“He just doesn’t listen.” My wife and I were sat in the living room of one of her friends, listening to her talking about her upcoming wedding. Her dad had recently turned up to one of her other friends’ weddings unannounced because he wanted to see his daughter in her bridesmaid’s dress. “I told him not to come and he did anyway, and now he’s convinced that we are going to do our own choreographed dad/daughter dance – even though I have told him it’s not happening every time he’s brought it up.”
It was a familiar feeling. When we planned our wedding, there were moments when I also felt unheard. Never to the extent of being forced to participate in a two-person flashmob, but still. One moment that sticks with me is my wife and her parents all being adamant about the date our wedding should be on. Instead of leaving it to us, as a couple, to decide, I felt that it was three against one and therefore my motion had been lost. I was then accused of being rude when I left the table we were eating lunch at, which I still, to this day, believe was the only thing I could have done to stop myself flipping the homemade tomato soup in the air. It was no longer an argument about what day the wedding was on – it was feeling like the control of my own wedding was slipping through my fingers.