Bride Calls Off The Wedding After Her Fiancé Refuses To Stand Up To His Overbearing Mother — 'Move Back Home To Mommy'
The "boy mom" strikes again — except the boy is now a grown man, and the mom is now a meddling mother-in-law.
shisuka / Canva Pro Meddling mother-in-laws are basically a tradition at this point. But for one bride on Reddit, her mother-in-law-to-be has become downright intolerable.
So when her overgrown "boy mom" antics and her fiancé's refusal to deal with them became entirely out of line, she decided to nip the problem in the bud before it became a lifelong crisis.
The bride called off the wedding when her fiancé refused to stand up to his mother.
Lately, a trend has popped up on social media of self-proclaimed "boy moms" talking about how they plan to manipulate their sons' relationships so that no woman will ever "steal" them away in adulthood.
This deeply off-putting trend has struck a lot of people as the explanation for how both meddling mothers-in-law and spineless men are born.
This bride's situation perfectly illustrates that theory and how the men raised by these moms are often totally unwilling to be adults and set boundaries when their mothers cross the line.
Her fiancé has let his mother meddle in their affairs so much that their engagement has lasted years despite them already having a child together. And she's simply had enough.
The groom's mom has convinced him to postpone their wedding four times in three years.
"I've been with my fiancé for seven years, and we have been engaged for three years," the bride wrote. "We have gone ahead and tried to do a 'save the date' 4 times now, and every single time, his mom convinces him to postpone."
"It's just always something," she says. Sometimes, his mother insists that they should be able to buy a house before getting married instead of renting because she says they "aren't stable."
Other times, his mother laments their "money situation" — even after they loaned the mom $8000 so she wouldn't lose her own house. "We have plenty of money," she wrote, "as my husband's an RN, and I'm a lawyer."
Their latest wedding plans couldn't be more low-key. It is a small backyard gathering with only local family. They've even made it a potluck to keep costs down.
But sure enough, her fiancé's mom came up with another excuse. "Her newest argument is that we 'need' to wait until our daughter is 'at least 3' so she can be our flower girl," she wrote.
Her fiancé promised he wouldn't let his mother interfere again. But when he did, she broke things off and told him to 'move back home to mommy.'
They finally set a wedding date, and her fiancé assured her that "he was tired of listening to" his mom's constant reasons for the delay. But that ended up being nothing but lip service.
"Last night he said, at random, 'My mom kind of has a point ... maybe we should wait until we buy a house so our living situation is a bit more stable.'" When he added that it would be "five years at most," she lost it.
"I just took my ring off and handed it to him and said I was no longer interested," she wrote, "and maybe he should move back home with mommy because I know for a fact that that woman will make up another excuse the second we buy a house."
She didn't stop there. She told him, "I have zero business being with a man who has no backbone and would put our lives on hold in favor of a woman who still wants to scrub his back in the shower," referring to the pretty shockingly unboundaried upbringing her fiancé had with his mom.
Her fiancé burst into tears, but she was unmoved. "I'm stupid calm, maybe because I'm over it, and told him I wanted him to leave."
And when his mom tried to intervene, she had some choice words for her, too. "I just texted back and said, 'No, it's fine, you won. Now you can have your baby boy back full time.'"
Experts like therapists agree that this woman probably dodged a major bullet by ending her engagement.
The bride feels terrible for how "mean" she was about this situation, but her fellow Redditors were firmly on her side. And many experts, like psychologists, say that she was right to see the dynamics between her fiancé and his mom as non-negotiable red flags.
Therapist Dr. Alexandra Solomon says the men in these toxic boy-mom-turned-overbearing-mother-in-law relationships are often stuck in "little boy mode," and she recently told us that it bodes ill for the son, his partner, and the marriage in general.
She said that a refusal to set boundaries with his mother and his prioritization of her needs would likely "erode the foundation of your relationship and breed resentment" over time — which likely means the marriage won't last.
Ultimately, the only person who can fix this situation is this woman's fiancé, and his total unwillingness to do so is a bad omen for the future. It surely wasn't easy, but this woman probably did the right thing by going her own way.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.