Help! My Brother’s Fiancée Asked Me Not to Come to the Wedding. I Plan to Retaliate.
Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here.
Dear Prudence,
My brother is marrying a woman who really doesn’t like me. The feeling is mutual. We normally just avoid each other. I recently received an invitation to their wedding for myself and a plus one. Shortly afterward, my future sister-in-law called to ask me not to come, as my presence would be a sour note on her special day. I would be happy to oblige but I like my brother and I know he would want me to be there and would be hurt if I wasn’t. I feel like she is outsourcing a conversation that she needs to have with him.
Would it be wrong of me to call my brother and simply tell him that she privately asked me not to attend their wedding and I intend to honor that request but that I would love to organize his stag? Or is that merely seeking conflict, particularly as my instinct is to take him to Vegas and bury him alive in cocaine and strippers?
—Well… You, Too
Dear Well,
Absolutely tell him what his fiancée said. You two don’t like each other, so she’d be nuts to think that you would keep a secret on her behalf. And don’t jump so quickly to honor her request! He might ask you to be there, in which case, you should show up (with an agreed-upon backup plan for how you’ll handle it if the bride makes a scene).
But this is the part where I’m going to ask you to behave more maturely than you feel, and take the high road: Do not retaliate by offering to plan a debaucherous weekend that could put your brother’s relationship at risk. You’ll solidify your reputation as an enemy of their union, and potentially give her a real reason to dislike you. You might even irritate your brother, if he perceives that you’re not just celebrating him but actively hoping to erode his connection with the woman he loves. You don’t want that, especially if their marriage lasts a while or a lifetime. There are too many family holidays in your future. Attend the bachelor party but follow the lead of whoever’s organizing it, even if you spend the whole time secretly fantasizing about an annulment.
Sometimes even Prudence needs a little help. This week’s tricky situation is below. Submit your comments about how to approach the situation here to Jenée, and then look back for the final answer here on Friday.
Dear Prudence,
I’ve been married for over 30 years. My husband has been retired for six months. We’ve spent the last two years working out career/retirement decisions for the “golden” phase of our life. To keep working or retire was a big question for my spouse. I voted for retirement. The biggest thorn in these conversations has been, and still is, my husband’s relationship with his previous colleague. They met over 15 years ago when he was developing a new community project for his work. She was employed elsewhere and he worked really hard to get her employed at his agency so they could collaborate, which he did.
While I respect the good community work they’ve achieved over the years, I’ve felt uncomfortable and bothered by the intimate and (in my opinion) flirtatious manner in which they speak. (Within these last 15 years, I worked seven of them in the same community with her and my husband and tried to develop a friendship with her during this time, to no avail. A couple of family members who met her said she seemed flirty and interested in my husband for more than work. Since I had not mentioned how I felt, I became bold with their validation, and I have to admit, I became especially negative toward her and her intentions.)
The last two years of conversation have included me stating my discomfort (and anger) and asking him to step away from their relationship, especially since he is now retired. I feel that I sacrificed enough time and attention for myself and our kids to these great community works over the years. It was and is important work for the community; I’ve never doubted that. I believe my spouse when he says he hasn’t slept with her, but I also strongly feel she would jump at the chance to be with him romantically if she could.
I said last March, when he retired, enough is enough. I asked him to cut all future work ties and communications with this woman for six months to give her a chance to find her own feet in the agency and to give him a chance to decide what he wants to do with his life. I told him, without anger, that if he wanted to continue his community work, I’d step away from the marriage so he could do so, but that I couldn’t stay and take any more of the drama and politics of the work, but I especially couldn’t take feeling like this woman is a third wheel in our marriage.
With counseling (for me) and what feels like a million conversations, we are at a really good place. Some moments feel like we are dating again. I honestly remember why I fell in love with him and am excited about our future. The problem is he won’t tell this woman to stop calling and texting. She’s asked him if he “really wants to quit” the committees, boards, and LLC they’ve created. He said he does. We don’t go more than three weeks without her checking in. When she contacts my spouse, I can tell right away because of the change in his disposition. He’s edgy, preoccupied, and more argumentative. I don’t want that in our relationship anymore. I tie it directly to his previous job and this woman. I said in late 2020, if she’s your best friend and you need her in your life, then invite her to dinner so we can all get on the same page, so I can squash these feelings of jealousy and neglect. I was told she’s a work colleague and nothing more. Yet still, she calls…Help!
—Third Wheel Angst
Dear Prudence,
I recently got a puppy and gave him a very common name. A family member is upset because they had a pet named the same as what I chose. I have been asked to change his name. I don’t care to do this but I don’t want to cause friction with this person. Your thoughts?
—Puppy Love
Dear Puppy Love,
This is what you call an unreasonable request. Your puppy already knows his name! Moreover, you chose it because you like it. If you want to be generous, you could tell your family member that you’ll refrain from discussing the dog in front of them, or you can invite them to make up a nickname to use. They can call him little Max II.
Dear Prudence,
My wife of 20 years has finally turned the corner over the last year and I am too resentful to enjoy it. She’s had pretty high levels of anxiety and depression for all of our marriage. She has very few friendships, and was only close to her parents who recently passed away over the last two years (one year apart). She never tried treatment, or to get help for her illness. For the seven years prior to her parents passing away, she showed me no affection in any way as she cared for them. I clearly communicated that this was an issue, and thought about leaving, but I didn’t at the time because of our young kids, and frankly, I didn’t want to look like the bad guy for leaving her when she was in a tough situation caring for her parents at the end. (Yeah, I should have just manned up.) She refused help from anyone, and I wasn’t a priority—just her parents and the kids. I am a more than involved father, doing bedtime, homework, appointments, all sports, and much of the home’s upkeep.
Now she is happy again for the first time in a decade, and made a career move that was really great for her. However, when my mother and father passed away she didn’t travel with me to their funerals, and didn’t help me with resolving any of their estates. After seven years of no contact, and doing my own thing with the kids, I shut down my desires for her. Now she thinks I must be looking elsewhere, but the reality is that I am so resentful about the last seven years that I can’t enjoy her being what I wanted all along. Do you think I should just leave or try therapy? I can’t ever see my feelings returning so I don’t see the point.
—Too Resentful to Enjoy
Dear Too Resentful to Enjoy,
After 20 years of marriage, therapy is worth trying. If your feelings don’t return (and I could understand if they didn’t), your sessions can serve as a place to navigate and negotiate the end of your relationship and plan a path forward that is as easy as possible on each of you and on your kids. The best-case scenario will be that you receive a sincere apology, you learn more about your wife’s experience over the past two decades, and you begin to feel your resentment fade away. After suffering in a one-sided marriage with a miserable spouse for so long, you owe yourself the opportunity to see if there’s a way you might enjoy this new version of your wife and the experience of having a partner who’s really present. But you also deserve a smooth and low-drama separation if it turns out that the relationship is beyond repair.
Dear Prudence,
I’m dating a much younger lady and the first couple of years were great. For some reason, she never gave me the handle for any of her social media. Of course, this piqued my interest and with the help of a few keywords, I quickly found her Twitter account. And over time our relationship from her perspective has gone from loving to her actually pretty much admitting to sleeping with someone—admitting that she “loved it” while continuing to keep up appearances with me. Do I just end this abruptly or do I have to shove her words in her face while doing it because I feel betrayed?
—Betrayed By X
Dear Betrayed By X,
You are welcome to do either, as long as you end it.
Dear Prudence,
I have known this guy for about a year now. We met in May of 2023 while I was swiping through Tinder looking for a causal relationship. I was very hesitant at first to meet him, as I was very hurt by a previous relationship and wasn’t sure if I was ready for a new one. It also didn’t help that he lived two hours away in another state. I eventually met him and we clicked instantly! We dated for a few months before he decided that it wasn’t going to work and broke it off. He wanted very different things in life than I did, so I don’t blame him.
After a couple of months of going no contact, we ended up spending time together when he visited my town with mutual friends of ours. Again, we instantly clicked and since then, we have continued to grow close. In fact, we now consider each other best friends, maybe even siblings, as we call each other brother or sister from time to time. Due to the distance, when we hang out it’s often for a few days and nights. I have to admit we do share the same bed when we see each other, although we do not touch one another. Recently, he has been seeing other women and I do find myself feeling jealous, especially if we haven’t seen each other in a while. I have expressed how this has made me feel to him and even explained that I don’t have those intimate feelings for him anymore. These feelings have become very confusing to me and I am genuinely worried that it will affect our relationship or how close we are in the future. What do I do, Prudence? How can I tell if I love him as a best friend or something more?
—Friend Zoned
Dear Friend Zoned,
OK, first of all, please stop referring to each other as brother and sister. That’s a transparent (and somewhat disturbing, given the sleeping arrangements and the jealous feelings) attempt to put a legitimate label on a failed romantic pairing. You don’t love this guy as a best friend or as something more. The answer is neither!
Your desires, attraction, and communication are all misaligned. There are a lot of different definitions of love out there, but few of them involve deciding it isn’t going to work, breaking up, wanting different things, and faking a platonic relationship, and losing all “intimate feelings,” followed by one person dating others while the other person gets jealous but still isn’t sure exactly how they feel. This isn’t your soulmate—he’s just a person who you click with in some (but not enough) ways. Stepping away from that little bit of attraction and compatibility and the attachment you’ve developed to him will be tough, but on the other hand, it frees up your time and energy for a potential relationship that involves a lot more enjoyment and a lot less confusion. Fire up Tinder again.
I have had a best friend for over a decade. He is fabulously gay, in his 50s, has a house in an expensive city and a vacation home on the coast, and we have been through a lot together. I thought we were extremely close; we would talk almost daily. I got married in November, and since it was going to be a tiny COVID wedding, my then-fiancé and I decided to only invite family.
