A mom has told how she was left feeling “hideous” after a bride she considered a friend airbrushed her out of her wedding photos.
The experience left Julie Warren so devastated, she hasn’t had her picture taken for 10 years.
The 52-year-old mom revealed the bride’s treatment of her in the run-up to the wedding and on the big day made Warren feel like a “non-person” and “so hideous, I cannot be in a photograph.”
The bride was a colleague at the school where Warren worked and they often worked as a pair.
Warren thought they got on well, but when her colleague was planning her wedding, Warren was left feeling unwanted.
She told the Mirror Online: “She ordered really fancy handmade invites, in the form of a scroll with dried roses, and they were given out personally. I did not get one.
“Weeks passed and I wondered where mine was. It seemed obvious that I was not invited. Others were asking where mine was.
“I tried to act normal but it was hurting me a lot, then I found the shop bought one in the pigeonhole.”
As the dress code was black tie, Warren, who is a size 22, splurged on a long black velvet dress, strappy shoes and a pashmina, and got her hair done.
But when she got to the wedding, she found all her colleagues were at one table, and she had been put at a separate table with the bride’s mother’s elderly neighbors.
She said: “The table we were put on had the seats missing, so staff went to get two and you could see the table was not meant for that many.
“As for us there was no room at all, plus we had no name tag on the table. I felt tears welling up, and to be honest I felt like a non-person.”
But things went from bad to worse when the photo-taking began.
She was not asked to join the bride’s friends for pictures, but when she wandered out, the photographer included her.
The bride didn’t speak to Warren and her husband all night and only spoke to her colleagues at the main table.
The couple left after three hours.
She said: “Someone’s best day of their life was one of the worst for me.”
Warren’s colleagues all expressed surprise that the couple had not been seated with them. And then came the wedding album.
She began to hear that her colleagues had seen the pictures, and how lovely they were, but the bride kept making excuses.
Warren said: “When I asked, I got various excuses: ‘I left it at home,’ her mother had it, then her nan, then it was in the car her husband was using, and others — although I was being told others had seen it!”
When Warren stumbled across it in the staff room, however, she was in for a shock.
She said: “I was not in the main family and friends one and not in the ones that I posed in. There was a gap in the line-up.
“This was the same for the others, I had been airbrushed out, my husband was in them, though, looking handsome in a tuxedo, so he appeared to be single.”
“I headed for the [bathroom], locked myself in and cried. It was the end of the school day, so I went out by the back way and out of the school gate and kept the tears in until I got home as I did not want my students to see me.
“I was thinking, ‘I must be worse than I think I am to be airbrushed out.'”
The experience left her feeling depressed and now she is begging image-conscious brides to be aware of the feelings of others.
She said: “People need to stop and think how their behavior affects others. Weddings can bring out the worse in some people and dropping people like me because of weight shows the shallowness of people.
“A wedding is supposed to be a ceremony of love to share with your family and friends. I hope that any bride-to-be thinks of others they invite, and not all about their image and what they want.”