29 People Who Called Off Their Weddings At The Last Possible Minute

11.

“I had to call off a wedding two days before I was supposed to be married. I’m an Orthodox Jew, and was introduced to my fiancé through a friend’s husband. He was nice, well-mannered, seemed smart, and was from a nice family. As Orthodox Jews are encouraged to try not to drag out the dating process if we seem to match, we decided two weeks was enough time to start making wedding plans, and we were engaged three weeks into our relationship. I was over the moon, and happily launched into preparations for the wedding, which was to take place two months later. Only as we started to seriously discuss our future, I began to realize that he seemed to behave weirdly around his parents — his mother was a very dominating, controlling type. He completely allowed himself to be controlled by her.”

“Our conversations would be like:

‘Hey, there’s this wedding band I heard, they’re really good, let’s check them out.’

Him: ‘Oh, my mother just listened to them and didn’t like them. Let’s try another band.’

Or…’Hey, I found a really nice apartment to rent, what do you think?’

Him: ‘My father says the rent is too high, let’s keep looking.’

Things started to really go south the day after our engagement party, which my family organized. His mother actually called me and spent half an hour on the phone complaining that we had a buffett style meal spread rather than a sit down dinner, and that her older mother had no chair to sit on (a complete lie) and that my family was abusive to her son and dragged him around like a cow, when in reality my dad and brothers playfully pulled him to the dance floor to dance with him. I called my fiancé right after, and he said something like, ‘Yeah, your dad dragged me around and I felt disrespected.’

By this point, I was starting to second-guess my decision to marry him. I started to realize that something was more than a little off with him. He casually said something like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be interested in sex the night of our wedding.’ The breaking point came three days before the wedding, when he refused to go to a hotel the night of our wedding, since his parents felt it wasn’t important. His plan was to drag a few mattresses to our empty apartment and go there straight after our wedding. After asking why he was so adamant in his refusal to spend a wedding night like normal couples do, he gave excuses like ‘we can only have breakfast during breakfast hours,’ or ‘we can’t have coffee there whenever we feel like it.’ I hung up, frustrated, crying, and went to sleep. The next day, while telling my mother of those recent developments, she just looked at me and said, ‘It’s never too late to back out.’

In that moment of clarity, I decided to break it off, two days before the wedding, and immediately felt immensely relieved. He seemed to take the news incredibly well and didn’t try to ask me to reconsider. However, the next day, he sent everybody he knew to call me to try to get me to change my mind. His father, sisters, uncles, friends, rabbis, everyone. I simply stopped taking calls.

All in all, it was a huge mess. There were a lot of fights between my family and his, and until the day of the wedding, my fiancé kept trying to call me and get me to take him back. On top of that, certain ‘friends’ were calling me and telling me off that I was making a huge mistake and hurting my chances of getting married in the future. So were certain family members. However, I felt that I was making the right decision, and eventually everything blew over. 

This was ten years ago, when I was twenty. I haven’t been married yet, but I know when the time will come, it will happen.”

—Anonymous, Quora