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A wedding guest has been defended online after she accidentally mistook someone wearing white for the bride.

In a recent post shared to the popular “Am I The A**hole?” subreddit, one woman asked if she was in the wrong for making the mistake at the wedding, noting that the mixup had made the bride cry. She explained that the incident happened while she was attending her boyfriend’s distant cousin’s wedding.

She expressed that she’d “never met the bride” before the wedding, since her boyfriend only sees these relatives once or twice a year. The woman noted that they’d been in a relationship for three years, and her boyfriend thought it was a good time for her to meet his relatives.

“My boyfriend told me he wanted to introduce them to me before the actual ceremony started so we were going to meet them, but my boyfriend got a call so he told me to wait a moment and got a little far so he wouldn’t have been interrupted,” she wrote.

The woman explained that two minutes after her boyfriend walked away, that was when she mistook another woman for the bride. “I saw a woman with a beautiful wedding dress. I said hello and then I congratulated her for the wedding and this is when things went wrong,” she continued. “The woman I was talking to wasn’t the bride.”

According to the wedding guest, the bride overheard what she said, since she was in a room nearby, but the Reddit poster didn’t notice her. The bride “got upset and started crying” and when the woman spoke to her boyfriend about the situation, “he called the bridesmaid and the mom” of the bride to help “calm” her down.

While her friends and family had defended her, the woman explained that other people at the wedding weren’t as easy to forgive her for the mistake. “My boyfriend and his family reassured me saying it wasn’t my fault but the bride, her mom and the groom are upset with me and are saying it’s all my fault,” she wrote. “I never saw her face, so when I saw a woman in a wedding dress, I immediately thought she was the bride.”

In a follow-up comment to the post, she added that it was the groom’s sister who wore a white dress during the wedding, which is why the Reddit user thought she was the bride.

The Reddit post has quickly gone viral with more than 6,300 upvotes as of 19 February. In the comments, many people came to the woman’s defence, claiming that wedding guests shouldn’t wear outfits that resemble the bride’s look.

“If anything, the woman in the wedding-looking dress is to blame,” one wrote. “There must be some kind of agreed dress code to avoid these types of confusion, right? I know it doesn’t have to be this everywhere or in every culture, but where the custom is for the bride to wear white, no other women should wear white to her wedding.”

“In western society, you do NOT wear a dress that resembles a wedding dress, you do NOT even wear white, and hell - not even ivory, to a wedding if you are not the bride. It’s rude as hell,” another agreed.

Many people went on to question why the bride got annoyed at the Reddit poster for making the mistake, rather than getting upset at the guest who wore a white outfit.

“I don’t understand why they are mad at you. They should be upset at the lady who wore a wedding dress to someone else’s wedding. What was going on with that?” one wrote.

“I wonder if she really is upset with you. It seems so weird that she would be angry at a person who she’s never met before being confused because someone else decided to wear white on her wedding,” another added. “Chances are that a) she was actually mad at the groom’s sister for wearing white and trying to hijack attention but she displaced her anger to you as a less threatening target, b) she was simply overwhelmed and very emotional on the big day and it just exploded at that moment.”

According to Diane Gottsman - a national etiquette expert and founder of The Protocol School of Texas, who previously spoke to The Independent - the rule still applies for most weddings. She noted that “white is still reserved for the bride” and that guests “should select another colour” when choosing an outfit. Gottsman also stated that the no-white rule should be followed by guests of all genders.

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