"My best friend dumped me as maid of honour for her wedding in the most horrible way."

For as long as I can remember, my closest friend Donna* has always told me when it came to her wedding day, I would be her maid of honour. It’s one of those things you promise between friends and you plan years and years in advance.

I can safely say this is the line I’d been hearing for at least a decade. Donna and I were close friends from high school. We spent much of our 20s together and were pretty much inseparable.

When she got engaged however, I was away on a holiday overseas. Being contactable was really difficult and she didn’t manage to reach me for a good week to share the news with me. When I finally did receive the phone call, she was very unhappy with me.

She continued to tell me that it had put a dampener on the news that she wasn’t able to share it with me right away and that she couldn’t understand why I hadn’t made it a priority to try and get back to her when she had been trying to contact me.

I understood her frustrations, but at the same time I thought it was a bit unreasonable. I was in Europe without an active phone and only checked in on social media intermittently when I had access to free WiFi. I hadn’t purchased a SIM card overseas and I really wanted to enjoy my trip and not be glued to my phone.

Yet Donna still couldn’t seem to understand. After basically having a go at me she proceeded to ask me if I would like to be “part of the bridal party”. Those were her exact words. There was no mention of maid of honour or bridesmaid or anything like that.

Being one of my closest friends, I of course accepted, and even arranged for a gift to be sent to her work in a hope to smooth things over and make the entire situation less awkward. Yet I received no thanks, I wasn’t even told if it arrived.

Listen: This woman was dumped for an even worse reason. (Post continues…)

Still, I tried to let it go and proceeded to be my usual friendly self. However, I began to wonder about the promise she had made me so many years ago. Was I the maid of honour? Did she not ask because it was kind of assumed? Was she not having one at all? Had she decided to go with someone else? I was well and truly stumped.

But then when the engagement rolled around, I got my answer in a way I’d never expected. We were sitting down in a group of three, the bride-to-be, myself, and another old friend from high school. The conversation turned to the details of the wedding when Tara* began quizzing about the bridal party.

She said, “Oh and Amanda* (me) must be your maid of honour, right?” I thought it was a fair enough thing to assume. I was kind of relieved that at least I’d get my answer then and there. But when Donna responded, “Oh… no. My maid of honour is Carrie*, she’s a really close friend of mine from work” and quickly pushed the subject onto something else, I just sat there in complete and utter shock.

I couldn’t believe that I’d been dumped as the maid of honour and my friend didn’t even have the decency to point blank tell me to my face and offer me some sort of explanation. To this day I still have no idea why I was dumped. I don’t know if it was because of the whole phone call situation or something else entirely.

I don’t want to make a big deal of it by confronting her with the question, but I’m really hurt by the entire situation. Do I have to go through with this whole wedding without addressing the fact that I was unceremoniously dropped or should I confront her about it?

* Note: names have been changed.