Weddings are always a high-stress situation, not just for the couple but also for their family members. The stress of planning a wedding sometimes brings out the worst in people.

But this young couple faced more than the average share of hurdles an engaged couple has to put up with. Slowly, they realized that they needed to stand up for themselves. Keep reading to find out everything that happened.

The groom, a gay man had had a hard time with his family because of his sexual orientation. He talked about the first time his parents found out he had a boyfriend and had kicked him out of the home. He wrote, “When my parents found out about my boyfriend when I was 15, they disowned me and kicked me out the house,” he wrote.

He talked about how negatively that had impacted him and led to homelessness. He wrote that he “ended up on the streets and in a youth homeless shelter.” When he reached out to other family members, requesting helps, even those who vocally supported LGBTQ+ rights bowed out saying they did not want to choose sides in his rift with his parents.

He shared how even his cousins were told to ignore him completely. He shared, how one cousin “was instructed to stop speaking to me and act like she didn’t recognize me when they passed where I was sleeping on a park bench on more than one occasion.”

But thankfully, he worked to get back on his feet and “adjusted to the idea of myself as someone without a family and managed, through huge effort and the dedication of some social workers, to get back on my feet and make a life for myself.”

He also found the love of his life, and married him in an intimate ceremony. He explained the event was “with close friends and his family in attendance. No one from my family was invited or informed about the wedding until after the event.”

After a long time, a cousin had reached out to him and apologized for her past behavior, and urged him to come to family events. He went to a few of them at her insistence, and his parents ignored him throughout while other family members pretended he had never been disowned.

He shared how his aunt and uncle “enthusiastically chatted to me and acted as though we’d just randomly lost contact and nothing weird had happened. I was polite but quickly stopped attending events and shifted to occasional friendly exchanges online with them.”

Then he uploaded pictures from his wedding online and all hell broke loose. His family was angry they had not been invited to the wedding. He wrote, “I have been bombarded with calls, texts, and messages from my cousin and her parents, all expressing how hurt they are that they received no invite. ‘How could you pretend to have reconnected with us but disown us as your family like this?’ is a genuine message I received from my aunt, along with, ‘Who are these strangers you refer to as your ‘parents’? Your real parents are so humiliated!’ (I referred to my mother-in-law and father-in-law as my family in a post, not as my parents.)”

Now after having been disowned by his family in the past for being gay, the young man is doubting himself on whether he did the right thing. He questions whether he was “somehow callous in not inviting them after we reconnected.”

People were on the groom’s side and told him he had done nothing wrong. One person commented on the situation, “they are in a self-righteous rage because they weren’t invited to his wedding? How dare they? There are no words. They deserve no words. They know exactly what they did, and they know exactly why they weren’t invited to that wedding. No explanation is needed, and, frankly, no contact with them is necessary.”

If you enjoyed this story, check out the one below about how a bride snubbed her father on her wedding day.