Usually, engagements are celebrated with champagne, group chats flooding with congratulations, and friends immediately asking to be in the wedding party. Others reveal very quickly exactly which people in your life were never really in your corner to begin with. The guest list has a way of doing that, separating the people who show up from the people who won’t show up ever again.
One man got engaged, made an announcement, and spent the weeks that followed blocking people and shrinking his side of the guest list down to almost nothing. His fiancée kept asking why his list was so small. The answer he eventually gave her brought them closer together than any guest list ever could.
The choice to be intimate before marriage is one that a lot of people feel they are allowed to have opinions about
Gaurav Vishwakarma / Pexels (not the actual photo)
When this groom announced his engagement, his friends thought they were allowed to run their mouths about the bride, who they knew came with a past
Kishan Rahul Jose / Pexels (not the actual photo)
The bride and groom were friends in school, but the bride was known to be a little more promiscuous than would normally be accepted in their culture
Kateryna Hliznitsova / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
They eventually lost touch but ran into each other years later, both admitting to have found religion in a more meaningful way
Taha Samet Arslan / Pexels (not the actual photo)
The man accepted her past and decided to propose, maintaining his virginity and being honest with his new fiancée about his feelings about her past
Aakash Malik / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
When he announced his engagement, his friends started badmouthing his bride, and he asked the internet if he should tell her about their behaviour and why they are not on the guest list anymore
Aakash Malik / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Following the internet’s advice, he was honest with his bride-to-be, explaining that their relationship was more important than friendships
Together they worked on the guest list again, ensuring everyone who was invited would make them comfortable and truly help them celebrate their love
Only about 3% of Americans wait until marriage to be intimate, so his choice to wait might seem very bizarre to most people. But in South Asian cultures, the numbers flip completely. Studies suggest that only around 3% of unmarried women report having premarital relations, though that figure rises to between 30% and 40% among urban, educated women.
There is a huge burden of cultural expectations placed on young people, especially young women, and the shame that accompanies that expectation is exactly what drove her family to walk out on her. He, by contrast, chose to stay and never judge her, a remarkable attribute in this context.
Research published in the Journal of Family Psychology found that genuinely accepting a partner’s past has a boomerang effect. When one person truly accepts the other, it increases the other person’s satisfaction in the relationship, which loops back and improves the first person’s relationship health too. He accepted her fully; she felt it, and their relationship will most likely be much stronger because of it.
Ivan S / Pexels (not the actual photo)
The dynamic of one partner having significantly more experience than the other is far more common than most people admit, and how couples navigate it also tends to say a lot about the maturity of the relationship. He handled it about as well as anyone could, by being honest, by not judging, and by recognising that who she was then and who she is now are two different things.
Cornell philosopher Kate Manne argues in her book “Entitled” that a lot of the judgment men direct at women’s intimate histories is not really about morality at all. It is about a deeply ingrained belief that a woman’s physical attention is something a man is owed, and that a history of giving it elsewhere represents a kind of loss.
The men who sent him horrible messages after his engagement announcement were not protecting him. They were expressing that framework out loud, and he was right to block every single one of them.
Do you think he did the right thing by writing those friends off? Tell us in the comments!
Commenters congratulated the groom for making the right choice, saying his honesty surely brought them closer as a couple
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