No pay, no say

I’m not letting a pushy parent ruin our wedding day!

Let me start by saying, I still suspect there was a mix up at the hospital when my wife was born. She’s way too soft-spoken and considerate to have been the fruit of the loin of the two people she calls her parents. Her father remains one of the rudest, most over-bearing people I have met to this day and her mother is just a super-snippy individual.

I did the right thing before I proposed, I rang her Dad and asked for his permission to marry her, I think he appreciated that. I would have asked in person, but we were living away and I had planned to propose in Casablanca (at Rick’s Café, that’s another story but seriously is one of the most romantic proposals you’ll ever hear… If you’ve seen Casablanca). It was, however, a challenge to get him to not tell his wife who would have in turn told everyone and the surprise would have been ruined.

Anyway, I asked, and she said yes. Then we started to plan the wedding and over those next few months my wife got more and more anxious. Not about what she wanted, she had that all mapped out and as I found out later, had been mapping out the whole wedding including the chosen church for many years. What was causing her angst was the level to which her family, in particular her parents would insert themselves into the wedding.

I began to have flashbacks to my wife’s brother’s wedding. There were the constant complaints about the venue (they had it in Fiji and as you can imagine that’s a terrible place to have a wedding), complaints about the food, and complaints about the amount of time between the service and the reception. But what I remembered the most was the father-in-law’s speech. It was a thrilling recount of his life, his family’s life, and little to no mention of the bride and groom. In fact he only really gave one back-handed compliment to the bride, which was not lost on those in attendance.

That’s where the train wreck really began. The bride got upset because her new father-in-law couldn’t say something nice on their wedding day. Then the Mother-in-law got very intoxicated, it seems she took the time between the service and reception to liquor up. Then when she’s at her drunkest she starts inappropriately touching her daughter’s then boyfriend (me). Let’s just say that the night ended up memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Over the next few days, when challenged on their behaviour both the groom’s parents defended their actions by articulating how much money they had put into paying for the wedding. Apparently they had paid considerably towards the wedding (the bride’s father was not around and her mother couldn’t afford much), so they felt entitled to behave as they wished.

So that’s when the four words of advice a good friend had given me years ago came back to me: No pay, no say! We weren’t rich, but my fiancé and I had good jobs, so we saved our pennies and planned a very frugal wedding. We told both our parents that we didn’t want any money from them and that we’d pay our own way. They didn’t know what that meant, until the wedding plans were firmed up.

We had the wedding at the location that my wife wanted, we invited who we wanted and did not invite the Aunt’s best friend’s sister or any other random relatives. There was only one speech: mine. It was beautiful, there were laughs, there were tears (some of the tears weren’t even mine). The Mother-in-law was on pretty good behaviour (although the night before the wedding her wandering hands were trying to feel my chest again). The complaints from everyone were pretty much silenced because they didn’t pay.

In the end was it a massive production? No. Did we have fireworks and a sky-writer? No. But we had a memorable wedding surrounded by people we loved, and my wife was not left in tears by the antics of her parents. That was all that mattered to me.