I was married a few years ago. It didn't last very long. It had been a long relationship before we were married, but my ex became a VERY different person once the vows were exchanged, in a very violent and controlling way. The divorce was really sudden and shocked all of our friends and family, and myself.
Like I said, years ago, so I'm in a much better place now and in a great relationship, however; now I'm a bridesmaid in a friend's wedding and have been very excitedly helping her look up info and plan things, because I love event planning, and am realizing I made a lot of glaring errors. I was following the advice of certain other wedding sites, and now that I've come across the Knot boards and other sites in my recent research for my friend I've realized I did a lot wrong in etiquette ways, and I feel really embarrassed and bad about it now.
When I got married I was a little more than a year out of college and the first of my friends to get married. My wedding was the first wedding I ever went to, and I really wasn’t the kind of had dreamed of what my wedding would be like before. I definitely got in over my head during planning and just made some faux pas out of ignorance. Definitely more a case of, stuff that never would have bothered me I didn't even consider could be seen as rude or improper to other people who knew better. (We had a cash registry, for example. I didn't know how gross it was, someone suggested it when I had asked a question about what to put on a real registry, since we were renting at the time and didn’t have the space for a lot of stuff/already had a lot of the stuff we NEEDED and felt weird asking for stuff we didn’t actually need/didn't want to not register and end up with a bunch of stuff we already had. Someone said to do a honeymoon registry since it was “more polite than asking for cash outright”and I believed them and created one.)
So my question is, what do I do at this point, or is just a try to forget about it and move on sort of thing? I feel terrible that I slighted my friends and part of me kind of wants to acknowledge to them that I was just ignorant and not trying to be rude and apologize, but part of me thinks that it’s been so long and a lot of them probably never even noticed/cared about some of that stuff, and the most offended are my ex’s family who hate me anyway and I’m really not about to reach out to them. It does bother me that they all just think I'm this terribly rude and ungrateful person on top of all the extra things they think about me because of my ex's gross lying in an attempt to hide the fact that his abuse is what ended our marriage and not anything I actually did. But any contact to any of them would be more harm than good for sure. But to my friends, I'm not sure what I do about it now or if it's best to just not do anything.
(as an aside, the wedding itself was really great! we had good food, no money dances or any of those kind of extra money-grabby things, we got a lot of great comments from guests about how much fun they had and how comfortable they felt so at least that was good).