Buy her a fully cancelable/transferrable plane ticket (not someplace expensive, just AWAY) in her name.
Offer it to her before the wedding.
She can either use it as a getaway or cash it in for a wedding present, her choice.
I wish someone would have done it for me before my first wedding, I would have taken it in a second. Instead, I went with guilt and was seperated five months later.
Good luck to you, and her. You’re a good friend.
I have a couple of things for your friend to consider.
Everything that the potential in-laws do that she doesn’t like will probably be done to her eventually by her husband. Whether you believe behavior is learned or inherited, the source of most of his behavior is the people she is having problems with. Running away is not going to help. She will have to learn to deal with the crap they are giving her or get out, because she will be dealing with it as long as she is with him. Does she think she can keep him away from them forever?
What happens if she has kids with this guy? Does she want her children to deal with these people? If they treat her and the groom badly (and I’m sure they treat him badly), they aren’t going to treat the children any better. If she wouldn’t want her children to have anything to do with these people, she’s going to have a very hard time preventing it if they are the child’s grandparents.
I may be over-reacting to the situation a little bit, since I have a very bad set of (now ex) in-laws. These were things I thought about near the end of my marriage as I watched my soon-to-be ex play the victim games his mother did, and found out that his father called my 4 year old ex-niece a whore. Had I known these things when I was first dating the guy, I would have not gone on another date with him.
One thing I learned the hard way: never push a friend to make the relationship decision YOU think is right. If you trash this relationship, and she decides it really is what she wants, your friendship will never be the same.
Tell her you care about her, that you are concerned for her, and that you will support her in whatever decision she makes. Give her the opportunity to talk through her troubles, provide reality checks (you can call this off, this is a lifetime decision, etc.) but remind her that no one can make this decision for her. In my opinion, that’s the best thing a friend can do.
So DoctorJ, what happened? Did she marry the guy? How did the families behave?
Support the famil law section of your local bar association by encouraging the wedding.
She can always cancel the wedding and use the non-refundable deposits on the reception to just throw a party. That way nothing is wasted, and it’s still fun, and she isn’t married to the guy. At least doing that removes the “but we have deposits” excuse.
I would put it to her like this;
She wants him to ‘grow a couple’ and stand up to his parents.
But she hasn’t got the ovaries to call the thing off even though she knows the whole thing stinks to high heaven?
Pot calling the kettle black.
We all have regrets in life, but the ones hardest to bear are the ones where we knew what we should do and still didn’t do it. Life sends you a pebble before before a brick. Ignore the pebble and you are surely doomed to be beaned by the brick!
Wisdom, it seems to me, isn’t just about being able to see the right thing to do, it’s also about having the fortitude to do it.
If she was my friend, and she asked me, I’d tell her, “I believe you already know what you SHOULD do, the question is are you willing to do it?”
Just my opinion.
My favorite cousin is 11 months my senior. She got married in the middle of last August, after a couple of serious bouts of what her delightful fiance, and her delightful parents, convinced her were ‘cold feet.’ The wedding was absolutely storybook beautiful, and those of us who hadn’t heard about the troubles didn’t suspect a thing. Except for my stepfather, who wondered what the hell the two of them were doing together.
The divorce was announced the first week of October. Score one for the stepfather. But more importantly, score one for Erika’s intuition: her guts knew a bad thing when they saw one.
I’m with the crowd here–deposit be damned. She needs to get out of this mess fast. God forbid she goes through with this and eventually decides that the real road to happily-ever-after is to add children to the equation.
I’m with the majority. Please, please tell your friend to run, not walk, away from this guy. If your friend wants to marry this guy in the hope that she’ll be able to straighten things out, she’s deluded. It won’t happen.
There are too damn many folks out there who went through with the wedding to save face and “get the value” out of the money laid out for the reception and so forth. It’s not worth it! I’ve done too many divorces where the parties thought they could patch it up once they were married only to find out that things only get worse.
Your friend’s feeling better is only a band-aid on a leaking dam. Please, please get her away from this guy and the wedding be damned.
Yer pal,
Zappo
First of all, I don’t think anyone should be telling anyone to “stay into” or “get out of” a wedding. This is a decision that has to be made by the people involved.
That being said, playing devil’s advocate is an entirely different thing. For example it needs to be pointed out worrying about deposits and crap like that is no reason to not cancel a wedding. This is a perfect example of what “love is blind” means. You’re so focused on certain things that you fail to look at things from a different perspective.
My wife’s any my famlies were all taking bets on how long our wedding would last. She was 17 & pregnant, and I was 20 years old. My wife and I are still happily married, and my son graduates high school this year. So, contrary to what will most likely happen, it still needs to be their decision.
E3
What a coincidence, that’s just the way that (recently banned) Satan used to end his posts.
E3
Sorry I haven’t offered an update sooner…
I spent Thursday night with my friend in the emergency room in Frankfort. She had not been able to eat in a week and anything she drank had been going straight through her for three days. She had planned to go to the doctor on Thursday, but decided she didn’t need to, even though she was “awfully weak” and was getting dizzy when she stood up. I called her and gave her a good reaming out, telling her that she could go to the emergency room now and get treated by competent medical professionals, or wait until Saturday when she passes out at the wedding so she can be treated by me. I met her at the ER, where she got three liters of fluid, then I spent the night on her couch. (Her fiance was at his bachelor party, and was not answering his pager or his cell phone, despite the fact that she specifically asked him to take it since she might have to go to the hospital. Jerk.)
Friday morning, when I left for work, she was planning to not have the wedding, but to just throw the big party and wait on the ceremony. Sometime before that afternoon, though, she decided to go through with it. The way I understand it, when she started calling people (including her mother) to tell them she had been to the hospital, they didn’t ask if she was OK–they asked about the wedding. They did move it inside, since she would probably not have made it if they had it outside.
The ceremony was, in a word, sad. She looked like she had stitched a smile onto her face; her eyes didn’t agree with it. It was one of those weddings where most of the people there are the old relatives and friends of parents; there was one pew of her friends, and we just sat there and tried not to strain something rolling our eyes (especially when he said he’d be with her “in sickness and in health”). Notably, they left out the part about anyone having any objections; I’m sure that was on purpose.
Her mother thanked me profusely for making her go to the ER, but later told the other friend that was with us, “I’m glad she’s feeling better. I guess she just needed a mother’s love.” Yeah, a mother’s love, three liters of normal saline IV, and a one-way ticket somewhere, bitch, but I haven’t exactly seen you offer any of the three. The reception was equally sad, I hear, since all of her friends left quickly to avoid getting fed up and saying the wrong thing.
So today they’re on a plane to St. Somewhere, probably fighting all the way. My greatest fear is that she won’t divorce him; she’ll just put up with it and be miserable from now on. None of it has made any sense to us, but we’re glad just to have it overwith; we can have an emotional break before things start falling apart again.
Thanks for the advice, everybody.
Dr. J
So sorry to hear that. I was really hoping she would at least postpone it. I can’t believe he didn’t even stay home after she was in the hospital! Bachelor party must have been more important, huh? What a jerk. Maybe it will all work out though. I, personally, don’t think it will and I think you’re going to have to listen to a lot of complaining from her but, you never know, it may work out.
I know exactly what you mean about the stitched on smile. That’s how I was at my first wedding. There’s a picture of my dad walking me down the aisle and the look on my face says it all! I look so unhappy and so fake. The whole ceremony is like that. I wish I would’ve had the guts to call it off… would’ve saved me $1,000 on my divorce. Most of my friends didn’t like him but never said anything because they didn’t want to hurt me. Now that I’m not married to him anymore they have no problems telling me how much they hated him and the way he treated me. Too bad they couldn’t have told me that before I walked down the aisle! You’ve done all you can for now. Just keep being a good friend.
So, DoctorJ, I gotta ask - what happened with your unhappy friend? Are they still married? Did she get pregnant?
How lovely indeed. Sounds like these guys really care for one another.
I just read this entire thread, and I too am curious. Consider this a bump to keep it from falling to the next page. I also liked that wedding pact those brothers made. I wonder how many of them took his siblings up on it.
If she does end up marrying this guy, BEG her to make sure that she doesn’t get pregnant for a few years. It’d be a shame to drag kids into this when she’s not even remotely sure they’re going to last.
This is an old thread from a year ago, which has been bumped asking for an update. And according to DoctorJ’s post she did get married, a year ago.