Planning a wedding can be expensive, time-consuming and stressful. What’s supposed to be a celebration of love and the merging of two people’s lives sometimes gets overshadowed by family drama.

In the Reddit sub r/AITA, one bride described the drama that ensued while she was planning her wedding. She was keeping the wedding small, limiting it to 25 guests, but that wasn’t the hardest part. The stress was around someone she knew she did not want to invite – her stepmom.

The bride explained that when her parents were married, her father had an affair with their foreign language teacher. At first the affair was emotional only, but eventually, it resulted in the bride’s parents getting divorced. The dad remarried, and the person he had the affair with is now the bride’s stepmom.

The bride does not want to invite the person who split up her parents to her wedding. That’s understandable, but the bride’s dad and her stepmom aren’t so understanding about it. When she sent an invitation to her dad, her dad asked her if that also included the stepmom. When the bride told him it didn’t, the stepmom was upset.

The bride posted in the Reddit sub to see how others felt about her decision not to invite her stepmom to the wedding under the circumstances. Overwhelmingly, the people who commented on her post supported her decision.

One person wrote, “You have a lot of valid feelings towards your dad and stepmom that haven’t been worked through. It’s mind boggling to me that they expect to be invited to your wedding as a couple, when nothing has really been properly dealt with, emotionally/mentally regarding the relationships. They think it’s fine to just attend and ‘play family’ until after the wedding. No. They have done nothing to earn an invite as a couple. If your dad chooses not to attend because his partner is not invited, that’s on him, but you’re not obligated to play ‘happy family’ just because this is a monumental occasion for you.”

Another reader added, “Please don’t call her your Step-Mom. She is not a mother to you in any way. She is your Dad’s wife and is not invited to your wedding.”

Yet another reader told the bride to uninvite her dad to her wedding unless she wanted him to walk her down the aisle. In response, the bride shared, “Hadn’t planned on asking him to! Now I am worried he might be assuming that LOL. To be honest, my first gut instinct after reading his message was “consider yourself uninvited.”

Do you think it’s rude not to invite the stepmom to the wedding under the circumstances?