Weddings are slow cookers full of potential agitation, wherein family, friends, finances, and fiancés all come together during months of planning and mingle together to create a terrible-tasting mess. Nine times out of ten, this nonsense actually isn’t about the wedding itself. In fact, the more complicated the fuss, the less likely it has anything to do with the bride, groom, or their nuptials.
From Michelle Singletary’s column in the Washington Post comes one such example involving a bride-to-be, her mother, and her aunt. A reader—let’s call her Anne—has a niece, whom we’ll call Catherine. Catherine is getting married and has a pricey registry full of “high-end” items like Kate Spade towels and $200 pots and pans. This doesn’t sit well with Aunt Anne for various reasons:
- Catherine—who, like her fiancé, is only employed part time—dropped out of college after a year and half and has not been responsible about paying off her student loans, loans on which Anne cosigned.
- When Anne reached out to her sister Mary (mother-of-the-bride) to express surprise at Catherine’s pricey wish list, Mary told Anne not to bother bother buying Catherine a gift off the registry. Instead, Mary advised Anne to just help pay down the student loans. Anne feels like a loan payment is a “weird” wedding gift.
- When Anne’s daughter (hell, let’s name her Elizabeth) got married, Mary didn’t give a gift.
Oh, hm—can you guess which one is the real issue here?
Objectively speaking, even if Anne thinks it’s odd to pay off some of Catherine’s debt in lieu of a registry gift, she’d be wise to at least consider it: Catherine’s failure to responsibly meet her financial obligations has hurt her aunt’s financial standing (Anne claims her credit score has dropped 100 points since cosigning on the doomed loans). Anne probably would be doing herself a favor if she got over her ideas of what constitutes a proper wedding gift and made a payment on the loan under the guise of a “gift” and called it a day.