Bride Started Wedding Ceremony on Time Even Though Her Parents Hadn't Showed Up

What would you do if you were about to get married and your parents were nowhere in sight? They weren't answering the phone. They were nowhere to be found. Would you wait? Or would you go on without them?

One bride who just recently got married had to decide whether to go on with her wedding ceremony even though her own parents hadn't shown up yet. In a post on Reddit's "Am I the A-hole?" she explains, "I got married on Saturday, and it was absolutely amazing except for one thing: My parents showed up late."

"They knew the ceremony time," she writes, "and my husband and I made it very clear to everyone, both in the invites and in person, that we were going to start exactly at that time. The venue cost us a lot of money (we paid for the entire wedding ourselves) and we were only able to use it for a limited amount of time, so we wanted to make every minute count."

When it was half an hour before start time and her parents still hadn't shown up, the couple didn't know what to do. They called them multiple times but nobody answered. "Finally," she writes, "the start time arrived and my parents still weren't there. I was really pissed off at this point."

I have so many questions. I understand that people have different relationships with their parents, but was the bride's mom really not at all involved in the "getting ready" process? Had they not talked at all earlier that day? How had the bride had no communication with her parents on her wedding day? And when they weren't answering their phones, wouldn't the bride's first reaction be to worry instead of anger? It's her wedding. If my parents weren't answering their phone on my wedding day, I'd think something was wrong.

But evidently, that didn't cross her mind. And when their wedding coordinator asked them what they wanted to do, they decided to start the wedding on time. Without her parents. "All of our other guests were already there, and we wanted to be considerate of their time," she wrote.

Her parents finally showed up 15 minutes after start time, by which time they had missed the ceremony completely. They explained they had left early, but were gotten rear-ended on their way to the wedding and had to deal with insurance, the police, and everything. Sucks! "But why wouldn't they just call their daughter and tell her what was going on?" you're probably asking yourself.

Well, they didn't call their daughter from the road because they don't have cellphones. They only have a landline. In 2019. I'm so confused. First of all, who doesn't have a cellphone in 2019? Second of all, they got in a car accident! Presumably with another car! That had a person in it! A person with a cellphone! They should have been like, "Hey, our daughter is about to get married, and you're making us late, so let us use your phone to call her to let her know what's going on." 

Basically, there were so many solutions to this situation that weren't "daughter gets married while wondering where her parents are," but that's what happened. The bride writes, "I'm still frustrated with them for not making more of an effort to get to the venue early, and they're furious at me for not delaying the wedding 15 minutes so they could be there." That's the other thing! No matter how much venue time I was "wasting," I would wait for my parents to get to my wedding. I just don't get this family dynamic... at all. 

But for commenters looking at the facts, the conclusion seemed to be that no one was wrong for reacting the way they did. "They did leave early. You couldn't delay indefinitely without losing your venue. Sucks a lot, but it is what it is," one person writes. 

"It sucks they were rear ended," someone else writes. "They made an effort to be there, but life got in the way. You also couldn't wait forever. Sure, maybe 15 minutes wouldn't be so bad, but where do you draw the line?" 

I don't know...twenty minutes...half an hour? Fifteen minutes seems a little ungenerous. 

Then again, it's really difficult to tell what the relationship is like between this bride and her parents. Maybe they're always late for big life events and this was just another example of that. Maybe she's always too hard on them. Who knows? Only one thing is for sure and it's that those parents need to get cellphones. There's no excuse anymore.