My Fiancé Freaked Out When I Put My Last Name on Our Wedding Website
Blending traditions when you get married isn’t always easy, but if you’re unwilling to compromise it's darn near impossible. One woman is really worried that her relationship is kaput after her very inflexible fiancé kicked her out of their apartment for trying to use her maiden name on their wedding invitation.
The Original Poster’s fiancé is more religious than she is.
As she explained in a post on Reddit's r/JUSTNoSO forum, the OP’s mother is Jewish but her father is not, but she was still “raised fully Jewish.”
“I went to a reform synagogue, went to Hebrew school multiple times a week until I was 14 and was bat-mitzvahed,” she explained in the post. “My family celebrates the high holidays [Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur].
She grew up in a very diverse neighborhood.
“There were a handful of Jewish people but I am also friends with people of other religions and races,” she explained. “I have never been one to discriminate.”
It was a far cry from her fiancé’s upbringing. He grew up in an “insular community of modern-Orthodox Persian Jews.”
In her husband’s culture, it’s expected among parents that their children will marry other children from within the community.
If their partner isn’t Persian, it’s still a bit taboo “but is more or less accepted.”
“Marrying non-Jewish is completely unacceptable, frowned upon and results in being disowned or cut off by your family and community,” she explained.
Of course, the OP had no idea about any of this when they met five years ago.
She’s slowly learned the rules of the community over time.
“I looked past it because we both loved each other and I did not feel the severity of the rules in the community applied much to our relationship since we are both Jewish,” she wrote. “I developed a relationship with his family and with time, they became accepting of our relationship.”
Recently the OP got down to business creating their wedding website — but she ran into a problem she never anticipated.
Her last name.
“Since my father is not Jewish, I do not have a Jewish last name. It is Italian,” she explained. And this became a big deal to her fiancé.
“He freaked out and said there is no way that my last name can appear on any of the wedding materials or anywhere on the day of the wedding,” she wrote. “The reason being is that he will be shunned (more or less) from everyone in his community if my last name or my parents’ full names appear on the invitation as-is because it gives off the impression that we are inter-marrying.”
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. According to Jewish law, 'Judaism is a matrilineal religion,' she explained.
That means if your mother is Jewish, “you are Jewish” — no matter what your last name is.
“Orthodox rabbis would NOT be willing to marry two people that are partaking in an intermarriage,” she explained. “The people in his community are very observant of Judaism and should not be ignorant to any of this.”
In the OP’s eyes, it was pretty clear what their deal was.
But her fiancé was so concerned with what everyone else would think that he asked her to use her mother’s maiden name on their wedding website — not her father’s last name. But that was not an option either.
“My parents are divorced and it is completely outlandish to expect my dad to take my mom's maiden name on the invitation,” she wrote.
The OP tried to explain how all of this made her feel, “which resulted in fighting, him taking away the engagement ring he gave me, kicking me out of the apartment, and giving me an ultimatum that he is unwilling to go through with the relationship and marriage unless the last name is hidden to avoid giving people in the community the impression that I am not Jewish (even though I am).”
Then her fiancé made things worse by calling her father and begging him to accept the plan he’d come up with.
He even told the OP’s father that his last name “sounded too catholic” — “which my dad found completely disrespectful and insulting,” she shared.
This all happened about five weeks ago, and the OP’s been at her mother’s house ever since. Her fiancé has since backed off his plan completely and apologized to the OP — but now she has more serious doubts.
“It’s about the way he treated me, what the ‘demand’ is symbolic of, and all of the damage it has caused between me, him, and our families,” she explained.
The OP always embraced her fiancé’s culture, but now she’s worried that “our future will fully revolve around his family and community expectations which will subsequently discount who I am and what I also visualized for my future.”
“I am fearful of what other irrational demands and ultimatums are going to come next in an effort to conform and keep up appearances in the community,” she added.
Sadly, that might make things too hard to fix.
“I am grateful for any advice and thoughts on whether this relationship is salvageable,” the OP wrote in the forum.
The comments section was pretty much unanimous — dump your fiancé ASAP.
"You’ve just gotten a picture of what your married life will be like. If you want this for the REST OF YOUR LIFE by all means, proceed," one commenter warned.
"Well he sounds like a jerk and I’d let him go," someone else wrote. "Throwing you out and taking away your ring is just too mean. Also he could have suggested that your mother include her maiden name as well as her married name so the fact that you are Jewish is obvious."
But we have a feeling that a third commenter was right on the money: "Sounds like he is looking for a way out to me."
In the end, the OP still seems unsure how to proceed.
"I was excited for our future together and was under a different impression of what a future together would look like. I feel frozen to a certain degree," she wrote later in the thread.
"All of this feels surreal," she added, "and I’m just trying to assess what to do next and if there is any purpose in trying to work on what I thought was a good relationship up until this point."
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