There’s a lot to love about weddings. A celebration of love at its most simple, weddings have over time become big gatherings that allow families to get together, celebrations of two single people becoming one married family unit, and plenty of great food and drink to be shared through the night. Of course, there’s a lot that can be monotonous about a wedding too, but all in all if the music is good, the food is tasty, and the drink is flowing, there’s very little to complain about.

For the happy couple, of course, the wedding day is a huge moment in their lives. While some approach the day pragmatically, knowing that it’s just a drop in the ocean of their relationship as a whole and treating it as such, the majority of folk – whether by their own or their parents’ wills – work hard to make their wedding day potentially the happiest day of their lives. And why shouldn’t they? Because when you discover a love so strong that you know it’s everlasting, that’s absolutely something to celebrate.

The woman in this story is really looking forward to marrying her fiancé, and has put a lot of effort and money into planning the celebrations. Central to that is her wedding dress, which she saved hard to afford and looks forward to wearing properly for the first time on her special day. So imagine her shock when she returns home and her dress isn’t where she left it – and the horror when she sees where it is now.

Read on to find out what happened here.

AITA for giving my future mother-in-law three days to pay me for a new wedding dress, or else I show the family a photo of her wearing it?

I’m getting married to my fiancé soon, and I bought my wedding dress weeks ago.

His mother (my future mother-in-law) kept pestering me about trying it on, but I firmly refused.

I finally shut it down after she offered me $100 to let her try it on.

Her reasoning for persisting so much? She says it’s because of her “love” for wedding dresses, and her obsession with them.

But this situation was about to get a whole lot weirder.

Fast forward to yesterday, I came home from work early and I found my fiancé at home.

He freaked out after seeing me, and tried to prevent me from going into my room while trying to text somebody on his phone.

I opened the door and was shocked to see his mom standing there wearing my dress.

I instantly pulled out my phone and took a photo of her in it.

Yikes! Let’s see what happened next.

She and my fiancé freaked out after I told her that she needed to pay me for a new dress in three days, or else I’d show the whole family the photo.

She started crying and then left, and my fiancé blew up at me saying I can’t be serious, and that I overreacted because his mom just wanted to try the dress on, no harm done.

But I refused to listen to him because in my opinion, the dress should only be worn by the bride and the bride only.

Quite frankly, I felt disgusted looking at the dress again, I don’t want it anymore – and so I think it’s fair that she pays me after she ruined it for me.

And this has caused some serious conflict for this couple.

He yelled at me and told me to wake up and stop treating his mom like that as if she was an enemy. We had a fight after he failed to get me to back down, and he’s been staying with his mom since then.

I felt awful, but I spent $3,000 on this dress and worked hard to get it, but now I can’t stand looking at it.

People in my family think I’m escalating things and risking my relationship with not only future mother-in-law, but my fiancé as well.

AITA?

Of course she’s escalating things – because not one bit of this is okay.

The mother-in-law trying on the wedding dress is beyond creepy for starters, but the fact that she colluded with her son on the plan?

But the biggest kicker is the fact that this woman’s fiancé is defending his mom over his future wife, which is a huge red flag in itself.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a mom who is irate after she gave a group leader money for her daughter’s lunch, only to have him pocket the cash and ask all of the kids to pay their own way.

Let’s see what folk on Reddit made of this.

This person agreed that the future husband’s reaction was a huge issue.

While others really spelled out how much he let her down.

Meanwhile, this Redditor encouraged her to call off the engagement entirely.

You can like wedding dresses all you want, but no person should ever be trying on someone else’s wedding dress without permission – and especially not before the wedding happens. That is her dress, and unless she’s knowingly buying it second-hand, she should be the first person to wear it. After all, a person’s wedding day is special and, for better or for worse, the dress is a huge part of that and something that many girls romanticise even from being a small child. So seeing her future mother-in-law in her wedding dress wouldn’t have just felt disheartening, it was a huge betray of trust.

And sure, her future husband thinks she’s making a big deal out of nothing – but that’s exactly the problem. Maybe the wedding dress wasn’t a big thing for him, but if it’s important to his fiancée, then it should be important to him too. Not in a false way, in a protecting and respecting the things that matter to his fiancée kind of way. This doesn’t just mean having her back when she insists his mother pays for a new one – this means not allowing his mother to try on his future bride’s dress in the first place.

Either this guy has no backbone whatsoever, meaning that his mother is going to dominate the rest of his life – and his future wife’s life – until he finds one, or his mother and her wishes are more important to him than his future wife’s. Neither of which are a recipe for a happy marriage. It’s no wonder she’s upset.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man whose celebratory post-grad school vacation is being ruined by his family’s insistence he’s being lazy.