As all parents of young children can attest, nights away from them are sacred – and often few and far between. If you've gone to the trouble of arranging childcare, which you may well be forking out hundreds of pounds for, so that you can let your hair down and have fun then there is a lot riding on the night.
Weddings are a classic case in point. They are expensive and logistically difficult to attend at the best of times, but for a lot of parents they are also a rare and treasured excuse to leave their children behind, and require outsourcing the responsibility of parenting to someone else.
Deep in the trenches of the 'Am I The Asshole' Reddit thread, where you can often find the unfiltered debates people are reluctant to share on mainstream social media, one parent proposes a dilemma on this subject.
She explains that she recently went to a college friend's wedding with her husband and they left their children with her parents. 'My husband and I don't have a ton of time to ourselves away from the kids,' she wrote, 'so we were excited to let loose.'
The invitation said the wedding would go on until 11am and that there would be an afterparty with the bride and groom at another venue. When the happy occasion rolled around, the guests were bemused to discover it was a 'dry wedding' as the groom was two years sober.
'When we found out there was no alcohol, we told people we were going to some bars after and not going to the after party,' the guest admitted. 'We left the wedding at 9.30pm because we were itching to go out and the wedding was boring.'
Unfortunately, the majority of their 'college crew' followed suit. Apparently, most of the bride's friends also ditched the after party and so the optics were 'lopsided' in favour of the groom.
The bride allegedly responded to her friends' decision to bail early by calling them 'assholes'. 'She said she didn't feel supported and felt like we were spiting her husband for his sobriety,' the user continued, before admitting that she told the bride 'she was reading too much into it'.
'We just wanted to go out,' she concluded.
Everyone can relate to that feeling of disappointment when they're looking for a big night out and their friends aren't, regardless of whether they have a babysitter at home or not, but the crux of this issue is that it wasn't just a night out, it was someone's wedding.
Weddings are costly events that take years to plan. While the statistics suggest otherwise, the idea is that you only have one in your lifetime. It's likely that the bride and groom were excited to host their friends all day – and at the after party too. It's also likely that their decision to have a 'dry wedding' was not an easy one, but one made to make the newly sober groom feel as comfortable as possible. By arranging an after party in the first place, it sounds like the couple still wanted to have fun with their guests regardless of the fact no one was drinking.
The fact their friends ditched their wedding to go and get drunk is a clear indication that they do not fully understand or respect how difficult sobriety is. It also suggests that their idea of fun is tightly woven with alcohol and feeling drunk.
Saying that, all friendships and dynamics are different, and we don't know how close the writer is to the friends who got married or how frequently they normally see each other. It is not necessarily their fault that so many of the other guests followed them in search of a better time either, especially if the wedding was widely considered 'boring'.
On paper, though, leaving someone's wedding early to go to a bar certainly qualifies as asshole behaviour, but who are we to judge...
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across pop culture, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things TV for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow shows with equal respect).