Woman Says Her Friends’ Weddings Could Cost Her $20,000 — and She’s Starting To Resent the Whole Thing

A woman says she loves her friends and wants to celebrate them, but she is starting to feel buried by the cost of being a wedding guest after getting invited to six weddings and their bachelorette trips in the same year.

The woman shared the situation in a Reddit post, explaining that she is single, not planning a wedding of her own anytime soon and trying to build toward normal adult goals like buying a house, moving into a better rental and choosing her own vacations. Instead, she said her money is being swallowed up by other people’s wedding plans before the events have even started. The original Reddit post is here.

According to her post, the issue is not one wedding. It is the pileup. She said she has been invited to six weddings, plus their bachelorettes, all in one year. None of the weddings or pre-wedding events are local to where she lives. Instead, the plans include destinations such as a European island, a tropical island, a West Coast wine town, a western ski town, an expensive city in Mexico, a southern city, two rural Midwest towns and an expensive East Coast city.

That would already be a lot, but the details made it worse.

She said many of the weddings are formal or black tie. The hotel blocks alone run around $400, $500 or even $700 a night. On top of that, the destinations are not easy places to reach, meaning she expects to spend heavily on flights, ground transportation, food, events, dresses and all the smaller expenses that come with being part of the wedding circuit.

By her estimate, the full year could cost her somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000. She said each wedding could easily require at least $2,000 just for the basics before she even factors in extras. She described herself as making a solid middle-class salary, but said the expectations are still pushing her to the edge financially.

What bothered her most was the feeling that her friends’ milestones are treated like community obligations, while her own goals are not. She said she may never have a wedding, and the big life event she is working toward is buying a house. But she cannot imagine her friends spending thousands of dollars on her housewarming or helping with her mortgage the way she is expected to spend thousands on their weddings.

That feeling seemed to be the thing she was struggling to say out loud. She was not saying she disliked her friends. She said she loves the people they are marrying and wants to show up well for them. But she also admitted she was starting to feel resentful over how expensive wedding culture has become and how normal it now feels for guests to be expected to spend huge amounts of money on someone else’s event.

Commenters did not hold back.

A lot of people told her she was not overreacting and that six destination weddings in one year was an unreasonable amount of pressure. Several said she needed to stop treating every invite like an obligation and start deciding based on her actual budget. One commenter pointed out that destination weddings naturally mean some guests will not be able to attend, and that couples should expect that.

Others told her to choose one or two weddings that mattered most and decline the rest. Some said she should skip the bachelorette trips entirely. A few commenters were especially blunt, saying her down payment, savings and future mattered more than keeping up with every formal event, hotel block and bridal itinerary.

There was also a lot of talk about what a destination wedding really means. One commenter said anyone planning one has to understand that guests may not be able to afford the travel, accommodations and time off work. Another said if a couple chooses a faraway or expensive wedding, they are also choosing the risk that people they care about will have to say no.

Some commenters pushed back on the idea that the couples were fully responsible for her finances. Their point was that people are allowed to plan the weddings they want, but guests are also allowed to decide those plans do not work for them. That seemed to be the middle ground in the thread: the weddings may be beautiful and meaningful, but an invitation is not a bill someone else gets to hand you.

The woman’s post hit a nerve because it was not only about weddings. It was about the quiet pressure to spend money you do not really want to spend because saying no feels like a friendship test. It was about being happy for people while also wondering why their celebration suddenly gets to outrank your savings, your vacation time and your own future.

By the end of the thread, most people had the same advice: she needed to stop trying to attend everything. Send a gift, write a kind note, pick the events she truly can afford and let the rest go. Because six destination weddings in one year may sound exciting on paper, but for one guest trying to build a life of her own, it was starting to feel less like celebration and more like financial whiplash.