A bride is cutting off her friends who didn’t bother to show up to her wedding without so much as an apology.
On November 6, Kalina Marie went viral on TikTok for exposing the vacant reception hall she and her husband walked into on their wedding day. “POV: you planned the most beautiful entrance. Just to open the doors to an empty venue,” she wrote over her video, which has now amassed over 8.6 million views.
Marie had been planning her big day for 10 months, sending out more than 75 invitations to their closest friends and family so they could join them on the joyous occasion. But on the day of their wedding, the happy couple was met with the disappointing reality of only five guests waiting to greet them inside the decorated reception room.
“FIVE PEOPLE SHOWED UP!!!!!!! Like, are you kidding me,” Marie exclaimed. “As you see in the video, we enter the venue. And no one is there. The invite said 1pm. My mom messaged me at 1:15 that no one was there. My husband and I finally showed up at 2 o’clock, to 5 people. In a venue planned for 40.”
The couple, who have been together for nine years, had been engaged for four years, but their wedding was delayed due to the pandemic.
In her caption, she said: “It just makes me think, like, why? What did we do? Am I that bad of a person? What did my husband ever do to deserve any of this? Why couldn’t we matter enough for people to show up?”
“I still have ‘friends’ that haven’t even messaged me to congratulate me or tell me why they didn’t come,” she continued. “It truly makes me sick. I honestly can’t wrap my head around this yet.”
In a follow-up video, Marie admitted her viral post has brought her an abundant amount of new supporters online. However, she and her husband are still finding it difficult to come to terms with the actions of their friends.
She said: “I am completely overwhelmed. Between feeling the love and support from TikTok, but also having to deal with the grief of deleting a lot of people out of our lives. It has been a whirlwind of emotions.
“For the most part, we’ve done a lot of re-evaluating our lives and just spending a lot of time appreciating what we have and what we had.”
Marie didn’t say whether she had contacted the no-show guests to hear their excuses, but she did confess that a lot of her husband’s family were the ones who didn’t come or send a card in their absence.
Amid the devastation, the newlyweds still managed to have fun at their reception, dancing with Marie’s son, her mom, and her cousin with festive masks on like she’d intended.