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It's not her fault he decided to leave.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Jul 29, 2022
After a bride married her husband a couple of days prior, she started to feel bad about her decision to exclude her biological father from walking her down the aisle.
The traditional passing of the daughter from father to husband is a dated ceremony, but one that many people take very seriously — like her biological father.
When she reached her conclusion, her father became very upset with her and hasn’t spoken to her since, so she asked Reddit if she should have just let him do it.
The bride gave her reasoning behind her decision by giving context surrounding her family.
She said that her parents were very young when they had her — a 20-year-old father and a 19-year-old mother — so within the first few years of her life, things were rough.
“They were both in conflict for the first couple years of my life and my dad ended up leaving us,” she explained. “My mum went through a court case and ended up getting full custody of me, which wasn't that hard as my dad was nowhere to be found.”
Within a few years, her mother found someone else and fell happily in love with him.
The pair got married, the stepfather adopted his stepdaughter, and they were “one happy family.”
“When I was 15 my mother told me that my birth father had contacted her and was trying to get contact with me,” she continued. “She told me I didn't have to meet him if I didn't want to but she thought it would be good for me to know my father.”
She decided to give him a second chance, and while they never became super close, she maintained an “ok relationship” with him all the way through college and after, only seeing him “a couple times a year.”
After her fiance proposed to her three months ago and they set the date for the wedding, she had something important to ask of her mother and stepfather.
“I asked them at a dinner a week later if they could walk me down the aisle and if my stepdad could give me away,” she explained. “They said yes and my stepdad was so overjoyed that I thought of him that he even cried when I asked him.”
Unfortunately, the father was not happy about this revelation — she hadn’t even been the one to tell him about the wedding.
Her father assumed that it would be him walking her down the aisle, but she wanted her mother and stepfather to do it since her biological father was barely in her life.
“He responded to the wedding invite with a ‘Cannot attend’ and hasn't spoken to me since,” she said. “I don't know what to do as I do want him in my life but should I have just let him walk me down the aisle?”
Redditors agree that the bride is NTA, or “not the a--hole.”
The internet users throw all of the blame on the father and claim that his reaction reveals his true nature — that he reached out to her to validate his feeling of regret for not being there.
“His reaction says everything about him, it's not about you at all,” one user wrote. “He can't take back those life choices or redo all the missed years. He now sees the consequences and they hurt. That's his problem, not yours.”
Some users expressed their sympathy because the father claimed to have struggled with his mental health, but don’t excuse the fact that he chose to walk out.
Once you walk out, you can’t simply choose to walk back in for the fun parts.
“He doesn't skip out on all the difficult parts of parenting just to do the fun parts. Your Dad is walking you down the aisle your sperm donor isn't,” wrote another user.
Some people questioned why she wanted him in her life in the first place, insinuating that he has provided nothing for her and therefore should hold no place in her future.
If she wants to keep him in her life, that’s her choice, but at least she can feel better about the decision she made with Reddit having her back.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Since graduating from Rutgers University, he spends most of his free time gaming or playing Quadball. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.