She Wouldn’t Accept Any Money From Her Mother-In-Law For Her Wedding, But Now Her Mother-In-Law Is Claiming To Feel “Left Out” And “Disowned”
This 29-year-old woman and her fiancé, 33, set their wedding date for over the summer. At first, they didn’t ask their parents for financial help funding their wedding. Her parents said they could give them $15,000 toward general wedding expenses, while her fiancé’s parents didn’t offer to give them any money but didn’t ask for them to.
Earlier in the planning process, she and her fiancé were hoping to get married on a Caribbean island. However, her in-laws didn’t like this idea because they feared flying on a plane.
So, she and her fiancé returned to the drawing board, hunting for a venue closer to home. In the end, she and her fiancé settled on a venue that was a six-hour drive away. Both her parents and his live a half hour away from them. At this point, her future in-laws still hadn’t offered to help pay for anything wedding-related.
“A few months into planning, my mother-in-law was talking to my mom on the phone about wedding plans, and my mother-in-law told her they wanted to match my parents of ‘up to $15,000′ to pay for the rehearsal dinner and the alcohol bill for the wedding reception,” she said.
After thinking it over, she and her fiancé chose to forego a rehearsal dinner in order to save money, also hopefully lowering the amount of money their parents would need to pay. Since then, they’ve discussed their wedding plans with her in-laws for hours via phone calls, text messages, emails, and dinners.
Besides accommodating her in-laws’ fears of flying by choosing a closer venue, she and her fiancé haven’t asked them what they think about the details of their wedding. She and her fiancé also invited a few of her in-laws’ friends, even though they had to be careful with how many guests they invited due to the number of people allowed at their venue of choice.
Since she and her fiancé were no longer having a rehearsal dinner, they predicted that the money her in-laws were contributing could be used to pay for a wedding photographer and food.
“Over these calls and emails, my mother-in-law told us they would be taking money out of their retirement fund to pay for our wedding (making us feel guilty). She’s sent texts about how stressed she is about our wedding and the money they had said they would give us since having many unexpected medical bills this year,” she explained.
Unfortunately, her mother-in-law has been struggling with her physical and mental health. Not long ago, her mother-in-law sent her and her fiancé a lengthy email relaying her frustrations about how they supposedly didn’t seem appreciative of the $400 she’d given them for Christmas.
innarevyako – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
Neither she nor her fiancé felt like this made any sense because both of them thanked her both in person and through text later, and they both were incredibly appreciative of the generous gift.
However, since her fiancé hadn’t yet cashed the check, his mother took this as an insult and felt he didn’t care that she gave him all of this money.
Her mother-in-law also wrote that she and her husband aren’t wealthy, so she and her fiancé needed to keep them in the loop about wedding details so that they could plan accordingly and be prepared for the financial expenses.
The two of them wrote back, emailing her fiancé’s mother to let her know that she didn’t have to be concerned about financially contributing to their wedding any longer.
They told her that from now on, they would be footing the bill for the rest of the expenses aside from what her parents were contributing, adding that now she could prioritize healing from her health issues.
“In an effort to detach from the guilt of receiving their money, we now feel even more guilty for having sent this email as my mother-in-law completely blew up at us and felt like we are ‘disowning them’ and feels like they have not been involved in any of the wedding plans,” she shared.
While it’s true that her mother has had more of a role in the wedding planning process, she and her fiancé have been the ones approving everything and doing what they feel is best.
Her mother has basically been their “wedding coordinator” because she enjoys the work and is fantastic at communicating with vendors in a timely manner.
She and her fiancé only told his mother that they didn’t want her to contribute financially to their wedding so that she would no longer be anxious about all of her bills. They didn’t mean to hurt her, and they feel terrible that she told them they broke her heart for excluding her.
What advice would you give her?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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