My Husband’s Bachelor Party Almost Ended in My Brothers’ Deaths. Now the Drama Is Threatening My Wedding.

Dear Prudence This really took a turn. Advice by Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Jenée Desmond-Harris? Sept 24, 20266:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here. Dear Prudence, My family are all tiny, fiery Mediterranean people who love to get up in people’s faces and ask “whaddaya gonna do ‘bout it?” My boyfriend is a massive Viking, well over two meters tall and built. He’s also very calm, gentle even, and typically responds to my brothers with something like, “Well, I’d slap the stupid out of you but there’d be nothing left.” Hey, it works. The problem came at his stag party. My brothers got loud-mouthed and aggressive with some of my beau’s less forgiving kin while drunk. It turned into a confrontation, and my brothers quickly learned that their Latin posturing wasn’t going to save them. My boyfriend stepped in, smoothed things out, and prevented them both from getting murdered, but they came home absolutely terrified. Apparently, grabbing a massive, tattooed bearded blonde man by the shirt front and calling him a “mother***a” … not the best idea. Anyway, my brothers are now threatening to boycott my wedding and insisting that they don’t want to be around my boyfriend or his family and friends ever again. “They’re scary.” My parents and much of my family are laughing at them but the narrative is developing that my boyfriend is somehow aggressive, which is simply not true. This entire situation is the product of my brother’s bravado and general assumption, based on years of experience, that they can get away with threatening and rude behavior. I don’t really know how to proceed. Do I need to even address this? Or do I just leave it to time and others in my family to remind my idiot siblings that they’re, well, idiots? I don’t want to wake up in 10 years and not have a relationship with them, but I am also aware that they’ve been asking for this for their entire lives. —Little Dogs Bark Loudest Dear Little Dogs, Mediterraneans! Vikings! Latin! Blonde! The many ethnic and cultural references running through this piece are distracting from the core issue, which is that your brothers almost got assaulted and—whether or not they had in fact been asking for it their whole lives or deserved it in that moment—don’t want that to happen again. Assuming they are still, as you put it, “idiots,” and assuming your fiancé’s cousin or whoever it was is still a person who had to be physically stopped from murdering them, they may be on to something. A reunion of a bunch of men who don’t have good conflict resolution skills and whose inhibitions are lowered by alcohol could legitimately go poorly for the “tiny and fiery” contingent. It’s easy for you to say they should get over it when they fear for their physical safety. Tell them you really want them to be there, but you’ll respect that they don’t feel comfortable attending. Then just hope the two toxic masculinity contingents can work things out at some point after the big day. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don’t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Prudence, My husband and I recently had a conversation with his sister about why he does not enjoy spending time with my family. It was lighthearted about it and I laughed along as he explained how he struggled with the chaos of my parents and siblings. He described how during a visit we would, for example, negotiate a plan/set a departure time for the next day, and he would then find himself waiting earnestly and expectantly for three hours that morning as we all got organized, only for someone to wander off, triggering a massive exodus that took another hour. I nodded along and sniggered when he said that the “worst part is that they all believe, completely, that we will be doing the things that we agreed to do, and the only one who has any doubts is me.” That is all true. The next day, though, I sat and thought about how he’s gritted his teeth through our process for more than two decades. How I’ve always known that he grins and bears it for me. That he hates every single minute he spends with us, passionately, because the idea of planning something and not seeing it through is completely alien to him and the inevitable dysfunction pains him deeply. This is a man who gets things done, so milling about aimlessly is frustrating and dull for him. I followed up with him, and he admitted that he’d rather go to the dentist than plan something with my parents and that he finds my family irritating and tedious. It’s something that I knew intuitively but have never really internalized, and now I am at a loss as to how to proceed. My family often quibble at my husband’s distance and what they see as his unwillingness to engage, but I have never really explored that with him, and now that I know part of the reason is that I am really reluctant to find out more. It would be a huge issue if he stopped coming to visit my folks, but at the same time, I can’t in good conscience keep pushing him to do something he hates doing, despite never complaining until now. What should I do? —Square Peg Dear Square Peg, Perspective, please. There’s a pretty big gap between “irritating and tedious” and “He hates every single minute he spends with us, passionately … it pains him deeply.” I think you’re over-dramatizing how negative your husband’s reaction is because you (understandably) find it upsetting that he struggles to enjoy himself around your loved ones. I’m sure the fact that he wasn’t totally open about his feelings before has you reeling, too. But while he has admitted that he doesn’t enjoy the experience of watching them try to execute a plan, this feels like it falls pretty solidly into the normal range of in-law annoyance. Different families do things differently and dealing with quirks that are not the same ones you grew up with can be difficult. That’s OK. I speak from experience. There’s a similar Type A planner (me) vs. Type B planner thing going on with me and my in-laws. I have expressed to my husband that I find it mind-blowing that when we visit, there is rarely a conversation about what is going to happen the next day. Instead, everyone gets up in the morning and does his or her own thing, and then at some point in the early afternoon reveals what they have in mind as far as group meals, activities, or visits.It’s no big surprise that these agendas often conflict, and are at times impossible at that point because various people live 40-to-60 minutes away from each other and have often become tied up with their own itineraries. On one infamous occasion my mother-in-law asked us around noon if anyone was interested in eating a particular meal for lunch. We were hungry and said yes. We spent the next five hours waiting in the living room for her to do a shopping trip that turned out to be very involved and then prepare the food. Meanwhile, the aunt who was also invited waited with us and showed us multiple episodes of the YouTube show “Soft White Underbelly,” which involves the most depressing interviews you can imagine with the most marginalized people in our country, to pass the time. So we were sitting there starving hearing the story of a teen prostitute. I was admittedly miserable—probably slightly more miserable than my husband was because I come from a “Would you like to come over three months from now, on Easter, between 12:30 and 12:45 pm and can you bring a salad” family where you know exactly what is going to happen and when. But here’s the thing: I was allowed to make this known and we can even joke about it because he knows I love his family, and that love can exist alongside things like wishing I knew when I was going to eat. We would have a problem here if your husband: Said he deeply hated your relatives; picked fights or made cruel remarks; stormed out of the house in a huff every time the departure didn’t happen at the agreed-upon time; or sat around getting drunk to deal with the delays. Instead, he’s just having a little bit of a bad and judgy feeling. The fact that he’s been showing up regardless is actually a good thing. An act of love, if you will. And this act of love doesn’t have to be as torturous as he’s making it out to be. In my case, when visiting my in-laws, I try to embrace the free-flowing agenda, reminding myself that I don’t actually have anything else to do. And I make sure to go ahead and eat something when I’m hungry now that I understand the time that can elapse between being offered a meal and eating the meal. Similarly, your husband can adjust. He should join the exodus and wander off to somewhere he likes, like a favorite local coffee shop. He’s free to use the chaotic downtime to catch up on work—or better, chat with some of your family members. In fact, it would be great if he could challenge himself to meet a higher standard than simply not complaining, and actually engage in civilized adult conversation despite the fact that things aren’t going his way. Remember, nothing about this situation is as heavy as you seem to feel it is except perhaps his checking out to the extent that people feel rejected by him. Saying something like, “I know my family being all over the place when it comes to plans drives you nuts. Thank you for dealing with them! Do you think this time you could use some of the waiting time to chat a little bit with my dad, and maybe ask him about his golf game or something? It would mean a lot to me if you could engage with people despite being irritated. Thanks, and next weekend I want to make it up to you by doing something you like.” Want more Prudie? Slate Plus members get an additional column each week. Sign up for Slate Plus now. Dear Prudence, One year ago, I won a few thousand dollars on a scratch ticket. I invested most of it, but set aside $500 to take a close friend out to a fancy omakase restaurant we had always dreamt of visiting, as a treat for both of us and a thank you for her years of friendship. A few days before our reservation date, my friend had to cancel (for completely valid reasons) and asked to reschedule. I tried to reschedule the dinner a few times over the course of the next month but she was always busy. I started to feel like I was begging to take her out for a fancy dinner, so I dropped it. She never brought it up again, and after six months I used the money for a few small home improvement projects. Now it’s been nearly a year, and the other day she reached out to ask if we could finally go out for the omakase dinner. The restaurant’s prices have increased to $300 per person, not including drinks, taxes, or gratuity. I was honest that I spent the money months earlier, and the restaurant is now completely out of my price range. I told her I’d be happy to take her for a nice sushi dinner elsewhere if we could keep the bill around $150 (which is more than enough for a VERY nice sushi dinner where we live). She was very upset and said that she didn’t know that my offer had a time limit, and that I should have asked her one more time before spending “our” omakase money. I suppose I could have, but after repeated unsuccessful attempts to reschedule, I thought I was taking the hint by not bringing it up again. Was I really out of line to not wait longer? What, if anything, do I owe her now? —Sushi Snaffoo Dear Sushi Snaffoo, She’s being ridiculous, and you don’t owe her a thing. Not a single thing. Except maybe the life lesson that making demands and being ungrateful is not a good way to get friends to want to spend their time and money with you. Take someone else to the sushi dinner. Classic Prudie We recently went to a clinical psychologist to help save our family. We were worried about our daughter, and she asked for counseling. Without going into all the details of her habitual lying and reckless behavior that is out of her norm, the doctor turned to my daughter and told her she was absolutely perfect! Repeatedly. Advice Dear Prudence