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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/ParadoxicalState on 2023-08-11 16:55:53.
I am not the original poster. Original post by u/throwawayred2blue in r/AmItheAsshole.
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trigger warnings: mention of drunk driving, alcoholism
mood spoilers: Tension, resolution, hope
AITA for telling my fiancé that his best friend can’t be his best man?
Thu, April 30, 2020
I know how it sounds. My fiancé (29M) is an amazing guy - sweet, funny, attractive, and hard-working. I (29F) was impressed with him from the moment I met him and we’ve been together 6 years. We are devoted to each other and working toward building our shared life. We each put a percentage of our earnings into two funds: one for our wedding (which is a year away) and another for a down payment on a home. We each pay the same percentage, but I pay a much larger amount because I went into a higher income field.
We’ve budgeted it out pretty well. At this rate, we’ll have enough to buy a home around the same time as our wedding, as planned. As to the wedding, we both wanted a small one, and my fiancé and I decided to have a destination wedding. We are paying for the entire wedding ourselves. My family’s pretty poor, so I’ve also been saving a portion of my remaining paycheck to be able to pay for all of them to come to the wedding for free. I’m also paying for one of my bridesmaids who went into teaching and doesn’t make much. My fiancé wouldn’t really have the disposable cash to do that, but his family can afford to pay (somewhat wealthy) and is happy for the vacation.
The problem arose last week. My fiancé’s best friend Tom (30M) who he asked to be his best man, got in an accident. It was likely entirely his fault as he was riding his motorcycle drunk. He suffered significant injuries, is going to have some major medical bills, and admitted to my fiancé he doesn’t think he can afford to come. My fiancé wants to pay for him (several thousand dollars) and lend him money to help cover his medical bills. But, especially with everything going on, my fiancé does not have and is unlikely to be able to get the money to do either.
I could afford to do both, but I don’t want to. Truthfully, I can’t stand this friend. He often rides or drives drunk, does not have a job, makes snarky comments about my fiancé that he insists are just jokes (but that I know actually affect my fiancé), and lives in his parents basement while ignoring their well-being. I was willing to have him up there as best man because my fiancé considers him a brother and it’s his choice. I wasn’t happy about it, but I wasn’t about to throw a tantrum about it. But with everything going on, my fiancé has suggested taking a huge chunk of our savings for a house to help, and I said no. We got in a huge fight and he called me selfish and cruel, at which point I lost it, told him his loser friend did this to himself, and that there was no way in hell I’d pay anything for his sorry ass. I ended by saying, “if he can’t afford to come, he can’t be your best man.”
He hasn’t spoken to me since last night and slept in the couch. While I still think I’m on solid footing, I wonder if I went to far. AITA?
OOP added in the comments
Just wanted to clarify: I am not paying for most of my friends. Most of our friends are young, without kids, and with good incomes, who travel a lot anyway. We chose a destination wedding in part because 2 of our close friends had one last year that a group of us went to and enjoyed. We told our friends our plans before making arrangements and made clear that we wouldn’t be upset if anyone couldn’t or didn’t want to join to due to costs. The one friend I’m paying for is one of my oldest friends who I knew wouldn’t be able to afford it because she chose to go into teaching. She also came to the wedding last year, after several of us pooled funds to pay for her, because she chose a meaningful, needed, and underpaid profession. Since I wanted her as a bridesmaid, I just told her straight up that I would pay for her. Same with my family - they mostly don’t have much money, so I have been putting aside part of my paycheck (outside of what we put into shared accounts) to pay for it. If I wasn’t spending it on them, that money would be going into my retirement account.
I am able to do that because I chose a more stressful profession to ensure I’d be able to build up funds. My fiancé intentionally chose a less demanding profession that he really enjoys but that pays way less than he could make with his degree, because he has less concerns about money. His family is well-off, so he never worried about being able to pay for their retirement or medical care. As a result, he has more free time, more enjoyment of his job, but does not have disposable cash right now.
So I’m happy to pay for my friend and my family because I chose to sacrifice a lot of career enjoyment to ensure I would be able to have extra money for things like this, and my friend and family have done nothing wrong. His friend does not deserve anything from me and moreover, I’m not interested in enabling his shitty behavior by bailing him out and paying for a free vacation.
I’m not actually paying for my friend or family out of the joint account. My fiancé and I pay a big percentage of each of our own incomes into joint accounts for various things, but we each keep the remainder of our paychecks as our own personal spending money. I usually spend mine on small things for me, on things for us (like our yearly vacations) or on my retirement funds. To pay for my friend/family, I’ve been putting less in my retirement fund. But none of it comes out of our shared funds; I keep paying the full agreed upon amounts isn’t those.
Judgement: Not the A-hole
EDIT
Thank you to everyone that’s responded - I will try to work through all of those this evening. I just wanted to make an edit based on a question/issue a lot of people have brought up: our finances.
To clarify, we have talked about everything, especially financial expectations, to make sure we’re on the same page. My fiancé’s dad is a family law attorney, and as soon as it became clear we were in it for the long-term, he sat us down, discussed with us the common pitfalls he saw that ended relationships, and gave us his advice to avoid them. His advice revolves largely around open communication and setting expectations and boundaries early, especially around money.
So when we each graduated, we talked about the career paths we wanted. My fiancé decided he’d rather take a lower paying job, with normal hours, less stress, and more time outside of work. He wasn’t worried about helping his parents out later in life, because they are very well set up. He also wasn’t worried that much about developing a big retirement account, because he’s very likely to inherit enough to survive on comfortably.
I, on the other hand, likely will not have any inheritance and will want to provide for my parents medical expenses and retirement as they get older. I also have a good amount of student loan debt (he doesn’t because his parents could afford to pay for it) and while we both really enjoy traveling, he’d be willing to cut back on it significantly to have an easier job year-round. I wouldn’t want to burden him with those costs (the ones that I brought into the relationship), as I feel that would natural cause resentment, especially if it meant he had to work a job he enjoyed less to help share the costs with me. So I took a high stress job that I don’t enjoy and that requires me to work longer hours, but that pays significantly more. We agreed we each should be able to make that choice and decided a fair way to handle finances would be to:
- create a joint account for common expenses: rent, bills, food, entertainment, work clothes. At his father’s suggestion, we put in writing specifically what the fund could be used for, agreed that anything outside that list would need to be approved by both of us, and that if the account is dissolved, we each get back what we put in and we split any interest evenly. We each pay in 35% of our incomes. Because of the difference in our incomes, about 80% of the fund ultimately come from my income, which I think is reasonable because we’re a team, we’re building a life together, and the difficulties of my job invariably affect him too.
- We create other joint savings accounts as needed for new projects, each the same way - with a written agreement as to what they can be used for. We have one for the house (each pay 20% of our incomes) and one for the wedding (each pay 10%).
- We each get to keep the remaining 35% for our personal spending. My fiancé does not have that much left over - he has some taken out pre-taxes for a 401k and he uses the rest for his car and a few hobbies. Right now he voluntarily went part-time because his work place was going to need to fire people if they didn’t get volunteers due to the current situation, and we’re in a good position otherwise, so he has pretty much no disposable income. I have a ton, but it goes mostly toward yearly vacations for us, my student loans (I’m paying twice what is owed each month to pay them down), my…
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create a joint account for common expenses: rent, bills, food, entertainment, work clothes. At his father’s suggestion, we put in writing specifically what the fund could be used for, agreed that anything outside that list would need to be approved by both of us, and that if the account is dissolved, we each get back what we put in and we split any interest evenly. We each pay in 35% of our incomes. Because of the difference in our incomes, about 80% of the fund ultimately come from my income, which I think is reasonable because we’re a team, we’re building a life together, and the difficulties of my job invariably affect him too.
We create other joint savings accounts as needed for new projects, each the same way - with a written agreement as to what they can be used for. We have one for the house (each pay 20% of our incomes) and one for the wedding (each pay 10%).
We each get to keep the remaining 35% for our personal spending. My fiancé does not have that much left over - he has some taken out pre-taxes for a 401k and he uses the rest for his car and a few hobbies. Right now he voluntarily went part-time because his work place was going to need to fire people if they didn’t get volunteers due to the current situation, and we’re in a good position otherwise, so he has pretty much no disposable income. I have a ton, but it goes mostly toward yearly vacations for us, my student loans (I’m paying twice what is owed each month to pay them down), my retirement account, an account set up for my parents future expenses, and my car payments. Right now it is also going toward helping with his car payments and hobbies. So yes, I could cut back on certain things and be able to pay for his friend, but it would affect those other things that I’ve worked hard for.
I realize this system would not work for everyone, but it works for us, and I am definitely not financially abusing my fiancé.
UPDATE: AITA for telling my fiancé his best friend can’t be his best man Fri, July 10, 2020
It’s been a little over two months since my original post and a lot has happened.
In the days after that argument, my fiancé and I had a number of heart to hearts. We each apologized for how we behaved. He admitted that his friend had done some terrible things and, after some soul searching, that he and his friend do not have a healthy relationship. He loves the guy, as his friend had been there for him through some tough times, but knows Tom needs to change.
I thought hard about several of the comments made on the original post, and made a tough choice. I told him that I hated the idea of bailing Tom out, and would never agree to help with his medical bills, but provided Tom made some effort to change, I would pay for him to come to the wedding with my own separate funds. I love my fiancé more than anything and I don’t want anything to mar our wedding or the start of our marriage.
Long story short, we sat down with Tom’s parents (who were also fed up with him and had previously refused to help with any bills) to discuss the best way to help him. We all ultimately agreed that we would cover some of his costs (us the wedding and his parents the medical bills), but only if he accepted responsibility for what he’s done and hit some concrete milestones toward changing, including successfully completing a program at an in-patient treatment facility for his addictions.
All four of us sat down with him to make this offer. I won’t go into details, but it didn’t go well. My fiancé finally lost it and told Tom that he’d stuck by him through years of shitty choices, and that if Tom wouldn’t get help, he didn’t even want him as a friend, much less a best man. Tom told us all to fuck off.
We hadn’t seen or heard from him since, and it has been incredibly hard on my fiancé.
Then, this past weekend, my fiancé received a text from Tom. It wasn’t long, but thanked for everything he had done for Tom, apologized “for everything” and let him know that he was on his way to a treatment facility. He hoped he could stand at my fiancé’s side at our wedding, like my fiancé had always stood at his.
My fiancé is trying to be cautious, but it clearly meant so much to him, and I know he believes against all odds that his friend will become a better man. I have my doubts, but you know what? I hope he does too.
Thanks to everyone that gave me advice, let me feel heard, and helped me become a little better as well.
Reminder - I am NOT the Original Poster!