Man says his son’s fiancée wanted him to call her his daughter, walk her down the aisle, and say he loved her in the wedding speech — and the whole situation eventually blew up so badly it ended the engagement

A 41-year-old man on Reddit said what started as awkward wedding pressure from his son’s fiancée turned into one of the biggest family messes he had ever dealt with.

He wrote that he has two adult children with his ex-wife: a son, John, 22, and a daughter, Sally, 20. He is remarried to a 28-year-old wife, and he said he is very close with both of his kids. The trouble started with John’s fiancée, Abbie. He said Abbie seemed nice enough at first, but had a habit of forcing herself into family roles and traditions that she had not naturally grown into. She called Sally “sis” very quickly, pushed strange mother-in-law and sister dynamics with his current wife, and most of all seemed determined to make him her father figure whether he wanted that or not.

According to his post, he and his children had a private tradition whenever they came over: before leaving, each of the kids would spend some time with him alone in his study to catch up. That tradition had become even more important since his remarriage because the kids still were not comfortable sharing certain personal things around his wife. Abbie asked to be included. He explained that the tradition was only for his children, but later compromised by doing coffee chats with both John and Abbie together so she could talk. Then things escalated. John eventually begged him to let Abbie call him “dad,” telling him she never had a caring father and had cried watching how close he was with Sally. He did not like it, but he gave in out of pity.

That was not enough for Abbie. She wanted him to walk her down the aisle. She also wanted a father-daughter dance. He said no to the dance because he walks with a cane and dancing is difficult for him. He was also not comfortable walking her down the aisle because, in his view, that role belonged to the actual relationship he had with Sally. When he brought it up during a visit, Abbie walked into his study without knocking and pushed the issue harder. Then, according to him, she asked if he planned to say during the wedding speech that he loved her and that he now had a “second daughter.” He said he was willing to say she was a happy addition to the family and that he loved how happy she made John, but he would not lie and say she was his daughter or that he loved her like one. Abbie started crying, John apologized, and they left.

The next big turn came on Mother’s Day. He later learned that Abbie and his ex-wife were much closer than he realized. Abbie apparently called his ex “mom,” and the ex had been encouraging all of this “you’re my dad too” behavior behind the scenes. On Mother’s Day, the four of them — John, Sally, Abbie, and his ex — ended up arguing about the wedding. John told Abbie to let the issue go. His ex told her she was right to want more. Sally snapped back that her father only had one daughter. At some point in the middle of the night, he got a text from Sally’s partner’s phone that said, “Abbie really is great, she hasn’t been perfect but you should give her a chance and you will learn to love her.” When he tried to text back, he found he had been blocked. Sally’s partner later said she had never sent the message and that it had been deleted from her phone, which meant someone had taken her phone and sent it pretending to be her.

As the updates continued, the whole family situation got worse. He wrote that Abbie and his ex-wife kept trying to push this fantasy version of family, while John was starting to crack under the pressure. By Thanksgiving, things had completely boiled over. He hosted a small, quiet dinner at his home with his wife, Sally, her partner, a couple of longtime honorary-family friends, and John. John specifically thought Abbie and his mother were spending Thanksgiving elsewhere. About an hour into the meal, the doorbell started ringing hard. He looked through the peephole and saw his ex-wife and Abbie standing there. Abbie had a half pan of macaroni and cheese, and his ex-wife was holding a fast-food bag like it was some kind of holiday contribution.

He called John to deal with them. When John opened the door, his ex-wife tried to stroll inside pleasantly, but John stopped her. Abbie said the entire family needed to be together. John told her to stop and asked for a minute. At that point, Sally marched to the door and completely unloaded on both of them. Her father said it was years of anger finally coming out at once. His ex-wife then screamed “SHUT UP,” grabbed the Pyrex dish of macaroni and cheese, and threw it down, apparently expecting it to shatter. It did not — it just hit the floor with a thud and cracked. He admitted he laughed. Then John stepped in and told his mother he did not know if he wanted anything to do with her anymore and that if she did not back off, the answer would definitely be no. He turned to Abbie and asked what was wrong with her and why she kept doing this after everything he had already said. Abbie started sobbing, then turned and slapped his ex-wife before running out and driving away, leaving the ex behind. The ex-wife actually chuckled and asked John for a ride home. Instead, his children told her she could not even use their Lyft apps. Their father told her to wait at the nearby park, handed her a spoon stuck into the macaroni and cheese, and told her at least now she could eat it while she waited. Then he threw her out for good.

That was the collapse. He later wrote that after Thanksgiving, John slowly started separating from Abbie for real. It was not easy. Abbie and his ex-wife made the breakup difficult for him. His ex-wife even tried getting to him through Abbie and later threw a public tantrum at his old workplace because his office information was online, humiliating him badly. Abbie also made dramatic attempts to get him back. But John eventually stopped trusting her. He moved a lot of his clothes into his father’s house for a while, then later got his own new place near his new job. His father said that once Abbie was really out of his life, John looked visibly more relaxed. He even started dating again a little.

The final update, posted in May 2025, had a very different tone. By then, the father and his current wife had welcomed a baby boy. His wife had a scare late in pregnancy, and he wrote that both of his kids really stepped up for her and supported her. He said his wife had never felt more loved. Sally and John also repaired their relationship. In one detail that clearly meant a lot to him, Sally got engaged and asked John to be her best man. He said that would not have happened a year earlier. She and her partner asked him to walk both of them down the aisle, and this time he cried happy tears. He also said he had originally saved money for John’s wedding, but after that wedding fell apart he used it to buy his son a getaway trip instead, figuring John needed a break from his job stress, his ex, and the whole family mess.

By the end, the father described the whole saga almost like a brutal stress test that the family somehow survived together. The son’s engagement was gone, the ex-wife was fully cut off by both children, Abbie was out of the picture, and instead of one forced father-of-the-bride fantasy, the family ended up with something much more real: the kids choosing their own father, on their own terms, after everything fell apart.

Original Reddit post.