Weddings have a unique talent for bringing out the best and the worst in family dynamics, often within the same twenty-four-hour period. There is seating chart politics and plenty of unsolicited opinions. There are also relatives who treat someone else's celebration as an opportunity to advance their own agenda.
Most couples navigate it with a smile and a wave, but some situations, however, are simply too much to absorb with grace. One bride let her cousin attend despite pre-wedding drama that would have had most people reaching for the uninvite button. But when she saw the disrespectful wedding gift they received, she knew it was time to retaliate.
Weddings have a special ability to bring out the absolute worst in people
One bride found that out when her cousin wanted to use the wedding as a chance to hand out her own invitations
The bride was already fuming, but when she opened her wedding gift from her cousin, she was even more appalled
Inside the envelope were two used gift cards from shops that the bride rarely even visits, amounting to roughly $80
The bride took this as her signal to simply regift them back to her entitled cousin, and also decline the invitation to the wedding
Experts say for family you should be spending around $100 to $150 on a gift, even if it is a gift card
Wedding gift etiquette is a tricky one, and one must also consider that not everyone is in the same financial position. According to Vogue, the average guest spends around $150 on a wedding gift, with distant relatives sitting closer to the $50 to $100 range and close family expected to land at $150 or above.
Roughly 10% of guests give gift cards, which is a perfectly legitimate choice, sitting neatly between cash and a physical gift in terms of flexibility and thoughtfulness. The key word there is thoughtfulness, because a gift card to a shop the recipient frequents, with the balance intact, is a perfectly reasonable present. A used gift card to a wine shop with Merry Christmas still written on it, from a cousin who earns over $100,000 a year, is a different category of gesture entirely.
If you are regifting something, Quick and Dirty Tips tells us that the free nature of the gift means you should be going the extra mile in some other way, adding a restaurant voucher or a personal touch that shows you put some thought in beyond passing along something you no longer needed. The cousin in this story did not go the extra mile. The used gift cards were tacky at best, but she could have at least added a nice salad spoon for good measure.
As for the dress blunder, it's hard not to see that once as malicious. Of all the colors under the sun, THAT is the one she chose? "If it's a pattern with a white base or a print with white in it, I would suggest sticking to a rough visual ratio of 75% color to 25% white," says Gabrielle Hurwitz. The jury is still out on whether the cousin respected that, but if it was noticeable enough for the bride to mention, we highly doubt it.
42% of couples cite family drama as their top wedding challenge, which means this bride is in very large and very tired company. She had already absorbed the invitation drama, the white dress, and the two to four days of panic over a potentially missing card, all before discovering what was actually inside the envelope. The decision to send the same energy back to the February wedding looks like the only reasonable response!
How would you react if you opened an envelope to find used gift cards? Share your thoughts in the comments!
People in the comments were equally outraged, and a few even gave smart suggestions for the wording on the returned card
