A friend’s Facebook posting:
Question for FB friends. My stepdaughter is getting married this weekend and she just called today to ask him if it’s okay for both my husband and her mother’s new husband to walk her down the aisle. What do you think?
A sampling of responses:
- I think if her step dad earned her love and respect and this is her day, it would lovely if he could be honored and is valued enough to be able to do that. If I had a step child and I raised/loved her and vice versa, I would have loved to be able to do that as a co-parent, esp being a step parent. It would make me feel very loved and a part of the family. Btw, what are the reasons to not “allow” it? Isn’t this HER wedding and special day? How horrible it would be to be told what to do on your wedding day esp when it is against what you really want to do…
- (from the stepmother’s mother) Absolutely NOT!
- Beautiful! That’s what family is about
- Absolutely! If she wants both men to be a part then they should!
- I would do what ever makes the Bride and Groom happy – it is their day.
- Yes. It is HER wedding!
- And as for the, “It’s HER day” camp, NO IT’S NOT. That is also a ridiculous notion that has gotten completely out of control. A wedding is a social ceremony, not every girl’s one chance to be a Disney Princess. Disney princesses are not real.
- Absolutely! What an honor for both men!
- It’s Her day. Tradition be damned. The question might be, is this really what she wants or is she being pressured?
I asked a divorce litigator for perspective and she responded with “If the stepfather is that important, the father shouldn’t even show up to this one. If the girl is a typical child of divorce there will be at least a couple more. By the third one she will be able to pay for a nice wedding herself with the child support and alimony collected from the first two marriages.”
What do readers here think? Is tradition (one father in the aisle at a time) more important than the bride’s preferences or vice versa?
[Backstory: The mother of the bride sued the father in California nearly two decades ago. As with 94 percent of California cases (Census March 2014 data), the mother was the winner in the winner-take-all system. Once she had established a claim to a share of a Silicon Valley salary at California child support guideline rates, she moved herself and the child to a low-cost-of-living part of the American South. At that point the father-daughter contact became infrequent and the stepmom described the situation as “He is pretty much an ATM.” Stepmom: “Mom collected relatively fat child support and a daycare allowance through high school, even though she didn’t have daycare from the age of 10.” The plaintiff mom eventually found a new companion who wanted to share in cashing checks from the defendant father and thus the cash-cow child acquired a stepdad. Both the mother and the stepfather have jobs, together earning more than the biological father. From the child’s perspective, however, the biological father remained the primary source of cash and the stepmom reports “she asked her dad to pay for the wedding.”]
I imagine it’s usually more like this story
https://m.reddit.com/r/offmychest/comments/1fl2xd/my_stepdaughter_wants_her_real_dad_to_give_her/
It’s up to the bride to decide. Period. End of discussion. She may (not necessary) consult other important people in her life for their opinion. But in the end, it’s her call. Presumably she is a grownup now. Reports to no one but her own conscience.
@paul,
It may be up to the bride to decide, but it’s up to dear ‘ol dad to agree to such a (IMO) silly request.
Question: How do they handle the question “Who gives this woman away?” Is dear ‘ol dad and moocher stepfather gonna say simultaneously: “We all do!” ???
PS
Dear ‘ol dad is nuts if he pays for the wedding. N-u-t-s.
The ATM should walk the bride down the aisle and hand her over to her new source of funding. Though I confess I’m not sure whether the ATM by that act can be considered once and for all closed?
The role of the step father seems unclear however. In some cases, adding all step fathers to walk down the aisle at a wedding may prove bothersome. In this particular case, step dad seems to be alone but didn’t even pay for the wedding, so that traditional role is closed to him. Is the bride by tradition entitled to have various freely chosen attendees as companions when walking down the aisle? Well, possibly since it’s “HER day” (even if paid by a third party). I’m afraid my limited knowledge of etiquette here finally fails me.
I disagree with “Beautiful! That’s what family is about”. No. The 2 men are not family. The dad ought to refuse to show up, if he is not going to be treated as the dad.
She should let the free market decide: whoever pays the most gets to walk her down the aisle.
The Reddit story was amusing, but is really different. The step-dad was being asked to pay for the wedding, but not even allowed to invite any of his friends.
The bridal giveaway is traditionally calculated using a formula that takes into account the greatest cashflow to Mom weighed against the smallest testicle size of the man involved.
ADMINISTRIVIA: while I’m glad to read the anonymized quotes from FB occasionally posted by Phil here, I do not want any of my words reposted there in whatever shape. This is hypertext, where every comment has its own unique direct URL, so use it.
THE… QUANDARY YOU POSTED IS SO FAR OFF MY MORAL SCALE, that I’m not sure that anything I write could be of use to anyone. Still, provided that I’ve gotten the across-state-lines-and-time-extended-families dynamic and dependencies right[*], here’s what I’d do: I’d write a letter to the bridegroom.
Dear Foo,
I understand that you intend to marry my biological daughter Bar. I suppose congratulations are in order, but before we get to it, I feel that you ought to know certain facts from Bar’s and mine family history. We’ve never met, so I’m not sure if you are open to such man-to-man disclosure from a stranger, but, as this letter’s aim is simply to provide you with a fuller picture of what (also) makes your beloved tick, you can always discount it after you read it.
While you probably have been told of Bar’s faraway biological father, I don’t suppose you’ve been made aware of the circumstances that led to her growing up with another father figure, her stepfather, around the household. In short, nearly 20 years ago, Bar’s mother X. petitioned the court for a divorce from me, and, as a result of it taking place in CA, and Bar herself having been conceived in the very state, X. ended up with a ma$$ive alimony and child support award totaling [$sum here] for the next NN years. The need to earn all that money, plus a bit more for my own existence, or else be held in contempt of court, has since governed my life in ways that definitely were not my life choices.
These heavy financial obligations to now support 2 people were of course not accompanied by any parental-veto or other gender-equality rights, as per the state’s juridical praxis of a child’s primary caregiver’s precedence over that of the secondary, spare parent’s-in-reserve (that is, should anything tragic happen to the primary). Having secured a stipulated luxury existence for herself and our daughter, Bar’s mother then moved thousands of miles away to a less expensive place in order to maximize her take. This directly prevented me from frequent, active participation in Bar’s upbringing, with her getting to know me primarily as a voice on the telephone, and faceless source of funds that allegedly were critical for her daily upkeep and fairy-tale-like life’s maintenance.
None of that was of course of Bar’s doing, she was just a child dependent on the whims of her mother and the presiding judge; but neither does it mean that it has left her untouched, that the court-mandated “finance constellation” she found herself in had no part in her later development. I wish I could state it differently, but despite my best attempts to balance her mother’s corrupting influence, that of a male companion always paying the bills, Bar grew up feeling no less entitled to be provided in life by someone else, than her rôle-model X. Perhaps “corruption” is too strong a word, but I can think of no weaker one that would express the cumulative effect of such ongoing “manna from heaven on tap” on a girl growing up with an ATM for a “father.”
Teenagers usually rebel against parentheses [apt word!] in one way or another; I certainly did, and still try not to repeat the errors of my folks… but Bar seems to have skillfully been steered past that stage and in the direction of emulating “financial savvy” ways of her mother’s. In any event, and despite my trying to make her see it from a novel p.o.v., the immorality of a child beeing used as both a meal ticket, a tool and a weapon wielded by one parent against the other, she finds that to be no cause for questioning her past. Because, had she done that, she’d have realized that, just as nobody has an obligation to love an ATM, so do the obligations of an ATM parent have an expiry date… and she has passed that way back already.
Lest you get the impression that I am only talking about the money, I hasten to assure you that it isn’t that which I resent the most, but the unjust, perverted way in which I’ve been made into a peon ostensibly for the sake of my own offspring (I pay taxes, too, but haven’t been able to learn to love the taxman either).
While I probably could have seen Bar a bit more than ultimately was the case, I felt that we were never given the opportunity to bond in a normal parent-child fashion, always contingent on X’s say-so, and thus never could become adult father and daughter. Maybe parental love should be less dependent on reciprocity than are the other kinds, I wouldn’t know; but I do know that a loving relation between any two grown-ups must build on sincerity and wholehearted mutual approval of, not on assumed societal and financial obligations of one towards the other (perhaps then in exchange for some form of servitude). That’s basically what has been broken in our case, and can not be mended from my side alone.
Bar’s my only child, so the “natural” way for me would be to leave her the lion’s share of my assets when I die. However, because of the way she’s been brought up, and thus far failed to acknowledge it, I now have to undertake a process of formally divesting myself of these assets in order to ensure that they end up where I want them to go, not whom some future probate judge may decide they belong to.
If my being brusque in regard to Bar’s immaturity shocks you, then I apologize, but I know that were I to wed a child of an absentee father, I’d at least try to find out the backstory of it. Just as I now also know what I didn’t before, that a no-fault-but-somehow-the-man-ends-up-paying-through-the-nose divorce means different things to wife, husband, and offspring, and not all of that pleasant despite the prospect of “being free again!”
You may of course question my motives for showing you, her intended companion, the little known side of Bar, but I assure you that I actually am concerned with her long-term welfare. Life with X. has not prepared her for standing on her own two feet, so the earlier she’s forced to face the dilemma of earning own upkeep, the better for her. As for your and her future together… if your love is strong enough, you have my blessings, but I’d still recommend you to get a vasectomy, or at the very least employ only Industrial Strength Trojan prophylactics, and to dispose of them in a secure non-recoverable fashion after use.
Your possibly future nominal father-in-law.
________________________________
(Needless to say, this would be the only acknowledgment of my estranged daughter’s request to “give her away” & on my own dime).
[^*] EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: a bride to be who was her divorced mother’s child support meal ticket asks the absentee biological-ATM father to pay for her wedding AND to walk her down the aisle together with the stepfather-part-beneficiary-of-that-ATM-largesse-over-the-years who raised her.