“AITA for telling my fiancée her wedding dress choice is way too extravagant and suggesting alternatives?”
We are getting married in July, the venue is booked and the wedding is pretty much sorted. Emma has been researching dresses and has a little scrap book of lots of dresses she likes for ideas but is now looking to buy. All that’s left to get is the bridesmaid dresses and her wedding dress.
We jointly put aside 10k each for the wedding, everything is paid and we have 6k left over which i think could go towards the honeymoon on top of the honeymoon fund we already had. We aren’t the extravagant type at all, then comes the time for emma to pick her dress. I know everything is more expensive when it has the term wedding attached to it what i wasn’t expecting was an $950 dress plus $120 veil!
I’m using my dad’s old tux he used for his wedding to my mom, just had it taken in a little, Emma can’t use her mum’s dress as her and her mum both say the style hasn’t aged well which is fair. I had a quick google around at dresses online and there were so many! and so many just like the one emma wants for like $50 to $100.
I’m not trying to get her to cheap out on her dress but she will literally wear it once, one dress for over $1000 is just insane that would fund our honeymoon . I tried to show her some dresses i found on a reccommended app called wish and others on website’s but she was having none of it. She is very slender but apparently wants it specially fitted?It turned nasty unfortunately because i said i refuse to drop such a large amount of money on a dress and she argued that she is using her own money for the dress. Which isn’t strictly true as we are about to marry and our finances will be joined. Then her mom had to get involved, they offered to pay for the dress but it’s not a case of not being able to afford it.It’s a dress! there are identical one’s online at a fraction of the cost. I thought she would be ecstatic to learn there are identical dresses for a fraction of the cost but she was really angry and upset. AITA here? is there something i am seriously missing because after we argued about the dress emma has been extremely cold towards me.
Then yestersay she said if i want her to cheap out on her wedding dress on her wedding day that she needs to really consider if we are a good match for marriage.Im blown away that she would say that over a dress, i told her she’s like a toddler throwing a tantrum over a sparkly toy she can’t have, that was a mistake as she left to stay with her parent’s, who called to tell me i am much more than an @$$#ole. AITA here?
Commenters did not hold back. Here are some of the top rated comments:
milee30 said:
YTA. You say you don’t want her to cheap out, but then you say you want her to buy a $50 -$100 wedding dress. That’s cheap. That’s cheap even for a regular dress. Those cheap dresses you’re finding online will look terrible in person and are the source of so many disappointed women and jokes.
Wedding dresses and their tailoring are expensive. $1000 is actually a low priced dress. Regardless of dress type, though, your reaction to her – calling her names and deciding you have veto power – is the real problem. You should be solving this issue together. If you can’t, maybe it’s not time to get married yet.
Cocoasneeze said:
YTA. You are suggesting she get married in a $50-$100 dress, and then when her parents offered to pay for her dress, it’s not even about the money for you. You literally want to control what she wears, an adult woman.
[deleted] said:
YTA no offense but you have no idea what you’re talking about. I assure you the $100 dress is not the “same exact dress”, it’s a cheap knockoff (which is what the wish app is known for).
Also yes, the dress needs to be fitted to her proportions, it would be very unusual for anyone to fit perfectly into an off the rack size gown perfectly with no alterations. $950 is actually not bad at all for a wedding gown including alterations.
I understand if you have different priorities with money, but it does not sound like this would be a huge deal in the grand scheme of everything with what you’d shared about your finances. Let her have this one.
If anything, just let her know that something else might have to give in your budget for the wedding or the honeymoon to accommodate for the dress and let her make that decision for herself.
After this, things got a little messy. OP posted this update:
Emma found this thread, it was a mistake to post here and im sorry i posted our problems on reddit, iata
And THEN “Emma” (whose real name is…Emma) responded with her own thread:
i will change the name despite his inability to do the same i don’t really care if he sees this but he isn’t subbed to relationships i literally don’t know where to start, my fiancee we’ll call greg . i dont know what came over him, its completely insane, we are getting married in summer, the argument started over my wedding dress.
i picked a very simple and traditional gown that was already discounted as it is an ex sample gown. my absolute idiot of a fiancee decided to post asking for opinions or more likely validation on whether i was being unreasonable. my dress is under 1000 dollars but will come to around 1500 with alterations.
we have over 7 thousand left over in our budget, that’s another thing that seriously upset me that he lied in his post multiple times, i make a much higher salary than him so we agreed he would put 5 k towards the wedding and i put in the rest but why lie? why ask opinions if you’ve skewed the details.
i had absolutely no problem with this as he makes just above the minimum wage. the thread got way too much attention, i had already gone to my parents because i was angry about him calling me immature and shouting about me being spoiled.
i also happened to find the thread shortly after he made it because not only did he use my real name his throwaway was his real name followed by his alarm pin! he sent me a text saying that he wasn’t the a%$#ole in this situation and i just KNEW he would post it, it’s not the first time he’s posted about stuff.
but nothing of this magnitude, anyway i don’t know what to do, there are people online now claiming to be me and its been shared on twitter and Facebook and I’m just utterly mortified. he got utterly hammered last night and called my parents, my dad had to hang up on him because he was screaming down the phone and my mom was disgusted.
i cant get my money back on the venue or anything, i recently started antidepressants because I’ve been feeling low but now i just feel empty. this whole thing was about the cost of my dress and he suggested i use the wish app to get an identical gown, first he refused to listen to me that wish is garbage but he also argued it to the death in the comments!
i read every single comment in that thread and it was like being punched in the gut, i can’t get over the odd lies either, he gave out my real name and his but lied about the age gap and budget.
i am 23 he is 43 admittedly he looks much much younger and for the first few weeks dating i thought he was in his early thirties. we also have only been together a year not 2 years i think he said, and im starting to think this was all too fast.
i need help, i need advice, i know im quite possibly pot calling the kettle by posting but i post here alot usually anyway and all the fake accounts claiming be me might throw him off anyway. i might be slow replying as i start work in an hour thanks all x
Here’s what people had to say after her post:
Tiborec said:
Girl, you have 20 years of age gap and a clear abusive relationship. It really was too fast this story. Leave him, please, if you want a life.
NDaveT said:
Call off the wedding. You will lose some money on deposits and every penny will be worth it. Marrying this guy would be far more expensive, both financially and emotionally.
SmallSacrifice wrote:
I left an abusive ex fiance and lost a fair amount of money in the process…and i have never regretted it for one single second. This abusive POS is NOT your person, OP. break free. Be single. Grow and change more. Then look for a mature, kind and loving person to share your life with.
Later OP posted this update: “Struggling to get back in to the dating scene since my fiancée left me unexpectedly.”
A few months back I was going to be married, and long story short things were called off. She wanted to end things, I didn’t. And I feel like I’ve lost all of my trust in woman I dont want to feel like this anymore. I was dating someone called isabelle up until last week shes really amazing and kind but the second she heard about my ex and the fiasco that surrounded it she ghosted me.
And its become a pattern, at some point no matter how close were getting they hear about it from a friend it comes up somehow and they bail. I just want to know how to behave, or what I can do to make things work? My last gf kacey, when she broke up with me she said the issue what that I hadn’t chanced from who I was when my fiancee left me but I have!
I hardly drink at all now, my job is steady and I’m a good guy, but I think the issue is that I’m suffering from small town syndrome. Everyone knows everyone here back a#$wards little town it is. Please please give me advice on putting this behind me I am honestly desperate. My life was about to move towards a phase and now I’m stuck in limbo, I need a girl to fill that place so I can move forward with my life.
