“You give love a bad name,” Bon Jovi famously screamed in the 1986 classic of the same name. But what about people who give their entire way of life a bad name? No adult likes to be preached to. It makes us feel like we’re being treated as children who can’t make the right decisions without a grownup stepping in to intervene. Progress is great and all, but now that we’re in the digital age, these people can take their crusading to entirely new levels.
Take vegans, for example. They aren’t willing to eat, wear or touch anything animal-based, and that’s fine – to each their own, right? The problem starts when you look down on other people who choose to live their lives differently. Just because we can’t get enough corn dogs doesn’t mean we’re horrible people, okay? The truth is, most vegans realize that. Most, but not all – like this vegan bride proved, giving all vegans a bad name.
A special kind of wedding
An old joke goes like this – how can you tell if someone is vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. Well, one Australian bride took it a step too far by flipping the script on all of the people in her guest list.
Posting in a vegans-only group to achieve the one thing people on the internet clamor for the most – validation – she laughed about her “family” (the quotes are all her) were trying to guilt trip her into allowing them to attend her all-vegan wedding even though they’re meat eaters.
Breaking the news
Her wedding is supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life, the bride reasoned. And a pretty serious damper was currently being put on it by those pesky family members, who were perhaps shocked to learn that they were not invited to her wedding. Why? Well, we’ll let her tell you. “We don’t want to host murderers at our wedding,” she wrote. Don’t mince words, just tell them how you feel, bride!
Just imagine being on the other end of that conversation, and finding out you’re not invited to a family member’s wedding because of your dietary habits. Now imagine a meat-eater disinviting a vegan to their wedding because lettuce has feelings too.
Not getting the support she hoped for
Considering our bride was posting in a vegan empowerment group, more jaded readers are probably guessing at the kind of gung-ho, militaristic responses she got in support of her decision. Prepare to surprised, and also don’t be so jaded. One vegan commenter called her decision “messed up,” and added a bit of helpful advice.
“You can’t go around calling your family murderers,” they wrote, possibly unaware that this was the most obvious statement ever committed to writing. “She is out of her mind,” added another, saying they’d have happily cut her out of their life if she was their own family. A third added their voice to the chorus of boos, saying she was being “ridiculous.”
A not-really-growing trend
We know some are loud – really, obnoxiously loud – but are there really that many vegans? Surveys show that much like many other cases, just because a group is vocal doesn’t mean it has a lot of members. According to a poll, in 2018 only about five percent of Americans said they were vegetarians, down from six percent in 2001.
But what about vegans, people who not only refuse to eat meat but have also sworn off any and all animal-based products? Well, vegans are only three percent of the U.S. populace. Still, even people who still eat meat are trying to cut down on their consumption, with initiatives like “Meatless Monday” picking up steam… and using it to cook broccoli.
A missed opportunity
Considering there are friendly carnivores who are making attempts to cut down, many people commenting on the bride’s post found that her decision wasn’t only patently insane, but also defeating the purpose. Many supported her decision to have a vegan menu, of course. It would be unreasonable for someone to just ignore their belief system for someone else’s sake.
Plus, she’s the one paying for it. But excluding all of the meat eaters would probably only serve to make them dislike her personally, and vegans in general. Would she not have been better served, many commenters wondered, if she used her wedding as an occasion to show non-vegans how delicious and amazing vegan food can be?
Doubling down
Faced with criticism when she expected unadulterated admiration, our bride went back to basics. And basics in this case were “the best defense is a good offense.” Realizing she was losing ground on the internet, she promptly doubled down on her claims, and revealed some more background info in the process.
The family members she had disinvited, she said, had “consistently attacked me and my partner just for being vegan.” Now that they were planning their wedding, however, they wanted to be “all buddy buddy” again.
Educating the savages
Needless to say, when she broke the news that they weren’t invited she was attacked again, and only because she didn’t want the “weight of having people that still kill animals at my wedding” on her conscience.
Since everyone in the vegan group was one, she said she expected “understanding” (read: complete support). She’d spent the past two years “educating” these people, and since they weren’t seeing the light she simply didn’t want them there. If not compromising her ethics made her “rude” or a “b****,” well… so be it.
A stressful time
Weddings are a stressful time. Probably one of the most stressful in any young couple’s lives, even. There’s just so much to get done and not a lot of time to do it in, and you want everything to be just perfect.
It places so much stress on the happy couple, in fact, that an entirely new term has been coined to describe women having a less than successful time in coping with it all – bridezillas. These raging hormone monsters will tear through a wedding planner like Godzilla through Tokyo.
The plot thickens
The drama of a Japanese monster movie had nothing on this bride’s story, it quickly turned out. One of the comments made on her post was by one of her relatives.
“What’s the most f***** up thing you’ve ever experienced?” she opened, and you could just tell this is going to be good. “I just got un-invited to a wedding that I was meant to be a bridesmaid for because I’m not vegan,” she wrote, proving that the bride – who she grew up with – wasn’t kidding.
Nothing’s ever really gone… from the internet
It was this revelation that proved to be the tipping point for our bride, as she promptly deleted her post. Unfortunately, she was about to discover that everything you put on the internet will be there forever, even if you delete it – and is liable to take on a life of its own.
Quick-fingered internet users took screenshots of the post and quickly spread it around. It reached many news outlets in and outside of Australia, but also made its way to one of the most infamous Facebook groups around.
The depressing trend you never knew existed
If you take nothing else away from this article, take away the knowledge that wedding shaming groups are a thing that exists. Yes, groups such as “that’s it, I’m wedding shaming” have been created with the express purpose of making fun of other people’s weddings.
Mean spirited? Petty? Welcome to the internet. Posts are even helpfully divided to categories, with some choice ones being “tacky family,” “cringe,” and “f****** yikes.” The biggest and most popular one has over 38,700 members, and they all want to make fun of your wedding.
New kind of bridezilla?
So could this vegan just be a new type of bridezilla – one fuelled by ideology rather than, say, complete detachment from reality? Possibly, but anyone calling her family the M-word is probably not on a first name basis with reality to start with.
We’ve had brides who wanted guests to pony up $1,500 gifts (each!) to pay for their dream weddings and brides who wanted guests to dress according to their physical appearance. So apparently the next logical progression would be dividing guests based on what they had for lunch.
No thanks, I’m like super vegan
It’s incredibly easy to get annoyed with the bride, and wish you could somehow physically knock some sense into her through your screen, but it’s also important to remember she doesn’t represent all vegans.
Most of them are completely normal people who maintain healthy relationships with friends and family, regardless of what they eat. They want a gentler, more compassionate world and can’t really be faulted for that. But yeah, sometimes they freak out at even seeing the word “bacon” written on a sandwich bag, so your mileage may vary.
Not the cats!
Crass generalizations aside, some vegans will go to any length to impose their beliefs. And since they can’t force other people to follow veganism, their pets are the next best thing, we guess.
A growing, very worrying trend has vegans only feeding their cats vegan food. In case you’re not seeing the problem, cats are carnivorous, and prolonged vegetable-only diets can make them seriously ill. Of course, pet food manufacturers were more than happy to make a quick buck by creating vegan cat food, but seriously. Knock it off, guys.
Her mom’s blood type really was ragu
One woman in Italy may not have said her family was ending animal lives, but she certainly took it upon herself to do just that – to her family!
The woman, who’d reportedly lost her job and moved back in with her mother, just couldn’t take her mom cooking up ragù – the meat-based sauce Italians love adding to their pasta so much. What did she do? Well, leaving constructive dialogue for another life, she grabbed a knife and said, “Quit making ragù or I’ll stab you in the stomach.”