A woman has sparked a debate after revealing that her friends didn’t find out about her wedding until they received invitations for it.
In a recent video shared to TiKTok, Sierra, @sometimesierra, explained how she didn’t talk to her friends about her relationship for quite some time in an effort to see how they would respond once they got her wedding invitation.
“Tell me you live for chaos without telling me you live for chaos, I’ll go first,” she said. “For the past two years, I have avoided talking about my relationship with my friends.”
“Just so I can see their reactions when they open their mailboxes and find an invitation..to my wedding,” she added. “They received them today.”
Since she sent the invitations, Sierra noted how her friends have been reaching out to her and even joked in her caption: “and my phone is POPPING OFF.”
As of 29 June, the video has more than 7.1m views, with many viewers congratulating Sierra and sharing how they also waited a bit before telling their peers their big news.
“I did this! Except we eloped, and posted a link to our wedding being live streamed and turned our phones off,” one TikTok user wrote.
“I announced that I was pregnant after I had given birth. (twice!) I highly recommend,” another added.
However, other people in the comments disagreed with Sierra’s strategy and noted how disappointed they would be if they found out about a friend’s wedding through an invitation.
“I would feel so sad if my close friend did this? I’d feel like they cut me out of a huge part of their life and didn’t like me,” one viewer wrote.
“Ok but if I were your friend I’d honestly feel kinda bad bc I’d feel as if I wasn’t involved in your life at all,” another wrote.
Others questioned if Sierra’s friends met her now-fiancé, one of which said: “But like… it’s important to see how your partner interacts with the people you love and vice versa.”
In a follow-up video, Sierra gave more context to the situation and noted how she has been separated from her friends due to the pandemic. She also noted that she’s been doing long distance with her fiancé, as he’s in the military, so he hasn’t had the opportunity to see her friends either.
“I have not seen most of my friends in about two years,” she explained. “Not to mention the fact that my fiancé is in the military and stationed in Korea. So he definitely hasn’t seen them in a while.”
Sierra went on to note that since she’s been dating her partner for a long time so they have a lot of the same friends. However, their friends “simply didn’t know that [she] had been betrothed to him for quite some time,” as she chose “not to tell them”.
She later posted a third video to share some of her friends reactions to her wedding invitations. The clip showed a variety of people, one of which had a shocked look on her face but still complimented the flowers on the invitation.
Another woman could be seen holding up the invitation and smiling, before noting how excited she was to attend the wedding.
Sierra also detailed how she had a wine night to celebrate her engagement and that she got a text from her “older cousin asking [her] how [she] became an adult before him”.
Speaking to The Independent, Sierra explained that she didn’t tell her friends about her wedding right away for the sake of privacy and planning, as she didn’t know how many people were going to invite to the ceremony.
“We decided not to tell our friends immediately that we were getting married (or anyone but direct family for that matter) because we knew we were going to have a very small wedding and weren’t sure who we could end up inviting,” she said. “Plus, we are pretty private people and don’t enjoy other peoples input to our pretty strange situation. However, we knew our friends would freak out (in a great way) if we just sent them invitations to our wedding instead.”
She emphasised that when her peers received their wedding invitations, they were “totally ecstatic and surprised”.
