Woman Wonders If She Is Wrong For Having Step-Dad Walk Her Down The Aisle Instead Of Biological Father
It's her wedding, not theirs.
Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock.com A 27-year-old woman is going through a familial dispute ahead of her upcoming wedding and wants the internet's advice on what to do.
A split between her and her siblings and their biological father has caused extended family members to get involved and call the bride to be an “a--hole,” but is she really one?
The bride-to-be wants her stepfather to walk her down the aisle instead of her biological father.
To avoid all the unnecessary drama, her stepfather and mother have told her that she can have her biological father walk her down the aisle, but she and her fiance agree that “we'd rather have me walk down the aisle alone than have him do it.”
As a result of all the feuding, the 27-year-old bride-to-be went to the subreddit “r/AmItheA--hole” (AITA) to find out whether or not she really was the “a--hole” her family said she was with the help of internet strangers.
Basically, you post your story on the subreddit and allow random people on the internet to read it and pass on their rating which boils down to “You’re the A--hole” (YTA), or “Not the A--hole” (NTA).
Fortunately for this woman, the Reddit philosophers were on her side given that there’s a lot of context that needs to be understood to know why she’s NTA.
A quick history wrap-up tells us that her biological father cheated on her mother while she was pregnant with their second child, which led to more problems.
Later, her mother emotionally cheated while she was pregnant with the third and last child (the writer of the post), which led to a divorce when she was born.
With her parents separated, her stepfather became the main father figure in the children’s lives.
“I have a great relationship with my stepdad. He's been more of a father to me than my bio dad my entire life,” she wrote in her post. “My siblings are much colder to my stepdad because they think of him as being the person who split my parents up.”
The problem only arises when she talks about the wedding plans to her sister, who is her Maid Of Honor and is much closer to their biological father than their stepfather.
“I was going over plans with my sister and mentioned that my stepdad would be walking me down the aisle. She was pissed,” she wrote.
“[She] started ranting about how I'm ungrateful and a bad daughter to my bio dad.”
This led to a call from the biological father saying that he wouldn’t go if he didn’t walk her down, adding “how having my stepdad walk down the aisle would humiliate him, and how if I care about him I will let him walk down the aisle.”
But the truth is that it’s her wedding and no one else’s. Not her biological father’s, not her stepfather’s, not her sisters, no one else’s but hers and her fiance’s.
“Your wedding should be a joyous affair and it sucks that your family is flipping out rather than being supportive of you,” wrote the top comment.
Other people also made note of how the biological father treated her before — about how he didn’t believe she was his and wasn’t even a father to her until recently.
“Any man who would choose to not attend his daughter's wedding because he's not the one walking her down the aisle has proven that he is unworthy to walk her down the aisle,” wrote another one of the top comments.
If a wedding is supposed to be one of the happiest days of your life, it shouldn’t be wasted by inviting people who are going to make it about them or hate the choices you want to make on your day.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.