Side note on wedding drama

It seems that no wedding planning process is complete without at least a little drama. In my earlier post, I wrote that we were lucky that there were no other hands in the wedding planning process but our own, which made things much, much easier. What I didn't mention was the difficulty in dealing with certain family members while we were planning our wedding. Although they didn't ruin the wedding or make a scene, I do feel that our relationship with these people have been permanently altered.

At first, we thought it might be a jealousy thing. Some people just don't react well to happy news when they're miserable. Some people get downright nasty when they're jealous. During the wedding planning process, my hubby and I have had our fair share of damaging interactions with unhappy people. As much as we would like to sympathize, forgive and help them, we have come to the conclusion that in some cases, you can't help them unless they help themselves and it's best to protect ourselves in the meanwhile. In truth, there is lingering anger, frustration and lots of hurt feelings still, but now that the wedding's over, the pressure to try and get them to behave nicely is off. Despite the hurtful behavior from these people, my hubby and I strove to give them every chance to "get over it" and start acting gracious. In the end, they still behaved like petty people, more focused on their own misery than trying to at least not be rude to us on our wedding day. I feel like they were almost angry that they couldn't ruin it for anybody without embarrassing themselves in front of everyone.

In any case, I won't go into details, but the ongoing and the on again, off again drama plagued our planning process. It took up not only an emotional and mental toll, but sucked up time because with every incident, there had to be some tears, venting, analyzing and then discussion on how to move forward. So you can say that these incidents weren't minor to us. Perhaps these people always had tendencies towards being petty, jealous and mean, but certainly they had never acted to such an extreme degree until we were engaged. Much of the process was tinged with the "what do we do about these people?" question. In the end, we chose to try to be gracious towards these people. However, we also had to shield them from some other guests that they were... unfriendly with. That meant that the mean people could not be given places of honor normally accorded to people in their positions.

Despite the unpleasantries, and we did experience a little at the wedding, they were unable to ruin it for us. That's partly because there were just too many people that were having a good time and really wanted to wish us well. It's also partly because the wedding was about us, not them, and as much as they'd like to pretend it's all about them, I'm sure it was a difficult fantasy to keep up. Thank goodness for that!