A bride asked a guest to leave her wedding when he showed up dressed in his decorated Marine uniform and garnered too much attention for her liking.
The bride wrote a post on a Reddit forum last week wanting to know if that community thought she was wrong for asking the Marine, a son of the groom’s family friends, to leave.
“I have nothing against anyone in the military, but this was a black-tie-optional wedding and frankly it felt very out of place and it seemed like he was just trying to show off. My wedding had over 300 guests and nobody else felt the need to wear something to make them stand out,” she wrote.
She wrote that other than waltzing around in his dress blues, he acted like a perfect gentleman “as one might expect from a member of the armed forces.”
The bride said he was capturing the attention of guests and “a few excited teenage girls at my wedding … wanted to take a picture with him, to which he graciously agreed.”
Bride kicks Marine out of wedding for wearing his dress blues. https://t.co/zRLzDB7DTU pic.twitter.com/sSNhyNecA1
— Navy Times (@NavyTimes) March 28, 2019
Before the Marine was ejected, several guests did come up to him and thank him for his service. However, the bride thought it was just too much.
She said, “Frankly it just felt like the only reason he wore that was to be in the spotlight and make it about him, which I don’t think you are supposed to do at someone else’s wedding.”
“If he wants to wear that to his own wedding then fine, but the whole point of having a dress code at a wedding is so that no one guest will stand out too much. I felt that he should have known this, since the whole point of uniforms in the military is so that you don’t stand out from everyone else,” she added.
The unidentified bride concluded her post by saying she did feel bad for asking the Marine to leave the wedding, “but it just didn’t feel right for him to be there like that.”
She received a lot of feedback on Reddit, including some from other members of the military.
Some of the comments included, “Army here. Look, I wouldn’t want to wear my ASUs (much less my mess dress) to someone’s wedding. Even if they asked me. But that’s because my ASUs feel significantly less formal and awesome than the Marines formal uniform. Theirs actually looks classy and black tie. If I had that as an option, I might be like ‘I should definitely wear this to this fancy wedding.’”
“Wearing formal military wear at formal civilian events is allowed per regulations (Army is AR 670-1, no clue for Marines), but you have to be a special kind of a****** to wear it to a non-military wedding without specific permission of the couple. The reason for this is the same as wearing white to a wedding — this puts you in competition with the bride. He should have dressed in civilian wear, or at very least, checked with the couple getting married,” someone else in the military wrote.
Another comment defending the Marine was harsh, telling the bride, “Over 300 people. Guy is in military formal wear and was very well-mannered. No question you’re an A. An over-dramatic, self-centered A.”
