When a wedding is on the horizon, it’s not unusual for that stressful planning process to either drive a rift between parents and their children or to bring existing tensions to a boiling point.
And whether we’re talking about a bride facing inconsistent or unreasonable expectations from her parents or a child being dragged into a remarrying parent’s drama , those concerns are often central to the entire ceremony.
Less common, however, are family problems that develop just from the simple act of going to someone else’s wedding. But as one dad’s story illustrates, even peripheral drama can bring families into some thorny ethical dilemmas.
Over the past weekend, the family we’re going to be hearing about was preparing to attend their goddaughter’s wedding a couple of hours away.
But as the dad explained in a Reddit post , his daughter was having a rough time getting ready, which he suspects was due to the hard-partying night she just had.
And when she did get dressed, he saw that she was wearing what he described as “Some kind of black, spaghetti strap halter-top thing with leggings.”
Considering that the invitation said the event was “semi-formal,” the dad hardly considered this an appropriate outfit for the occasion.
In response, she told him that she didn’t have anything else to wear and that he doesn’t get to police what she puts on her body.
And when he countered that she was being disrespectful to her cousin’s wishes, she replied that if people focused more on her clothes than the bride’s, that was their problem and not hers.
This led the dad to say that if that’s how she felt, how she was getting to the wedding was her problem and not his.
And by that, he meant she would not be riding in his car if she didn’t change clothes and could find her own way there.
In his words, “I am not going to arrive with my daughter looking like she is about to hit a club at 2am instead of attend her cousin’s wedding.”
But as he put it once this ultimatum was dropped, “My wife chimed in at this point and told us both to calm down.”
While she also didn’t agree with what her daughter was wearing, she felt the dad was being over-bearing and offered to help the daughter find a different outfit.
When she scoffed at this and went to her room, he told her to either be ready in 15 minutes or he’s leaving.
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Although the mom went with him after this period elapsed, she seemed to feel guilty about doing so and both she and the daughter blamed him for the fact she couldn’t make it to the wedding.
But while some in the community he reached out to felt he should have let his wife handle the situation, few were very interested in defending the daughter’s actions.
As one user said , “I put this in a similar category as if your daughter had decided to wear a white dress to the wedding. Yeah there’s no law preventing it but that doesn’t mean you have to assist in her decisions.
And if she’s big enough to decide what she wants to wear she’s big enough to call an Uber.”
Another suspected that not being able to go to the wedding wasn’t as much of a pain point for the daughter as it appeared.
As they said , “She was too partied out to care about going to the wedding. You did her a favor by not taking her.”
h/t: Reddit | papabearaita
