My Sil Poured Red Wine All Over My Wedding Dress

A Wedding Ruined by Tradition

My sister-in-law poured red wine all over my wedding dress because she thought I shouldn’t wear white since I’d lived with her brother before marriage and white was for pure brides only. She walked up to me during the father-daughter dance holding a full glass of merlot and threw it directly at the bodice of my $8,000 dress while announcing that now my dress matched my morals.

She announced: “now my dress matched my morals”

She said: “white was sacred and I’d defiled it by pretending to be something I wasn’t when everyone knew Jason and I had been living together for 3 years”

She actually stood there smiling as red wine dripped down my grandmother’s vintage lace that had been worn by four generations of women in my family. Megan told the shocked guests that someone had to stand up for traditional values and she was doing them all a favor by showing what happened to women who wore white without earning it.

She said: “I’d corrupted her innocent brother by seducing him into living in sin and now I was corrupting the sanctity of marriage by wearing virginal white”

She’d been planning this for months apparently, telling her friends she was going to teach me a lesson about respecting wedding traditions and knowing my place as a fallen woman. She actually brought three bottles of the specific red wine that stained the worst and had been practicing her throw to make sure she’d hit the dress perfectly.

Jason tried to calm everyone down, but Megan said: “he was blinded by lust and didn’t understand that I’d trapped him into marriage by already acting like a wife without the commitment”

She said: “real brides waited until marriage to live with their husbands and I was just playing dress up in a color I didn’t deserve”

The dress was completely ruined and I had to finish my wedding reception in my reception dress while everyone stared and whispered about what had happened. Megan spent the rest of the reception telling anyone who’d listened that she’d done the right thing and someday everyone would thank her for having the courage to call out my hypocrisy.

That’s when I decided Megan needed to learn about consequences for judging other people’s choices. I started with her all-white apartment that she was obsessively proud of and posted about constantly on her home decorating blog.

Everything in her place was pristine white, from the furniture to the walls to the dishes, because she said white represented her pure lifestyle and clean conscience. During a family dinner at her apartment, I accidentally spilled turmeric sauce on her white couch while reaching for bread.

The yellow stain spread across the expensive fabric and wouldn’t come out no matter how much she scrubbed. I apologized profusely but mentioned that maybe white wasn’t practical for someone who entertained so much and color would hide life’s little accidents better.

Next came the white car that she’d special ordered and treated like a temple of cleanliness. I volunteered to help with groceries and accidentally left a basket of berries on her leather seat during a hot day.

The berries burst and leaked purple juice onto the white leather, creating permanent stains that she couldn’t remove. When she discovered it, I innocently suggested that white cars were impractical and maybe she should have chosen a color that could handle real world use.

The real justice came with Megan’s own wedding planning when she got engaged to Paul six months later. She’d been planning her perfect white wedding since childhood and ordered a $12,000 pure white dress with white shoes, white veil, and white jewelry to match.

She bragged constantly about how she’d earned the right to wear white because she’d saved herself for marriage, unlike some people. At her bridal shower, I gave her a special gift of expensive white lingerie for her wedding night, but I’d washed it with a single red sock first.

When she opened it in front of everyone, the lingerie was stained pink and ruined. I gasped and said the store must have made a mistake, but everyone saw the symbolism of her white things being tainted.

During her bachelorette party, I arranged for the bartender to only serve red wine and made sure Megan’s white outfit got splashed repeatedly by accident. Her white pants, white top, and white shoes all ended up stained with wine by the end of the night.

I kept apologizing and saying: “White was just so hard to keep clean when you were actually living life instead of just posing for pictures.”

The masterpiece was at her wedding when I wore the exact same shade of white as her bridesmaids but in a slightly different style. When people asked why I was in white at someone else’s wedding, I loudly explained that Megan had taught me that clothing colors were just fabric and didn’t mean anything about someone’s character or choices.

I said: “she’d shown me at my wedding that judging people by their outfit choices was more important than celebrating love”

So I was honoring her values by wearing whatever I wanted. Throughout her reception, I made sure to be in every photo wearing my white dress that was almost identical to her bridesmaids, ruining her color scheme and aesthetic.