So, I'm new here and I apologize for the long post ahead but appreciate any help/advice you could give! I am recently engaged and I cannot wait to marry the love of my life. It took a long time for us to find the perfect venue that had our date available. We are getting married on October 5th of 2019 and we knew we had to have that date since it happens to be our dating anniversary. We thought it was perfect that it falls on a Saturday in 2019. Both of our families knew that was our ideal date and when we put our deposit down, I was over the moon. Come to find out, the day we put our deposit down was the same day his sister got engaged. Her and her FH have been dating for a while now but are still relatively young, only two years out of college. We knew they'd be getting engaged but had no idea that it was going to happen at the beginning of this year. My future SIL is extremely kind but can be very selfish since she is the youngest of four and the only daughter in the family. Here’s where the problems begin.
Shortly after SIL gets engaged, my FH and I went to dinner at our in-laws. My mother-in-law went on to talk about how her daughter was in a really hard place because she doesn't want to upset us if she gets married first and then she proceeded to ask us to change our wedding date. She knew how stressful the process was for us to find a perfect venue and she knew the significance behind our date... Even if there was no significance, that's not something you ask your son and future daughter-in-law to do. Obviously, I was very hurt by that but my FH handled it well. The conversation keeps going on about certain things we are comfortable with and addressing any of our concerns. My FH and I, his parents, and my future sister-in-law established that August and September were off limits for the two of them. This would give some relief to the family members that are in both or attending both weddings. I was not the most thrilled with that decision, I would have liked there to be more than just two months time but understand that I don't own the calendar and I cannot expect them to put their lives on hold because of our upcoming wedding. Future SIL is also a school teacher so I can understand why she want her wedding to happen when she does not have school.
On Easter Sunday, we went to my family for lunch and his family for dessert. We overhead his sister talking to his aunt and uncle (who they are not that close to) about a certain venue and how much she loved it. At first, I was excited that she appears to have found her perfect place but my fiance was not thrilled at all. She is in our wedding and knew of all of our details as soon as they came to be and we somewhat expected the same. She left to go to her FH’s side of the family and we spent some time talking to my FH’s parents to figure things out since she never clued us in on anything. Turns out, she wanted to get married in June because that would give a good chunk of time between our dates but was having trouble finding a venue that had any Saturday availability in that month. She falls in love with this one venue and although she hasn’t booked a date yet, she’s considering Saturday, August 10th or 17th even though the venue has all Saturdays available in July. We were dumbfounded and we didn’t even know how to process this information. When we got home, we started discussing the entire situation and identified what bothered us and what was information we wanted to find out.
Here are our major concerns that we do need to address with my in-laws but are somewhat struggling with exactly how we want to do that. First, we were under the impression that August and September were off the table. Maybe that was a misunderstanding but we don’t think it was and we would like to know why this has suddenly changed. Regarding school vacation periods, there are other times when school is not in session (We live in the northeast where kids get a week in February and April, there’s Thanksgiving break and even winter break). Why not pick another time? Without any reasoning from her or her fiance, it appears to the two of us that they simply want to beat us to it. I’m afraid that this entire process, which is supposed to be a wonderful time in my FH and I’s relationship, will be focused on her wedding and then everything regarding ours will be crammed into the less than two months in between. I’m not one for all of the attention on me but I’ve been looking forward to this process for a very long time now and I know neither my fiance or I want to be considered an afterthought. I also don’t want this to become a competition but his family is very competitive. I can see his sister wanting or doing certain things just to “one up” us.
I do have to say the biggest problem we have is that we found out about this through the grapevine essentially and there was very little consideration for us. My best friend got engaged about a month after I did and when I texted her our date, she was excited for us. All of a sudden, she is strongly considering November 2019 and asked me if I was okay with that because she did not want to “crowd” my wedding date or offend me in any way. This did not bother me one bit, I was even happier for her after she asked me because I thought it was extremely considerate. When I told my FH about this, the look on his face absolutely killed me because his sister did not do the same. They were very close growing up and still somewhat are.
At this point, I’m no longer mad about the situation on my own behalf but rather the disregard of my fiance’s feelings by his own family. All of this to say, does anyone have any experience with this type of situation? I’m open to any advice or suggestions.
*If any of this appears to be confusing please let me know. I understand this is a long post and does have a lot of information packed in. I easily could have left important information.
