How TikTok Turned Wedding Shame Into a Content Gold Mine 

When newly engaged teacher Kayla C. began making content about her upcoming wedding, she posted a TikTok compiling some of the big ticket items on her registry, jokingly titling it, “Things off our registry that I’ll actually be devastated if we don’t receive.” These included a $160 silverware set, a $349 cordless Dyson vacuum, and a $349 KitchenAid mixer. So she was shocked when popular commentary creator Cali — who has over 400,000 followers over two accounts — screen-recorded her video and began mocking her choices as extravagant and far too expensive. After that post went up, Kayla posted that she was getting dozens of death threats. 

The “Wedding Registry Drama,” as it’s being referred to on TikTok, has had a somewhat positive outcome: After the majority of people sided with Kayla, Cali removed the video and Kayla has begun using the newfound attention to fulfill teachers’ classroom wishlists. But it’s part of an ongoing pattern — one that often makes upcoming nuptials of otherwise anonymous people some of the biggest spectacles on the app.

In January, a TikToker named Lauren went private after she posted a video washing off her bridal makeup before the ceremony even started, because of how much she disliked the job her makeup artist had done. People dubbed her a mean girl and her makeup artist, Kandra Jones, got a massive influx of followers. Then there’s 19-year-old Austyn Mae, who posted a video in December 2024 saying she hated her reception photos — only to have her photographer post a comeback with her entire wedding photo gallery. The reaction against Mae was so swift that the creator has disabled people’s ability to comment on her wedding TikToks. And who can forget the September 2024 story of The Key Look? Makeup artist Keziah Jones posted a TikTok series about being “kicked out” of a wedding where she was paid to do makeup — only to have multiple bridesmaids, guests, and other vendors post that she had cried through most of the bridal makeup and then crashed the rest of the celebration uninvited. Jones posted and deleted multiple apology videos, all of which began new cycles of drama. 

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While saying “I do” is a cultural sign of love and commitment, it also takes a Whole. Lot. Of. Cash. Weddings are the backbone of a $72 billion industry globally, according to Fast Company. An annual survey from The Knot found that the average price of a wedding in the U.S. was $33,000 in 2024, a number that can grow or shrink significantly based on location, vendors, and number of guests. Weddings are also a community event, celebrations that involve bringing people together. There are a plethora of varying beliefs, etiquettes, and ideas about the proper way to host, attend, and even talk about weddings. And as TikTok has become a central meeting ground of commerce and advertisement, it makes sense that people who are trying to get married and people who make their living from weddings all end up intermingling there. But what’s interesting about TikTok’s relationship to weddings is how the digital space has transformed from one of consumption (buy these flowers, have this trend) to one fixated on

shame. 

Wedding shame is a discourse machine on TikTok, one that constantly generates new stories, new opinions, and new drama. There are creators who perform viral AITA marriage stories from Reddit, accounts that reenact experiences with their worst clients, and thousands of brides, vendors, and families in between making wedding-related TikToks asking people for their opinion. Everyone loves to talk about the Big Day. But what’s unique about this content gold mine is how critiques of an event, or registry, or even FAQ wedding page are almost always taken as direct insight into the person who posted it. 

In all the above cases of viral wedding drama, the stories eventually devolved into picking sides based on assumptions behind their choices. Kayla was shamed for putting a Kitchen Aid on her registry because people thought it meant she was bleeding her guests dry. Cali was shamed for mocking Kayla’s list in the first place because it meant she thought teachers didn’t deserve nice things. Austyn was shamed for cherry picking photos she didn’t like, while Jones prompted thousands of reactions shaming the makeup artist for overstepping her bounds and missing social cues. Who you hire, what you say, and how you act around weddings doesn’t just say what tax bracket you’re in. On TikTok, it’s become tantamount to telling people who you are and what morals you hold. And if you made the wrong choices, or the wrong TikTok, what comes next isn’t pleasant. 

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Jess Maddox, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and a digital culture expert, tells Rolling Stone that shame is a complicated part of how many viral events online happen and spread. But she notes that weddings in particular can become fixtures for online drama because of how normal it already is to have strong opinions about the event.

“We have lost the plot a little bit in terms of the role shame can play online. The big [thing] people say about weddings is that weddings are for everyone else,” she says. “Weddings can become really easy collective pile-ons because of how we already think about them offline. The fact that consumerism has moral balances attached to it, and the fact social media is just performances can create a really volatile situation where people are making snap moral judgments when they don’t know the whole story.” 

TikTok’s algorithm can’t be discounted in this shame cycle. The app’s proprietary technology uses data about how long a person is scrolling, what they like, share, save, comment on, and stop to watch to curate content on their for-you-pages. So if you’re planning a wedding, or even trying to figure out what to wear when you attend one, chances are a fair amount of content related to weddings will pop up on your feed. But while Maddox says that wedding shame will absolutely continue to be big on TikTok, it doesn’t have to end with people being chased off the app. 

“We let perfect be the enemy of good. So even when we try for this kind of class solidarity, like siding with wedding vendors over their mistreatment, I don’t think we actually take it to a place where it becomes meaningful change,” Maddox says. “It gets stuck in the limited spaces of social media to either call out or shame, and then go back to what we were talking about at the beginning. What would these viral discourses look like if we educated instead of shamed?”