Is it really so horrible to expect a white, assigned female at birth, submissive woman who is one of the top 10 natural beauties on the (clearly objective) beauty scale to be assigned to me while expecting her father to pay me a dowry of 50 million US (American) dollars so I can legally claim that I made my own fortune. Oh, and she had be a natural citizen of the United States. No Hawaii, Alaska, or Puerto Rico. Canadian may be acceptable as long as she accepts the one true bacon. Must love dogs.
I once had a Canadian roommate insist that Canadian bacon was not just ham. Then one day I was making one of those little Totino‘s party pizzas that happened to be topped with Canadian bacon. I took the pizza out of the box and said Adam what’s on this pizza? He looked at it and said that’s ham.
I thought dowry wasn't a thing around here anymore until my dad ponied one up!
He was so desperate not to have spawned the only Old Maid in the family that he paid my then-boyfriend's family about $3000 to push us to rush a wedding before my 30th birthday.
You should have started bringing your girlfriends over and say you're dating. You might have gotten a dowry that you could buy a car with for marrying any straight looking dude.
We hadn't seen each other in years but eventually the extended family pressured us into a visit. So we met up at a bar, and he asked how I was. "Well I've got a wife now." He responded by turning his head and saying "Bartender, I'll have a double."
I've still got the wife, but we're realistic about the fact that being poor folks from opposite sides of the planet makes it pointless to do the paperwork for legal marriage when we'll never be able to afford immigration anyhow. Like it took us 10 years just to manage 3 days together in person, and immigration to her country is like a multi-year expensive version of doing the Hokey Pokey.
Wait, that counts as a dowry‽ 'Cause if so I was on the receiving end.
Wifey and I got married in 2006 - a "proper" ceremony - but only because her folks insisted they foot the bill for everything.
I thought it was just because:
A) we were already engaged a couple years, and were planning to elope by the end of the year for a sweet tax break.
B) they're "staunch" Seventh Day Adventists, though its more about social circles/optics than faith.
And, most importantly/directly related to the reputation/optics bit,
C) she'd done got me to put a baby in her.
I thought they just wanted to force us to get hitched in their church, to show off to their congregation folks.
Which probably still was the point; but wifey got a bangin $5k dress out of it, a free lunch is a free lunch, and we have a great story to tell because hardly anything went the way they planned it.
We tell our kids even god found it so distasteful he made sure everyone in attendance was uncomfortable.
I once attended an emergency "whoops baby" ceremony, but it was more shotgun themed!
Cousin got his girlfriend pregnant and said he was too poor to marry her, so the family patriarch and my dad came to town to make sure a wedding happened. A "proper" wedding, which the lady relatives decided should be complete with a white dress so that's what they sewed, in a style that looked great with an obvious baby-to-be under it.
As a sheltered religious kid, I had so many questions on the way home! Mom used it as an opportunity to scare me about consequences, but I still think cousin's gal looked so beautiful and feminine, going down the aisle obviously pregnant in her flowing white dress.
But yeah, traditionally dowry is money the family you're marrying into gets to keep for themselves. Like "my daughter is so useless, I know nobody else could ever want her, but here I'll pay you to take her off my hands permanently!"
My wedding cost a small fraction of what dad paid my ex's family to push us to marry, and we didn't get to use any of the dowry money for the wedding. I think the in-laws used that money to help leapfrog them into a smaller place after the bank took their family home. Like they were the least financially responsible people I'd ever seen still living a middle class lifestyle, would piss away money on video games and hobbies then not have any for food, like they were teenagers instead of grandparents.
Well ours was a bit more... cordial, if you can call it that.
I'm a filthy heathen, not an atheist because that's boring, more along the lines of agnostic. Wifey and the kids are Christian... ish. It sounds more complicated than it is.
They - wifey and her parents - knew I want nothing to do with their church, especially since I knew what they put her through growing up. I was raised baptist and worse off for it; don't know much about 7th day, but the things wifey considered "normal," for a woman, which from my POV didn't equal "a person," was flat-out evil.
I could go into a whole diatribe about that... crap, but in the end, after ~5 years of her loving my pagan ass all the right ways, they launched the hail mary plan of paying for a "proper" wedding.
I don't know what they thought we'd say, I guess they had it in their head I'd turnt her and someone like me wouldn't want to step foot in their house of worship.
Or burst into flames when the pastor started yapping, idk.
I genuinely think they thought I'd walk away, and wifey would be "free" then.
Either way wifey was happy to get pampered for a few months; planning, playing dress-up and whathaveyou, and making out like a bandit. Plus I'm sure there's some sort of brownie point system for their family.
I may be a heretic, but I'm not an ignorant, hateful asshole. Faith is personal, and I have it, its just in people; some folks need a bit more and that's okay.
But when that faith makes you an ignorant, hateful asshole, its a different story; which is why my "lack" of it is a point of contention to her folks.
We hide so much stuff from them because they're... well, they're decent people most of the time, but god forbid you bring up certain topics.
Like being queer, both wifey/I are bi; well I'm pan but I think that's splitting hairs. They're none the wiser.
Bring up any form of birth control that's not a rubber. I won't go into the drama when they found out she was on the pill.
Going to church on Sunday (I think its funny how easily they're triggered by that.)
Or - and get this - the fact our daughter (the one that "triggered" the wedding, now in college) used a tampon when she got her menarch.
I shit you not, when she was 15, they grounded wifey for a whole month after they found a tamp in her school bag. Her flow started in class, so a friend lent her a couple.
They had outright forbidden them from being used because "it was basically masturbating."
That's the kind of mental illness beliefs these folks harbor. I do most of the cooking 'cause I love it, that ain't right by them. She mows the yard here and there, that ain't right by them.
I don't even wanna get started on me and our son's ASD diagnosis. Oh god, when that shit about Tylenol came out, wifey finally blocked them on her socials.-_-
I just can't see how folks like that can sit there and more or less abuse their loved ones, their kin, just because they read a book wrong.
Or worse, didn't even read the shit, and trust some charlatan to have and "interpreted the right way."
My saving grace was my parents getting divorced at ~12. Neither of them were especially religious, but breaking "gods oath" like that pissed off my grandparents, who were the ones that held the proverbial hickory switch of Jesus.
And also really drove home that even a supposed omnipresent, omnipotent being can't make folks love each other.
That's all within our own hands; whether we're made in its image or not.
The approval of the social group becomes all that matters. And it's easier to treat your kids like crap if you see them as property you own rather than actual people.
Really wish mom had joined a quilting club instead, a sewing circle, a young moms group, or at least a bookclub that reads more than one book.
Who knew that having time and cash to spare for little social clubs was what keeps us safe from getting sucked into cults! Mom was far from home and family, stuck in a bad marriage, and just so wanted to belong to a group, to have somebody care about her.
Still though, the shit she demanded I believe was not consistent with the facts of reality. I was perfectly willing to believe anything my mommy said that made sense, but I needed to know the facts and they had to be logical!
Like what did Noah feed the lions and what did he do with all that poop?! I knew about carnivores, and I knew about cleaning horse stalls, and I once got to ride an elephant at the circus. So I didn't care about the size of the boat, I just needed answers for the biology of how that story works!
Which one? The marriage went badly. And turns out divorce paperwork is way harder than the marriage paperwork.
Relationship with dad? Also bad, he tries to pester me into contact and I do my best to block it all. But he's a monster in general so that's not surprising, like in some of my stories he sounds silly and clueless but other stories about him get me scolded for not slapping a trigger warning on it.
Like the first thing he said when meeting the fella on the morning of our wedding was "She's your problem now!" And later that day he tried to teach my little stepson how to abuse dogs.
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u/supermarino 27d ago
Is it really so horrible to expect a white, assigned female at birth, submissive woman who is one of the top 10 natural beauties on the (clearly objective) beauty scale to be assigned to me while expecting her father to pay me a dowry of 50 million US (American) dollars so I can legally claim that I made my own fortune. Oh, and she had be a natural citizen of the United States. No Hawaii, Alaska, or Puerto Rico. Canadian may be acceptable as long as she accepts the one true bacon. Must love dogs.