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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/10Kfireants on 2024-10-28 02:06:24+00:00.
Obligatory “Didn’t happen today.”
When I was 19 and attending my hometown’s junior (2-year) college, I became good friends with two non-traditional students, Ann and Hillary, in a class we shared. They were in their early-mid 30s. We stayed friends after our shared class ended, occasionally catching up at the same restaurant where we’d eat after class.
Ann was a bit eccentric but a sweetheart. She’d invite me on trips with her daughters, who were roughly ages 11 and 13. Wanting me to “see more of the country,” she invited me to her sister’s out-of-state wedding, when her husband couldn’t go and wouldn’t take their girls out of school in January (important later).
I moved on to attend university, but a couple years after college graduation, I moved back to my hometown to work at the newspaper. Hillary had moved, but Ann and I caught up at our old regular restaurant. I took some senior portraits for her oldest daughter who was now graduating high school, and after that, we kinda drifted.
Working at the local newspaper means seeing all the courthouse records published in the paper. And when Ann’s youngest daughter was just 18 , I saw her in the list of new marriage licenses! Ann’s daughter Lucy had pretty standard first and middle names. But back when the girls were little on one of those daytrips, they talked about how, after giving birth, Ann was so out of it, her husband misspelled Lucy’s middle name accidentally or otherwise on the birth certificate.
So seeing Lucy’s name in the recent marriage licenses was solid, could-not-be-mistaken for someone else with that name proof … And to be honest, Ann was known to fib to make some stories sound cooler, so it was also kinda proof that Lucy’s name story was not one of those fibs.
Well what do you do when an old friend whose kids you knew as littles has a kid GETTING MARRIED? You message her, “Looks like congrats are in order, Mother of the bride!” With a bunch of smiley faces.
A confused? Ann responded that both her girls were single! She said she’d pass along my congrats to her brother, who was married that week. Back when I was Ann’s plus-one at her sister’s wedding, I’d met her parents and all her siblings, so she thought (or hoped) I just meant him.
Meanwhile MY brain immediately started saying, “fuck, fuck, fuck fuck fuuuuuuck.” It’s so crystal clear with 20/20 hindsight that this was a land mine … Lucy was barely 18. At the time, yeah girl was young, but I had classmates who got married at 18. It never occured to me LUCY GOT MARRIED BEHIND HER PARENTS’ BACKS. IN SECRET. And it apparently didn’t occur to Romeo and Juliet that modern marriages are published in the local paper.
I couldn’t lie and say I had the wrong Lucy, again with the middle name thing. So I just told Ann how odd it was a Lucy Middlename Lastname, of the same age, was in this week’s marriage licenses. Ann responded, “wishful thinking on the boy’s part. Lucy told him no.”
I let Ann have it and just said, “Ahh.” Knowing, There. Is. No. Way. a boy, man, woman or anyone can file for and receive a whole ass marriage license with the other party in absentia. That’s not how it works. But poor Ann now had bigger worries and I wasn’t about to call her out even more.
Later Lucy herself messaged the newspaper social media accounts asking if we could unpublish the marriage license, as there’d been a mistake and it was no longer relevant. She didn’t try and say she’d rejected it altogether like her mom did. Nor did she argue the accuracy or anything … So I knew Ann trying to save face was just that, and Lucy did, in fact, sign a marriage license at some point. The newspaper did not, ever, remove public records, including this time.
I never heard what happened to Lucy and Romeo, whether they’d already broken up by the time the record was published or made to by their parents, or something else? I sure as shit wasn’t going to ask. I do know they did not stay married.
Ann sent me some copy/paste “pass this on” thing at some point, and I gave her a salon suggestion in response to a post, but we never had a full conversation again. Some time later I noticed a blue, “Add Friend” button by her name. It would have been cool to keep in touch on social media but knowing we’d all but drifted, and coupled with that mortifying (for us both) exchange, the friendship was probably meant to fade.
TL;DR: I knew the young daughters of an old college friend who was a little older than me. Years later I moved back to town and when I saw the youngest daughter’s name in the newspaper’s marriage licenses, I congratulated my friend on being a “mother of the bride,” only to find she had no idea her 18-year-old daughter applied for a marriage license … and her daughter didn’t realize public records were published in the newspape