At most weddings I have attended, the parents (and even step-parents) of the bride and groom were considered the hosts, not guests. I certainly don’t consider myself a guest at a party I am substantially paying for. I didn’t expect him to announce the details to his co-workers, but I was not happy that he withheld the details from his mother and me.
Shodan - Right. I am totally OK with the idea of celebrating separate from the paperwork. I have done it. His father had even planned to have a big party in December in our town to celebrate with all of the relatives who didn’t make the trip. I don’t know the current status of those plans.
My sister did a similar thing, for immigration reasons. They got married as soon as they returned to the States in a small civil ceremony with the immediate family there except for my BIL’s parents. Then 6 months later they had a big wedding with all the guests and pretty much no one but us knew they’d been married for 6 months.
I was fine with it then, and I’m fine with it now.
Good points. In fact, some religions have pretty complex rules as to when and if a secular courthouse wedding is recognized. For example, two Roman Catholics who get married before a judge at town hall generally are considered married with respect to governmental purposes, but the Catholic Church does not recognize that as a legitimate marriage. In the eyes of the church, they are still unmarried, so a subsequent church wedding with the full formalities and ceremonies is the “real” marriage.
“Prod, sorry to say it, but Dad died last night. His will says you have to pick up your share of the insurance benefits from the lawyer’s office within 48 hours or it goes to the ASPCA. I’d get my ass on a plane, right now…”
So you feel like you were made a fool of? At that point in the conversation I would probably tell my parents, “Oh, ha ha, sorry, we already signed the paperwork, so your advice doesn’t really hold”, except in the instance of feeling like I couldn’t trust them to not jump down my throat with more comments about how I should’ve done this that or the other thing the way they wanted me to. It sounds like your relationship with him is simply strained from both directions so that nobody can communicate plainly without bad feelings cropping up. If you asked him why it’s like this and got him to tell you a straight answer, he’d probably say, “I feel like you’re judging me all the time by your values when that’s not the way I live my life.”
More and more these days western marriage is seen as strictly between the two people getting married: everyone else’s opinions be damned. For instance, asking the father for a blessing is just a formality and most would go ahead even if the father refused. I can see how that would lead to not seeing any big reason to tell anybody when they actually signed paperwork. They weren’t going to not get married just because someone else thought it was a bad decision. Hell, maybe he didn’t even feel really married until he had the ceremony. Maybe the paper didn’t mean anything to him but a money break, and the ceremony meant it was real for him.
And according to my mother, the Grand High Arbiter of Wedding Ettiquette, holding the reception (which is a party to celebrate the occasion of a wedding) up to a year, or the birth of their first child, after the wedding is perfectly OK. But lying to your family is rather different than wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
Macca - If he had told us in October that they were married we would have been delighted. I don’t feel I have been made a fool of; I resent him having put his mother through a lot of emotional turmoil without giving her the full picture.
Yes, I think this was in poor taste. I had a friend who lied to me in order to protect some lies he made to his girlfriend. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave: When first we practise to deceive!” and all that.
I’d be unhappy.
If he had just been open with the family. There is no big deal about having a ceremony after the legal paperwork. But lying to family in order to straight arm them into coming, uncool.
A wedding is simply one day in your life. You have to live with (read associate with) your family for the rest of your life. Why deceive people simply so that your pictures have more people in them? It shows a level of contempt for their circumstances and selfishness on yours.
This is one of those things where, if he felt he couldn’t tell them while it was happening (and it seems like his family members WOULD have dragged their heels about participating), then maybe he should have considered never telling anyone, ever.
My aunt and uncle got married by the justice of the peace secretly, and then had their big church wedding months later. The motivator was so that he would have married status when it came to the Vietnam draft. They didn’t tell anyone EVER, in part because the church ceremony was the only one that “counted” to her family, and also that people feel very strongly about the draft. This is something that family members only learned about in recent years.
There are many things in life where if people would be upset while it is happening, they will also be upset to find out about it after the fact, and then you can even add on the resentment at being (at worst) lied to or (at best) being kept in the dark.
I’m assuming the emotional turmoil is your wife calling up relatives repeatedly and convincing them to go, right? You’ve said that you two would’ve gone and paid regardless, but are you saying that she wouldn’t have tried to get anyone else to go if you knew ahead of time about the paperwork?
Because if she would’ve done the same thing regardless of knowing when the paperwork was signed, I’m not sure how it’s his fault.
I’m pretty sure that Prodigal’s brothers and father would not have gone had they known the truth, because I think they would have argued strongly for a celebration closer to where most of the invitees live, and I don’t think my wife would have expended nearly the effort she did had she known the truth but the others didn’t.
I think that I place a very high value on factual and emotional honesty in relationships, and you are focused on outcomes. I feel that if someone is going to call their mother and ask for emotional support and advice because they are moving out of their girlfriend’s apartment, when what they are doing is moving out of their wife’s apartment, they are engaging in serious dishonesty and abusing the relationship. YMMV, mine won’t.
Aside from the moral dilemma, my advice to Prodigal: if you’re keeping a huge secret from a large group of people, try not to get drunk around them. Just sayin’.
It’s not the “fake” wedding that is annoying – I’ve known a number of people who had a registry office or otherwise tiny legal wedding, who opted to have a large ceremony when finances and life allowed. (Many of these were in the military at the time and one was going to be deployed overseas, or had other reasons to marry quickly.)
It’s the lack of honesty that’s a problem. I’d have a serious come-to-Jeebus talk with the Prodigal about this, because that kind of habit doesn’t bode well for the marriage.
It was not a Turkish wedding. Prodigal’s bride is a kick-ass cook and dessert maker, but she served us a store-bought dessert when my wife and I had dinner at their apartment a few days before the wedding. She has made baklava when she visited our house.
All pretty much is forgiven. I still feel a little anger at times, but that is diminishing. I was curious to see what others thought of the situation. The responses have been interesting.
Yeah, I’m with you, Crotalus. Your stepson should have let his mother decide how much effort she was willing to expend to persuade the rest of the family to get there, by letting her know exactly what his marriage situation actually was.
First off, your issue is not the wedding. It’s with PS. You are clearly resentful of him-- of having bailed him out, of his lifestyle, of his moving, and of his perceived lack of respect for your values. Some of this sounds like typical step-parent tension; some of it is just a personality clash. In either case, he’s family, you can’t turn back the clock and take away the cash you’ve given him, and he’s not going to suddenly see the light and drag his Turkish wife back to Podunk to settle into a life as an insurance salesman (or whatever you think would have been smarter).
Your role here is to be the bigger man, and either accept him how he is, or resolve grit your teeth and bear it for the sake of family cohesion. It’s not helpful to walk around with a big chip on your shoulder for something that is never going to be resolved. You don’t like the kid. He doesn’t seem to have a great relationship with you. That’s fine, you are all adults, but you have to find a way to live with it without being pissed off all the time. You aren’t going to win this fight, so how are you going to keep the family functional?
As for the wedding: Yes, he should have told you about filing the legal paperwork. But this is a sin of degrees- I think relatively few couples actually go to the courthouse on the same day they have the big to-do, either out of pure logistics or out of practical benefits (in my case, it was health insurance) that come from getting legally married sooner rather than later. A wedding is a public solemnization and celebration of a union, not a magic transformation contingent on a particular piece of paper being sent to the courthouse. It’s perfectly valid, and extremely normal, to celebrate your wedding before or after the change in the legal status, and these weddings are not “shams” or “fakes” (and it reflects poorly on you for using such incendiary and unfair language—you are smearing a lot of people’s weddings here).
Anyway, either be the bigger man and swallow your resentment, or resolve to stay out of this fight and let your wife manage family relationships with PS.
(Eta, just read your last comment. Seems that you’ve gained some perspective, so I could have probably toned down my reply.)
Sorry, it is 100% wrong that this is extremely normal, perfectly valid or done by all but “relatively few” couples. What do you think an “officiant” is for at a wedding?
If someone gets married in secret, lies about being married to everyone under the sun (to their face) until their sham re-enactment, so that it doesn’t interfere with receiving lots of attention and gifts – that is a huge breach of etiquette and reveals some nasty truths about their character.
There’s a distinct difference between “having the legal technicalities and details attended to on a date different than the ceremony/celebration” and “not telling your mother, father and brothers that you’re already married because you want them to fly across the country on their own dime to come to the ceremony/celebration for almost an entire year”. And expecting them to pay for the “wedding” without telling them that the actual marriage happened almost a year ago on top of that.
The former happens all the time - for a huge variety of reasons - and nobody gets particularly bothered by it. Really, it doesn’t much matter whether the actual legal technicalities happen on the same calendar date as the ceremony/celebration - nobody really cares about that kind of thing outside the actual people getting married. If pressed, I’m guessing that most people, if asked, mentally consider the ceremony/celebration the WEDDING, not the conducting of legal technicalities (assuming it happens at a different time).
The latter is - at the very best, most generous view of Prodigal’s behavior - phenomenally rude and inconsiderate. Deliberately hiding major life events from your parents and siblings is . . . unacceptable if you speak with them at all. If you’re sufficiently estranged that you don’t communicate with them, not telling them you’ve married is fine. If you’re soliciting their assistance in planning the wedding, it is not fine. If you have to get married hurriedly (for whatever reason - and there are some perfectly fine reasons for it) and intend to have the celebration later, then just use your freaking words!
**even sven **- I have the same perspective I have had all along. You are reading things that have not been written. I never wanted or expected him to stay in Podunk or work any particular career, I just expected him to have more respect for his brother and father who have stayed and who are firefighters. The terrible decisions referred to in the OP involved things like moving to New York with a large dog, no job, and very little money, or leaving a salaried job with benefits in his exact chosen field to free-lance. Nothing to do with what he wants to do, all about prudence.
I didn’t smear anyone’s wedding. I’m talking about this situation, not the ones that you and others try to claim as equivalent. He represented to me and his mother and others that we were witnessing the beginning of their married lives as well as celebrating their marriage. The first part of that was not true and a pretty active lie.
I see Aangelica and LC Strawhouse have addressed this better than me.
