Parents should know their kids better than anyone. I wouldn’t expect a mother or a father to be able to predict their kid’s every move, especially in adulthood, but I do expect that when their kid tells their parents who they are, they listen. The mom in this story didn’t do that with her 24-year-old daughter, who said she didn’t want a proper wedding after getting engaged to her fiancee. Her daughter, Lynn, is an alternative in many senses of the word; she graduated college for the first time at 16, has tattoos and piercings, and fully marches to the beat of her own drum. She reluctantly agreed to a wedding after her mom pressured her into it, but after one dispute over the flowers, she quickly went home and eloped. While her dad understands why she did that, her mom can’t get over her devastation over the elopement.
When I first watched My Best Friends Wedding, I was kind of shocked that the titular best friend was marrying a 20-year-old undergraduate, aka Cameron Diaz. I know it’s not necessarily unethical for a 28-year-old to marry somebody in their early 20s, but I can still think it’s weird and that Julia Roberts was a much better option.
Once someone is 18, they can marry whoever they want without their parent’s consent. Any schmuck can walk down to the courthouse and get officially “married,” but most people want a bigger production that costs a bit more than that. If a young couple is going to get their dream wedding with all the frills, they’re probably going to need some money from their parents to make it all happen. The dad at the center of this story is refusing to pay for his daughter’s wedding because she is Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend’s Wedding and he can’t accept a Dermot Mulroney husband just yet.
We’ve all heard of bridezillas, and some of us have encountered them in real life. It’s easy to think of a bridezilla as an unrepentant and unreasonable monster who wants it her way or the highway, no matter how unreasonable her way is. While those brides do exist, it’s much more likely for a bride to be unreasonable for a reason that’s sympathetic if you know the context. Maybe a million family members are whispering in her ear, telling her that her wedding has to be perfect, or else. She might’ve spent her life’s savings on this one day, and anything short of exactly what she wants would feel like an absurd waste of money. Or perhaps she’s feeling bad about her self-image and doesn’t want there to be photos of her big day because of how insecure she’s feeling. As unusual as it sounds, the latter scenario is what happened to this bride.