s been resistant to taking steps to improving her mental health or accepting any help.
In response, she went off about how she’s too busy “saving the world” at her job (she’s a social worker) and crashes every day at home with no energy to do anything else, and that we would never understand what it was like to be her. I reminded her that we all have jobs and busy schedules, and she snapped back that we weren’t “saving the world” like she was, and that we would never understand her struggle. (Btw… My fiancé works in special ed and Sister 1 is a school counselor.) I got angry and told her she had Main Character Syndrome and that she needed to get over her self-victimization.
Things escalated after I told her she acts like she’s the only one with problems in the family.
Her response to that was, “I never said that!”
And fiancé — now having a hard time staying silent in the back of the car as she was yelling at me — said quietly, “Actually, you did just say that.”
This is when all hell breaks loose. We were at a red light, and she turns around to fiancé, and basically screams at the top of her lungs — like, Bad Girls Club-style cussing and berating at the TOP of her lungs at him — asking who the fuck he thought he was, etc etc. You get the gist. It was humiliating. We felt unsafe in the car and got out at the red light. We ended up going to another grocery store and returning home.
Context: Fiancé has a history of being abused (verbally and physically, including being called the f-slur) by his father and brother who did hard drugs and kind of used him as a punching bag growing up. So he does not do well with violence and aggression. He’s a very gentle soul.
Anyway, Sister 2 didn’t show up to the Mother’s Day party for a while after that. She was parked somewhere random and my mom was worried sick trying to get her to come home. When she did come home eventually, my mother urged her to apologize to fiancé for her behavior. So she walks up to fiancé very begrudgingly, and mutters that “I’m sorry but do not get involved with arguments between me and my sister.” In short, it was not an apology at all, and fiancé, myself, and Sister 1 are like “that wasn’t an apology?”
This enrages Sister 2 further. She absolutely loses it and cusses out fiancé at the top of her lungs all over again, except this time she doubles down by calling him cringey, asking if he was gay, bragging that she had more testosterone than him, and ultimately, saying she “never liked (fiancé) since the beginning”, that “she doesn’t like him,” and that she was “not going to come to the wedding.” For his part, fiancé lost his temper and lashed out verbally at her as well —cursing and insulting included. I could tell she was shocked because IMO I think people are generally too scared to stand up to her, so this might have been a first.
She stormed away. Then, after a bit, she ran back upstairs from her basement room with a vengeance. She lunged at him as if she were planning on physically fighting him. It got to the point where my mom had to hold her back and I could see the fear in Sister 1’s face as she watched the drama unfold. It was genuinely scary. In anger, I called her crazy and that I didn’t know who she was anymore, which I do regret and didn’t help the situation.
It was an absolute shitshow.
Given his trauma of being lunged at and verbally abused by his own family members growing up, fiancé was shaky and pretty mentally fucked up for days after the incident. He has firmly decided that he does NOT want Sister 2 at the wedding because he simply does not feel safe around her anymore.
When this was verbalized to my mother and Sister 1, they were both incredibly offended and upset that Sister 2 would be barred from the wedding. They think it’s a decision I’m going to regret for the rest of my life. Sister 1 even said that “sisterhood loyalty” comes first, and that if Sister 2 was barred from going to the wedding, then she would refuse to attend herself. This broke my heart, as she’s really close to fiancé and myself and I really wanted her to be there.
Now I’m at a point where I just need external guidance on what to do and how to approach this. I feel that growing up in my volatile family has resulted in me normalizing Sister 2’s behavior in my head and while I support fiancé above all, I’m just terrified that this will shatter our family. I don’t know how to react or what to do.
My mother says everyone “made mistakes” that day that we all have to apologize for, instead of pinning all the blame on Sister 2. She believes that fiancé should have accepted Sister 2’s initial “apology” and moved on, and that not allowing Sister 2 to attend my wedding could result in Sister 2 “being pushed the edge” — heavily implying her hurting herself. She is saying it’s a choice I would regret for the rest of my life, and that Sister 2 didn’t independently explode and would not do so at the wedding.
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**TL;DR:** After a series of family arguments on Mother's Day, my (31F) depressed, volatile sister (24F) deeply insulted and physically lunged at my fiancé (32M) before being restrained. My fiancé and I exchanged insults with her during the escalation. Because my fiancé has childhood abuse trauma and feels unsafe, we banned my sister from our wedding.
My mother and other sister (27F) argue that everyone made mistakes that day, and that there’s no reason why we should keep my offending sister from attending the wedding. My other sister is now threatening to boycott the wedding out of sisterly loyalty to my uninvited sister, and my mom warns the ban could — her words — “push (volatile sister) over the edge.”
AITAH for keeping her uninvited and standing with my fiancé?