In 2017, I proposed to my boyfriend, a shy introverted nerd, then studying for his Master's, who's very quiet about his sexuality, even with his family. We've been in a relationship since roughly 2011/2012, long distance for portions of it. I proposed on a beach near where I was going to school when we met online. His family lives in Tennessee and mine lives in California. It was a fun experience to propose to him, driving up and down the northern California coastline and enjoying the scenery until I took him to a bench and popped the question discreetly. We decided to wait until we were both employed before making any solid plans.
Flash forward to October 2019. He's graduated with a Master's degree and struggling to find a job. I'm working in marketing for a tech company and somewhat unhappy with my job. My family convinces us without too much pressure to just start planning for the wedding because they're generously going to pay for it. He says that he'd prefer something as quiet as possible, with as few people as we can manage. We settle on 50 guests at a small indoor venue in Northern California with a date of July 31st, 2020. By the end of 2019, my family and I have visited the venue and lined up vendors (cake, flowers, etc.), asking for his input when needed. He always responds with "Sure, fine, whatever you picked is okay."
One month later, I get laid off. We're both left without income and I'm taking unemployment checks knowing it's a limited time. We're not too worried about the wedding because my family is still paying for it.
March 2020 hits and we realize that the wedding isn't happening. We scramble to move the date to July 2021, praying that vaccines will be prevalent by then.
During the pandemic, both my fiancé and I manage to get jobs. He gets a remote position using his Master's and I get a job that's temporarily remote with an HQ in Austin, TX, where we were hoping to move to eventually anyway. By December 2020, we'd moved in to a nice spacious house for rent, managing to relocate across 4 states without contracting COVID.
Now, with only a few months away and post-vaccination, we go to visit my family in California to resolve the remaining questions. Every day is a struggle for him. I'm handling 90% of the coordination, working with my family to set everything up, even connecting with his family to coordinate their involvement. He spends the majority of the weekend in the guest room, hiding away from us and the wedding discussion.
The night before we fly back to Austin, I realize this is taking a toll on me. He's trying to be as minimally involved as possible in our wedding, and while we used to joke about doing it for our families, I've gotten attached to the plans we're making, probably because I'm doing the lion's share of the work for it so I'm making most of these decisions.
He keeps complaining about everything we're doing. He says that he felt he was clear when we first started planning back in 2019 that he wanted as little celebration as possible. And he says that he regrets not putting his foot down earlier and demanding an even smaller ceremony, but he doesn't want to change the plans we have now. But every time we discuss the current plans, his mood shifts, and trying to get information out of him is excruciating. He says that whenever we discuss it, it feels like he's "making plans for the worst day of [his] life." I am doing my best to leave him out of the planning, at his request, but it's making this so much harder for me.
Planning this wedding feels like a second job where I have a coworker who refuses to do his part because he hates the job. But we're both on contract until July 2021. And the worst part is that I really like how the wedding is turning out. I think it's going to be beautiful. I'm looking forward to sharing my vows. I want this to be my only wedding, and I want it to be a wonderful day of celebration for us.
I love this man. I want to marry him. But he doesn't want to be at the altar. Not because he doesn't love me, but because he hates the wedding that he's committed to. He's promised to me that he'll be there and he'll do his best to put on a smile for anyone, but that doesn't make me feel better when I know he's suffering inside.
Everyone keeps telling me how excited they are for us. Telling me that wedding planning is stressful but it'll be worth it. But they don't know what we're really going through. I don't know if it will be --worth it--, and I find myself getting worked up almost to the point of crying when I think about our wedding.
Recently, I confronted him about his negativity and how much it's affecting me. At first, he said that he feels he has a right to express his discomfort, annoyance or negativity with these plans, despite having given us the green light for almost all of them. But eventually the dam broke and he tearfully confessed that it's taking a toll on him too, because he hates being vilified for his negativity on an event centered around his strongest anxieties. He's said that he doesn't really believe in the institution of marriage, which tracks with some of his family history. And truthfully, I don't love the "institution" of marriage either. But I want to marry HIM.
I want to look back at our wedding pictures with fondness, but I'm afraid that at this point, we'll both just look at them with scorn. As a low point in our relationship that we pushed past. Or worse, the day things started going downhill.
Almost a year and a half ago, we took a relationship analysis test, and it graded us extremely highly. We're trusting, understanding, and eager to work with each other. Until the wedding plans shifted into high gear.
Doing this at the tail end of the pandemic is surely taking its toll on our mental health, but I can't help but feel we could be doing something differently. I've suggested therapy, but he remains insistent that he doesn't want therapy, and that he can resolve his mental health problems on his own with introspection.
Do I get him more involved? Do I leave him alone and carry this burden myself? Do we change plans last-minute, even after changing things already? Surely there are other people out there who have had this kind of problem, how did they get through this?
tl;dr: My future husband hates the idea of being in a marriage ceremony in a couple months, but doesn't want to cancel our wedding plans. He's grouchy, closed-off, and annoyed every time we talk about it and it's taking a toll on both of us, considering all the work and travel we have to do to make it happen. I love our wedding plans, he hates them, but he's also agreed to all of them since we started. I've compromised a lot to make it more comfortable for him, but he still despises it. I'm worried our relationship may be stretched too thin, right when we're supposed to be committing our lives to each other.
Edit: He and I had another talk after I posted this and he's actually feeling a lot better about the wedding. He told me he now sees it as just another day that he may not love, but it's worth doing for the sake of celebrating us for our friends and families. I think I might have hyperfixated on some of his reactions and let my anxiety spiral in the absence of evidence of his feelings. He has some improvements to make regarding communication between us, but he's no longer calling it "the worst day of his life." We also both acknowledged how hard it's been to hold down two stressful jobs while doing all this planning. We have more to work on, but I'm not worried about us anymore.
As such, I'm going to delete this post in a couple of hours to respect our privacy. Mostly making this edit to let everybody who became invested know that we're gonna be okay and to thank the folks in the comments who helped me see his perspective on things.
Submitted May 25, 2021 at 02:07PM by squarecherry https://ift.tt/3ujLdCj
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